SOCIAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN FARMERS 757 



half-trained, if it cannot satisfy the ambition of strong, well-educated 

 men and women, its future, from the social point of view, is indeed 

 gloomy. 



The present-day course of study in the agricultural college does 

 not, however, fully meet this demand for rural leadership. The farm 

 problem has been regarded as a technical question, and a technical 

 training has been offered the student. The agricultural college, 

 therefore, needs " socializing." Agricultural economics and rural 

 sociology should occupy a large place in the curriculum. The men 

 who go from the college to the farm should appreciate the significance 

 of the agricultural question, and should be trained to organize their 

 forces for genuine rural progress. The college should, as far as 

 possible, become the leader in the whole movement for solving the 

 farm problem. 



The farm home has not come in for its share of attention in existing 

 schemes of agricultural education. The kitchen and the dining- 

 room have as much to gain from science as have the dairy and 

 the orchard. The inspiration of vocational knowledge must be the 

 possession of her who is the entrepreneur of the family, the home- 

 maker. The agricultural colleges, through their departments of 

 domestic science - - better, of " home-making " - should inaugurate 

 a comprehensive movement for carrying to the farm home a larger 

 measure of the advantages which modern science is showering upon 

 humanity. 



The agricultural college must also lead in a more adequate develop- 

 ment of extension teaching. Magnificent work has already been 

 done through farmers' institutes, reading courses, cooperative 

 experiments, demonstrations, and correspondence. But the field is 

 so immense, the number of people involved so enormous, the diffi- 

 culties of reaching them so many, that it offers a genuine problem 

 and one of peculiar significance, not only because of the generally 

 recognized need of adult education, but also because of the isolation 

 of the farmers. 



It should be said that in no line of rural betterment has so much 

 progress been made in America as in agricultural education. Merely 

 to describe the work that is being done through nature-study and 

 agriculture in the public schools, through agricultural schools, 

 through our magnificent agricultural colleges, through farmers' 

 institutes, and especially through the experiment stations and the 

 federal Department of Agriculture in agricultural research and in 

 the distribution of the best agricultural information --merely to 

 inventory these movements properly would take the time available 

 for this discussion. What has been said relative to agricultural 

 education is less in way of criticism of existing methods than in way 

 of suggestion as to fundamental needs. 



