496 State Board of Agriculture, &c. 



In the profession of teaching the same defect exists, 

 though, as with the clergy, our teachers would receive much 

 benefit from a more practical system of education than they 

 now get. It is because the profession of teaching is so 

 unpractical that it has been found so difficult to make agri- 

 cultural colleges a success. They have been oflicered from 

 a class of men utterly unfitted, by training and preconceived 

 opinions, for the work they are set to do, when they are put 

 in charge of a school of agriculture, or of any practical art. 

 As they cannot do it they naturally despise it, and think it 

 unworthy an educated man, according to their idea of edu- 

 cation ; and all their influence will invariably be used in 

 diverting the course of study from the practical to the rig- 

 idly scientific and literary. This is their forte, and they nat- 

 urally and excusably draw back from that which they nei- 

 ther understand nor value. 



The fact is, brother farmers, our colleges and schools were 

 never designed for the likes of us. All the colleges and 

 schools in the world, from the beginning nearly up to the 

 present time, were organized and designed for making 

 priests, ministers, lawyers, and teachers of divinity and law. 

 No thought of educating the people ever entered the minds 

 of the men who founded the schools and colleges of the old 

 world, of which our schools and colleges are the lineal 

 descendants. They were designed for " our betters," as the 

 working men of Europe have always been taught to call the 

 aristocracies of wealth and collegiate learning. In those 

 times the profession of medicine was divided, the scientific 

 part in the hands of the college bred "physician" or doctor 

 of medicine, who disdained to put his hand upon a patient, 



