436 ANNUAL REPORT OF THE Off. Doc. 



county agricultural schools. It is not necessary to explain them, be- 

 cause the name in each case explains the school, there being one 

 school to each congressional district in the one case, and in the other 

 case, one school to each county, and these schools attempt to serve 

 the areas indicated. 



But from our investigation we have found that it is impossible to 

 serve a community of that area; it is not a community; it is simply 

 a set area of land. In Pennsylvania we believe that secondary schools 

 should be near enough to the people that the boys and girls of high 

 school age can come to the school in the morning and return to their 

 homes at night. Farmers need boys who are of high school age, and 

 the boys and girls of high school age need their homes during that 

 period in their lives. For that reason, instead of making large ap- 

 propriations to any one school which would attempt to serve a con- 

 gressional district or a county, that same amount of money is di- 

 vided up into smaller portions and distributed throughout the State 

 in small portions, each portion going to a community, so far as it is 

 possible to distribute it. 



This is rather a poor slide of a very good school, the Hickory Voca- 

 tional School in Washington county. There is one man in this audi- 

 ence who lives within a stone's throw of that school. This is a vo- 

 cational school ; in this school there is operated a four year course in 

 agriculture and a four year course in homemaking for the girls; on 

 this basis of one half of the day, the boy is with the supervisor of ag- 

 riculture ; the other half of the day he is in what you might term the 

 high school; that is to say, he is studying academic subjects. He 

 does not study agricultural subjects or practical subjects the full half 

 day; it amounts to about 40% of his time. All boys in these voca- 

 tional schools are required to take a vocational course for the first 

 two years, getting the practical work with the academic work, not in 

 place of it. 



And, my friends, let me insert here, that this move to introduce 

 vocational education in the rural district is not revolutionary in its 

 character by any means, it is evolutionary, we are adding the practical 

 work to the academic curriculum, rather than replacing the academic 

 work. The girls are required to spent part of their time each day in 

 vocational work for the first two years. At the end of two years, 

 both boys and girls have the option of continuing in such a course or 

 finishing in what might be termed an all academic course or all high 

 school course. George Washington pointed out the fact that it was 

 necessary in his time, and is necessary now — he pointed out in his 

 time that a study of the soil should be made in order that its needs 

 might be determined, in order that we might make it yield morei 

 than it does, in order that we might take care of it better. It is 

 hardly necessary to state then that in an agricultural school we 

 should have agricultural laboratories so fitted up that the boys in the 

 class in agriculture might make a study of the soil. The work in 

 the soil consists of theoretical work, if you wish to call it so. 

 There must be some organizing of your information and that, I 

 suppose, might be termed theoretical work. There must be some or- 

 ganization of that material, in order that the practical work in the 

 laboratory and the field might not take up useless time, in order 

 that time might not be wasted. The so-called theoretical work is 



