AGRICULTURE IN THE HIGH SCHOOL 387 



only features of agriculture that have pedagogic cohesion are the sci- 

 ences involved. 



Presented as they have been without any experience in their utiliza- 

 tion having been afforded, high school sciences have not kept pace with 

 educational needs. The fault seems to be that the student has been 

 held too rigidly to the accuracy of an accumulated knowledge with too 

 little experience with the method of its acquisition. 5 Pure science can 

 be but imperfectly appreciated by the adolescent who still retains his 

 dominant childish interest in the use, rather than the organization and 

 structure, of things. 6 And if science could be taught as pure science 

 its destructive tendency, striking as it does at the root of authority, is 

 of questionable propriety where it does not at the same time furnish a 

 philosophy of life. It is especially necessary under a rational govern- 

 ment, such as ours, that it be made humanistic. 7 And humanistic 

 science is applied science. 



The purposes of high school agriculture, therefore, await the reform 

 of the high school sciences; and a reform in the direction of applied 

 science is evident to many science teachers who have no special interest 



5 ' ' Science teaching has suffered because science has been so f requently 

 presented just as so much ready-made knowledge, so much subject-matter of 

 fact and law, rather than the effective method of inquiry into any subject- 

 matter. . . . 



' ' Only by taking a hand in the making of knowledge, by transferring guess 

 and opinion into belief authorized by inquiry, does one ever get a knowledge of 

 the method of knowing. Because participation in the making of knowledge has 

 been scant, because reliance upon the efficacy of acquaintance with certain kinds 

 of facts has been current, science has not accomplished in education what was 

 predicted for it." — Dewey, "Science as Subject-matter and as Method," 

 A. A. A. S., 1909. 



8 ' ' What the pupil is unable to use at any time can not be taught him most 

 economically and efficiently at that time. ' ' — O 'Shea, ' ' Dynamic Factors in 

 Education," p. 41. 



"Then (in adolescence) . . . come the need of utilities, applications to 

 machinery, hygiene, commerce, processes of manufacture, the bread-winning 

 worth of nature knowledge, how its forces are harnessed to serve man and to 

 produce values. Contrary to common educational theory and practise, the prac- 

 tical, technological side of science should precede its purer forms." — Hall, 

 "Adolescence," Vol. II., p. 153. 



7 "An interpretation of humanism with science, and of science with human- 

 ism, is the condition of the highest culture. ' ' — Symonds, ' ' Culture. ' ' 



' ' As our schools grow more national they should also grow more humanistic. 

 The older humanism was devotion to ... an abstract ideal. The newer humanism 

 of the schools can not well dispense with the best that the older humanism had 

 to offer. But it will cease to be abstract. . . . The best that the school can do 

 to guard them (youth) against self -centered commercialism, is to awaken their 

 enthusiasm for some ideal good, which has power of appeal to the imagination. 

 . . . We may look to see ... a new humanism, leaning more and more on science, 

 mindful of the past, patriotic in the present, and looking hopefully forward to 

 the larger human interests." — Brown, "The Making of Our Middle Schools," 

 p. 463. 



