bigblow] CORRESPONDENCE AND DISCUSSIONS 255 



waters. In fact, from beginning to end this excellent article is 

 nothing more or less than a "pedagogical kink" given to chemis- 

 try and physics with special reference to soils considered as a 

 basis for plant growth. This is good agriculture, and apparently 

 good agricultural teaching, but it certainly is not "introducing 

 new matter." Every one of the important points in this article 

 are perfectly familiar to thousands of students who have followed 

 courses in physics which did not contain the words "soil" and 

 "agriculture." In short, this lesson in agriculture is simply the 

 old material of physics and chemistry from the point of view of 

 agriculture. Perhaps this is "new," but it is obvious that there 

 is nothing to be gained and much to be lost if we continue to insist 

 that this new subject in the school curriculum is new matter and 

 not simply an educational application to special problems of 

 matter and methods which are familiar in the various sciences. 

 The above illustration shows that the agricultural teaching is after 

 all a sort of a "pedagogical kink" (the writer would prefer to 

 describe it as an educational application) of physics, chemistry 

 and biology. This being the case we can certainly make head- 

 way by working towards a proper correlation with the existing 

 courses in the sciences, rather than by trying to establish the absurd 

 claim that agricultural instruction is an entirely new subject which 

 ought to be kept quite independent of the regular science courses. 



M. A. Bigelow. 



Will Agricultural Teaching Keep Boys on the Farm? One of 



the most striking characteristics in the numerous arguments 

 advanced in favor of agricultural instruction for public schools is 

 the statement that if properly educated with reference to the 

 agricultural business, boys will tend to stay on the farm. This 

 idea that somehow nature-study and agricultural teaching will 

 tend to keep the boys on the farm and prevent migration to the 

 cities has become widespread throughout the land and at the 

 present time it is the greatest motive power back of the move- 

 ment for agricultural education in many States. 



Looking at the facts verified by observation in a large number 

 of concrete cases, the writer is led to question whether it is "safe to 

 base our agricultural instruction on the theory that it will tend to 

 keep the boys on the farm. I doubt it because I know that a 

 large number of boys do not leave farms because they find it 



