"to help
a child to gain useful knowledge about living things," have been the
most usual aims. And the method has been that of minute examination of a
specimen from the plant or animal world, utterly detached from its
surroundings, considered by the docile child in parts, such as leaves,
stem, roots, petals, and uses; or head, wings, legs, tail, and habits.
The innocent listener might frequently think with reason that a number
lesson rather than a nature lesson was being given. The day of the
object lesson is past, and to young children the nature lesson must
become nature work.

It is in the term "nature lesson" that the root of the mischief lies:
nature is not a lesson to the young child, it is an interest from which
he seeks to gain more pleasure, by means of his own activity: plants
encourage him to garden, animals stir his desire to watch, feed and
protect; water, earth and fire arouse his craving to investigate and
experiment: there is no motive for passive study at this juncture, and
without a motive or purpose all study leads to nothing. Adults compare,
and count the various parts of a living thing for purposes of
classification connected with the subdivisions of life which we call
botany and zoology; but such things are far removed from the young
child's world--only gradually does it begin to dawn on him that there
are interesting likenesses, and that in this world, as in his own, there
are relationships; when he realises this, the time for a nature lesson
has come. But much direct experience must come first.

In setting out the furnishing of the school the need for this activity
is implied. No school worthy of the name can do without a garden, any
more than it can do without reading books, or blackboards, indeed the
former need is greater: if it is possible, and possibilities gradually
merge into acceptances, a pond should be in the middle of the garden,
and trees should also be considered as part of the whole. It is not
difficult for the ordinary person to make a pond, or even to begin a
garden.

In a school situated in S.E. London in the midst of rows of monotonous
little houses, and close to a busy railway junction, a miracle was
performed: the playground was not very large, and of the usual
uncompromising concrete. The children, most of whose fathers worked on
the railway, lived in the surrounding streets, and most of them had a
back-yard of sorts; they had little or no idea of a garden. One of the
te