COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS 409 



while the last census shows that 208,442 men over 21 years of age are 

 engaged in some form of agricultural work in the State. That is, there is 

 only one student in college to every 900 men of full age engaged in 

 agriculture. If each family has on the average live persons, only one 

 family engaged in agricultural industry out of every 180 has a boy in 

 the College. Making every allowance we please for the poverty of many 

 farming families, and for the fact that many families do not contain 

 boys of college age, still the figures show that the reason there are only 

 269 agricultural students here is that the farmers in general are not 

 willing that their sons should come here. 



That the farmers' sons do not come here is not the fault of this par- 

 ticular college, of its methods or its teachers. If that were the trouble 

 we would find the farmers sending their sons to agricultural colleges 

 in other states, which they are not doing. It is not due to the fact that 

 it is not right to give a farmer's boy such an education as this College 

 affords, for there is no such fact; the fact is just the reverse. It is not 

 at all probable that the reason is that the farmers are parsimonious; I 

 do not believe that they are. The sole reason, in my estimation, is that 

 the farmers in general are not jet educated up to the belief that the 

 course of instruction given by this College would be of benefit to their 

 boys. Many of them are in fact decidedly prejudiced against such a. 

 course of instruction. 



The farmers are not to be blamed for this lack of education or for 

 their prejudice, for in the case of the vast majority of them there has 

 been nothing in the whole course of their lives or of that of their an- 

 cestors to free them of such a prejudice. We might as well blame the 

 men of the Middle Ages for their neglect to study the natural sciences, 

 the men of the fifteenth century for their disbelief in the theories of 

 Columbus, and the men of the eighteenth century, even after the elec- 

 trical discoveries of Franklin, ^'olta and Galvani, for failing to invent 

 the telegraph. ■ There is nothing in the whole realm of human opinion 

 in which the majority of men are so conservative as in matters of educa- 

 tion. How many years it required from the time of Froebel until the 

 idea of the kindergarten was so generally accepted that'it became adopted 

 in even a few of our public schools? After the excellence of the manual 

 training system of Russia was shown in our Centennial Exposition in 

 1876, how long it was before the manual training idea became at all 

 popular in this country. It was not until after millions of dollars had 

 been spent by some of our philanthropic rich men in establishing private 

 manual training schools, many books had been written and lectures 

 given upon the subject, that public boards of education began to con- 

 ' sider the question and manual training was introduced into the public 

 schools. It is not only among uneducated men that prejudices in educa- 

 tional matters exist to such an extent that they restrain progress, for 

 manual training was opposed by some of our most eminent educators. 

 The fetich of the study for yenrs of Greek and Latin as necessary for all 

 educated men still exists in the minds of many learned teachers, and 

 their theories and prejudices in favor of the old classical education are 

 still responsible for wasting the time of thousands of students and for 

 preventing them from acquiring knowledge in other branches which 

 would be of vastly greater benefit to them. 

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