DAIRY AND SEED IMPROVEMENT MEETINGS. 207 



shall call the nation to repentance, he ought to have an oppor- 

 tunity to do so. A study, therefore, in all our schools, a con- 

 scious directed effort to learn what all the various kinds of 

 vocations may lead to, an introspective study of the qualities 

 of the individual himself, as to whether he is fitted to this or 

 that or the other vocation, will have a great bearing upon the 

 future interests of our country. I said a moment ago that it 

 seemed to me it would be unfortunate if we should, in this 

 struggle to meet the need of vocational training, fix upon our 

 country the caste system of Continental Europe. In that sys- 

 tem, particularly in Germany, it has been the custom for years 

 for the parents and the teachers — the authorities of the state — 

 to decide at the age of 12 or 13 that this boy shall be a wood 

 worker, that boy shall go into the textile mills, and so on. And 

 then through a period of years the whole effort of the school 

 and the shop is to fix the boy in the particular trade selected. 

 It may be that he is utterly unfitted for it. It may be that he 

 has within him the making of something entirely different and 

 better than that, but that is the fact and it is fixed. Nothing, it 

 seems to me, could be more unfortunate for us in America than 

 to ever allow our vocational education to take a form like that, 

 so that we would destroy the possibility of the boy's being 

 what he ought to be. I do not believe there is anybody in this 

 world omniscient enough to tell what a boy at the age of 12 or 

 14, or even 16, ought to be. You can perhaps get some indi- 

 cation as you study him, as you analyze his traits, etc., and yet 

 the chances are that you are a prejudiced judge after all. It is 

 a difficult problem. 



A form of vocational education which most of you are, of 

 course, intensely interested in, is the vocation of agriculture. 

 Here much has been done of a satisfactory type, in some 

 foreign countries, and something is already being done in 

 America. I was reading only a day or two ago a report upon 

 work in Denmark. I found that Denmark has been willing 

 to put into her rural schools larger sums of money than we have 

 yet dreamed of in this country. Her rural schools are almost all 

 of them consolidated. There are very few single room schools, 

 due to the necessary conditions of climate and the topography 

 of the country. Whether it is a one teacher school or a five or 

 six teacher school, she has gone to the expense of building. 



