258 ANNUAL REPORT OF THE Off. Doc. 



In the city, one will make use of building operations, or work of a 

 similar nature, carried on there, the animals in the Zoological Gar- 

 dens, the business operations in the stores and markets, and things 

 that the child sees every day, and with which it is familiar. The 

 school in the country, unfortunately, up to this time, has been try- 

 ing to make use of the same material as the city school is making 

 use of, rather than adapting the real things of the country to their 

 purpose. So our exercises in geography treat of the North pole, 

 and the South pole, than they do about Pennsylvania, and the 

 localit}' surrounding the child; these things are largely imaginary 

 to the child, and harder for him to understand than the same prin- 

 ciples applied to something with which he is familiar. When I 

 went to school, I had a teacher whom I thought a most interesting 

 teacher; he kept teaching us something, and kept telling us some- 

 thing new all the time, and used illustrations to bring out his point; 

 he talked about things I knew something about, and made every- 

 thing plain. That is just what I believe the country school should 

 do, and if the country schools used country things, and the teacher 

 illustrated them, these schools would be teaching agriculture in ;i 

 practical way; so I want to talk to you a little tonight of two 

 schools teaching agriculture, and I will use pictures very largely 

 to tell my story. One of these schools is in Maryland, and one in 

 Pennsvlvania. 



The one in Maryland is out in the country. There are several 

 roads coming to a point, like the spokes of a wagon wheel, and at 

 that point there is a little church, and the school, and the black- 

 smith shop, and two stores. Up to two years ago there was no high 

 school within reach of the boys and girls around there, although 

 it was a rich farming community. They asked the commissioners 

 for the establishment of a high school within reach of their child- 

 ren, and some one suggested teaching agriculture in the school; the 

 commissioners talked it over, and asked the Maryland Agricultural 

 College to help them get a teacher to teach agriculture, and the 

 Director came to us to help find a teacher, and we sent a man out 

 from the Department with the intention of having him come back 

 to us. The first year they paid him a thousand dollars, so that the 

 first year's school cost them twelve hundred dollars; they were 

 obliged to make some repairs to the old Quaker schoolhouse. The 

 next year they raised more money and more children. 



I will show you the methods they used, and the text-books, and I 

 want to emphasize the fact that in order to teach agriculture, it is 

 not necessary to have a great number of expensive text-books. 

 They began not by studying the life of the plant as outlined in a 

 text book, but the plants themselves in the field and in the garden. 

 In this way they studied much more thoroughly than if they had 

 been obliged to depend on the text book. Here we have the boys 

 and girls; you see what size they are; they are studying botany, and 

 studying it without any rudimentary preparation. This is the way 

 they began their school work; later they went out and studied in 

 the fields and gardens, and, in the meantime, in the schoolroom 

 they were studying plants grown for the purpose — studying them 

 to get at the plant formations — what the plant eats, how it gets its 

 food — how the plant takes up large amounts of water from the soil, 



