EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY. 369 



England are, in large measure, deserted or are passing into alien 

 hands. To retain the country boy on the land and to keep our soil 

 from exhaustion, it is high .time that all our rural schools turned 

 their attention, as some of them have done, to scientific agriculture. 

 There is no study of greater importance. There is none more enter- 

 taining. If every country boy could become, according to his ability, 

 a Burbank, increasing the yield of the fruit tree, the grain field and 

 the cotton plantation, producing food and clothing where before there 

 was only waste, what riches would be added to our country, what 

 happiness would be infused into life ! To obtain one plant that will 

 metamorphose the field or the garden, ten thousand plants must be 

 grown and destroyed. To find one Burbank, ten thousand boys must 

 be trained, but unlike the plants, all the boys will have been benefited. 

 The gain to the nation would be incalculable. Scientific Agriculture, 

 practically taught, is as necessary for the rural school, as is manual 

 training for the city school. 



Xor are our people going to rest satisfied with mere manual train- 

 ing. The Mosely commissioners pointed out that the great defect 

 in American education is the absence of trade schools. Trade schools 

 will inevitably come. The sooner the better. They are demanded 

 for individual and social efficiency. 



It is not in secondary schools alone, however, that efficiency de- 

 mands highly differentiated types of schools. It is absurd to place 

 the boy or girl, ten or twelve years of age, just landed from Italy, 

 who can not read a word in his own language or speak a word of 

 English, in the same class with American boys and girls five or six 

 years old. For a time at least the foreigners should be segregated and 

 should receive special treatment. Again, the studies that appeal to 

 the normal boy only disgust the confirmed truant or the embryo 

 criminal. Yet again, the mentally defective, the crippled and the 

 physically weak children require special treatment. Unless all indi- 

 cations fail, the demand for education for efficiency will lead in all 

 our large cities to the organization of many widely differentiated 

 types of elementary school. 



The problem of the curriculum, important as it is, is less important 

 than the problem of the teacher. The born teacher, that is, the man 

 or woman who has a genius for teaching, will teach well, in spite of 

 any curriculum, however bad. Unfortunately, genius is as rare in the 

 profession of teaching as it is in law, or medicine, or any other pro- 

 fession. The great majority of us, as it needs must be, are very 

 common-place persons, who are seeking for light and doing the best 

 we can. Hence the supreme importance of training. And yet there 

 is no part of our work to which so little thought and investigation have 

 been given. Normal schools in this country are still very young — 

 only a little over half a century old. The first normal schools were 



VOL. LXVII. — 24. 



