198 AGRICULTURE OF MAINE. 



changes for the better, there has been a continual contest with 

 the set and estabhshed forms of education, by those interested 

 to keej) organized education in harmony with the developing 

 life everywhere about us. We are today realizing better and 

 more clearly than ever before, that there are many educational 

 forces in the world. A generation or two ago the common 

 notion was that the school was the only educational factor. It 

 was hardly admitted that the home, the state in its political 

 relations, the business activities of the community, and society 

 in its organized forms, had any effect upon the education of the 

 individual. These forces helped to fit the individual to his 

 surroundings, but they were not recognized as educational in 

 the technical meaning of the term. 



As society hasi developed new forms of activity, new forms 

 of industrial grouping, new desires transforming the luxuries 

 of yesterday into the necessities of today, there has grown up a 

 marked need of special adaptation to the new kind of Hfe. The 

 old form of education that fitted the individual fairly well for 

 the smaller Hfe of fifty years ago, hardly fits him for the kind 

 of life that he must live today. The man who sighs for a return 

 to the simple Hfe of yesterday, is sighing after all for a thing that 

 he does not really want; for when you question him you find 

 that he would Hke to take back into that simple life his automo- 

 bile, his telephone, his daily paper, — all the things he enjoys and 

 now finds necessary. He imagines, if he could get all these back 

 into the simple life, that the simple life would be intensely 

 interesting and happy. It probably would be but it would no 

 longer be simple. Life will never again be siimple. The wheels 

 of the world's progress do not turn backward. This life wdl 

 grow more and more complex, and as its complexity increases 

 the need of the individual for training and development that 

 will adjust him to this complex life grows greater and greater. 



Some thirty or forty years ago a few of our educational 

 leaders began advocating the introduction of manual training 

 into the schools for the purpose of fitting young people better 

 for the life they would necessarily enter as men and women. 

 Manual training had at first a gradual, and in recent years, a 

 very rapid growth. It was believed by its advocates that it 

 would equip boys with the ability to earn a living. Time 

 enough has elapsed since its introduction to prove rather con- 



