SCO State Board of Agriculture, &c. 



definitions of aritlimetical terms, in which he uses dozens of 

 words that need defining to the ordinary beginner quite as 

 much as do the terms he uses these words to define. Every 

 definition is, I venture to assert, utterly unintelligible to the 

 average scholar, and will be memorized mechanically, and 

 be of no more use than if they were written in Latin, unless 

 the teacher takes pains to translate them into plain English, 

 and illustrate them practically in various ways. I do not 

 believe a college bred man can make a good arithmetic. 

 When it is done it will be done by some practical account- 

 ant, and then every college bred man of our schools will, I 

 fear, do his best to prevent its adoption. 



Fellow farmers, I think I have made plain to you the rea- 

 sons why education draws our young men away from the 

 farm. The whole spirit of our educational system, common 

 schools and all, is scholastic, theoretical, and calculated 

 gradually to wean away the youthful mind from every prac- 

 tical aim in life to the dreamy regions of thought without 

 action and life without purpose. So far as it has any practi- 

 cal end it is to beget a contempt for manual labor, and lead 

 to vague ambitions for some sphere in life where kid gloves 

 can be worn all the time. Now in this age and country, 

 when and where, as Horace Greeley has said, there is no 

 way to get money except to earn it or to steal it, our far- 

 mer boys are far more likely to be educated into the classes 

 that live by plundering their fiithers, either as politicians, 

 speculators or tramps, than to be brought to love and live 

 by the labors of the farm. 



Not that there is anything essentially demoralizing in the 

 scholastic system of education. But the ranks of all the 



