The School Gardening Movement, 1890–1920

‘‘A Better Crop of Boys and Girls’’: The School Gardening Movement, 1890–1920 Sally Gregory Kohlstedt In the 1890s progressive educators like John Dewey proposed expansive ideas about integrating school and society. Working to make the boundaries between classroom learning and pupils’ natural environment more permeable, for example, Dewey urged teachers to connect intellectual and practical elements within their curricula.1 Highly visible and widespread examples of this integrative goal were the school gardens that flourished from the 1890s well into the twentieth century. Evidence of their presence is recorded in newspapers, national magazines, and annual school reports whose illustrations typically portrayed well-dressed children cultivating large gardens next to impressive urban school buildings. Whether in large cities or country settings, school gardens were expressions of modern and progressive education of the sort encouraged by Dewey. Gardens were encouraged in theory and in practice not only at the laboratory school affiliated with the University of Chicago but also in normal schools across the country (Figure 1).2 Sally Gregory Kohlstedt is a professor with the Program in History of Science and Technologyat the University of Minnesota. The author wishes to thank colleagues who at various points helped move this project along, including Amy Fisher, Donald Opitz, David Sloane, Paul Brinkman, Nancy Beatty, three anonymous reviewers, and HEQ editors, as well as librarians who assiduously helped the author track down obscure references, sometimes while she was traveling with funds from National Science Foundation grants #0115772 and #9123719. Readers may be interested in the narrative and illustrations on a recently launched site at http://www.loc.gov/rr/program/journey/ schoolgardens.html (October 1, 2007). 1School and Society (1899) was written at a time of optimism and high productivity for John Dewey, and he argued eloquently for schools in which children’s social and natural environments were connected to intellectual and practical instruction. He suggested, among many other things, that object lessons presented for the sake of processing information were no ‘‘substitute for acquaintance with the plants and animals of the farm and garden acquired through actually living among them and caring for them.’’ See John Dewey, The Middle Works, 1899–1901, ed. JoAnn Boydon, 1 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1976), 33–35; quote on 8. 2On Dewey during his years in Chicago and his interaction with Wilbur Jackman, which started well but ended badly, see Jay Martin, The Education of John Dewey: A Biography (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 199–210. History of Education Quarterly Vol. 48 No. 1 February 2008 The School Gardening Movement, 1890–1920 59 Figure 1. Normal schools built in the latter decades of the nineteenth century were impressive monuments to education, like the Massachusetts State Normal School at Hyannis (now used for city business). Its adjoining land was made into a school garden, here cultivated by second grade pupils at the practice school and under the supervision of prospective teachers. Typically photographed during spring planting season or later when colorful tulips, daisies or sunflowers reached full bloom and healthy vegetables like corn, peas, and cabbages were harvested, school gardens were initially an expression of the nature study movement that introduced science into the public schools. The process of gardening was a way to stimulate children’s curiosity and enthusiasm, according to Wilbur Jackman, whose Nature Study for the Common Schools textbook was a catalyst for teaching nature study. A prote´ge´ of Francis W. Parkman at Cook County Normal School and later affiliated with Dewey at the University of Chicago, Jackman urged teachers to ‘‘take the spontaneous development of the child’s mind under the influence of the natural environment’’ as a guide to instruction.3 His ‘‘rolling year’’ curriculum had students doing elementary science projects by season, with field trips to study river basins, insect life, local trees and plants, and 3Wilbur S. Jackman, Nature Study for the Common Schools (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1891), 8. On his larger role in education, see Audrey B. Champagne and Leopold E. Klopfer, ‘‘Pioneers of Elementary School Science: Wilbur Samuel Jackman.’’ Science Education 63 (1979): 145–65. 60 History of Education Quarterly other natural phenomena during good weather and indoor observation and experiments during the winter season. Gardens provided a practical addition if proper facilities could be developed close to the schools, allowing children to express themselves through individual projects often in collaboration with their peers under guided supervision. Each garden was shaped and also limited by the dedication and skill of instructors, the involvement of the pupils, the nature of the sites available, and the kinds of tools and other supports provided by the school and community. As a result, school gardens were malleable projects and could be managed to meet a wide range of expectations. This versatility contributed to their spread across the continent. This article explores expectations surrounding these experimental projects in order to explain their remarkable growth. While school gardens were initially promoted as a method to teach the natural sciences, a wide range of ambitions emerged as proponents sought to provide practical agricultural training, promote an appreciation for the beauty and bounty of nature, or develop civic pride. While some teachers very systematically linked the outdoor work to specific subjects Fgeometric patterns for the garden, arithmetic calculations linked to expenses and production, reading assignments about caring for plants, and art projects that might use materials from nature to create collages or encourage self expression in watercolors or clay sculptureFothers provided simple instructions and presumed that the experience of gardening was itself a lesson. Surprisingly little has been written about these schools gardens, despite the fact that their existence is well recorded in publications and school records in the early twentieth century. The way that they flourished, sometimes on school sites and sometimes at a distance from school, across the United States suggests something of the life cycle of curricular movements more generally as they arrived to enthusiastic reception and support, became varied as they adapted to local opportunities, were to some extent absorbed into the agendas of other educational efforts, and eventually waned when they no longer seem to meet changing expectations or were overtaken by newer enthusiasms. The gardening movement is a particularly striking example of a widely accepted program that nonetheless flourished for just one generation before largely disappearing. School gardens, sometimes but not always linked to the simultaneous growth of nature study, became common at the turn of the century. Whether rural or urban, they gained substantial endorsement from national gardening and agricultural organizations by the 1910s. They became most dramatically visible when the United States School Garden Army, created as part of the World War I domestic war preparedness efforts, numbered in the hundreds of thousands. The School Gardening Movement, 1890–1920 61 Indeed, under the aegis of wartime emergency, school gardens were found truly nationwide, stimulated by federal funding but building on the multiple existing sites made possible by school policies and administrators as well as community leaders, parents, and even pupils themselves. During the 1920s, local support and national attention lagged, so that the gardening movement essentially disappeared from public view, although local school gardens continued to persist well into the 1930s and regained some momentum during World War II. In their heyday, school gardens were presented as progressive learning that was thoroughly planned and implemented in order to produce its own good harvest of ripe produce and better-educated children. School gardens reveal how deeply metaphors of nature were embedded in thinking about the educational process at the turn of the century and how ambiguously those ideas have been interpreted. Living nature was viewed as part of organic development that simply occurs; growing up was a natural process. But nature could also be wild, unregulated, even dangerous.4 Children might thus be viewed as tender sprouts needing only nurturing care to flourish, or they might be considered untamed and needing strict tending. In either instance, Progressives believed that human intervention in the natural world, as well as the world of child development, was essential, whether to protect some basic nature, to enhance it, or to control it. The school gardening movement primarily emphasized the abundance and ameliorating effects of nature, but some programs revealed conflicting expectations about both nature and the children who would be working with it. There were thus significant differences of opinion, for example, between proponents who emphasized showing children the wonder and beauty of nature by the study of flowers and trees and those who wanted to teach practical agricultural skills or between those who anticipated that gardens could enhance individual self-expression as well as community cooperation and those who wanted garden programs to instill discipline in unruly juveniles. Whatever the specific expectations,

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