AGRICULTURE IN THE HIGH SCHOOL 393 



purpose in our mixed schools is not only the inability of foreseeing and 

 planning for individual needs, but also in the inadequacy of funds and 

 teachers to satisfy such needs. On the assumption that a high school 

 course and no more is to be made available to every youth of the land, 

 such needs, except for delinquents and defectives, may best be provided 

 in the latter part of the high school course. 



This would mean the utilization of agriculture so far as applicable 

 in the teaching of all subjects and all kinds of students, with a gradual 

 increase of the purely vocational phases for such students as have 

 elected agriculture as a vocation. Thus would the correlated sciences 

 be better treated for their own purposes without greatly disturbing the 

 present system of accrediting schools and subjects, leaving the accredit- 

 ing of the strictly vocational subjects of the same school to be dealt with 

 separately. And it is necessary, if we would secure the right kind of 

 science teaching as well as vocational courses with thorough founda- 

 tions, to have them taught in the same school, else may the one be 

 divorced from its source of strength and the other become no more than 

 elementary and baldly utilitarian. 



The " preparatory " value of the vocational side of the agricultural 

 course may be considered apart from the reform of the sciences. It is 

 this consideration that makes necessary the admission of educational 

 values, until recently not recognized as such by schoolmen. First might 

 be mentioned the significance to the young learner of testing by a mus- 

 cular manipulation the objects of his environment. Such objects are 

 of value as educational materials to the degree to which they call for 

 necessary muscular adjustments similar to those which the race from 

 the earliest times has experienced. Every sensation or thought, the 

 psychologists affirm, naturally stimulates a motor adjustment which 

 reinforces the original sensory or central impulse which originated the 

 motion. And this " back stroke " from the muscle furnishing the 

 unifying "kinesthetic factor" is a thing to be encouraged and not 

 repressed, as has too often been done in school work. 25 In the earliest 



ward in the most deliberate and amplest fashion to the study of the products of 

 the intellectual life, regardless of the basis of his own economic support." — 

 Butler, "Training for Vocation and for Avocation," Educational Review, 

 December, 1908, pp. 472-474. 



25 ' ' We have lately become convinced that accurate work with carpenter 's 

 tools, or lathe, or hammer and anvil, or violin, or piano, or pencil, or crayon, 

 or camel 's hair brush, trains the same nerves and ganglia with which we do 

 what is ordinarily called thinking." — Eliot, "Education for Efficiency," p. 38. 



"Every mental state is a fusion of sensory and motor elements, and any 

 influence that strengthens the one tends to strengthen the other also. ' ' — Baldwin, 

 "Mental Development; Methods and Processes," p. 440. 



"No serious thought is possible without some voluntary effort, and no 

 emotion ever arises without inducing some form of action. ' ' — Judd, ' ' Psychol- 

 ogy," p. 66. 



VOL. LXXIX. — 27. 



