72 STATE BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



that their beneficent influence on the mind and character can there 

 he safely suspended? When the average student finishes his high school 

 work, he is just beginning to develop certain of his faculties, especially 

 on the emotional side. He is just beginning to be able in some degree 

 to assimilate the thought of the great intellects whose highest and most 

 lasting product is literature. It is during this final period of plas- 

 ticity, before the character hardens into its permanent form, in other 

 Avords, during the four or five college years, that the best and most 

 effective shaping and moulding must be accomplished. It is certainly 

 not a specialist in education who dreams that the great subjects through 

 which education is accomplished can be successfully treated as hori- 

 zontal layers or strata to be deposited in the mind of the student. ''Line 

 upon line, precept u])on precept, here a little and there a little," is still 

 the secret of the successful educator. I strongly believe and affirm that 

 during the four years of college life it is a positive crime under any 

 circumstances to neglect the aesthetic and moral life, to cease effort 

 directly to form and mould the emotional nature, to forego the oppor- 

 tunity to create wider interests in life, a broader outlook, a stronger 

 character. The utilitarian idea in education, while correct within limits 

 and a distinct step forward in adapting college education to the needs of 

 the masses, becomes a most dismal failure, a most disaster-threaten- 

 ing menace to social and national life, if it is allowed to degenerate into 

 mere sordidness, if it deliberately or impliedly teaches the student to 

 measure all achievement by the base standard of dollars and cents. 

 After all, the college exists for the student, not the student for the col- 

 lege. Its function is to create for him a broader life, not to put blind 

 bridles over his eyes that he may look only in the direction his master 

 desires. 



How much time, then, should be given to the work which our depart- 

 ment does for the student? Without discussing the question in the 

 abstract, I reply with another question. In view of the enormous inter,- 

 ests to be cared for, as inadequately presented in the foregoing, is the 

 average time at ^I. A. C. actually devoted to the English work, as pre- 

 sented in the statistics at the head of this report, too much? It is per- 

 haps a little less than that given to the Miliary Department. The aver- 

 age student at this College, rightly or wrongly, takes certainly not less 

 than l}0 hours of class-room work per week; nine per cent, therefore, of 

 the whole work of the student at this College is on the average devoted 

 to this })hase of his education. In the course into which the Englisli 

 work most largely enters, the women's it amounts to only IGi^'o per cent 

 of her whole time. Considering our ])rol)lem as primarily an cduca- 

 tiwuil one — and that is what it is, disguise it as we may — I respect- 

 fully repeat my question, is nine per cent, or even IG per cent, too much? 



I confess that I have been much pained and discouraged by the effort 

 to decrease the time devoted to the work of this Department and espec- 

 ially by some show in the Faculty of lack of sympathy with our work. 

 That any little success of this Department in comx)etition with other 

 colleges should cause, not pleasure, but publicly expressed anxiety for 

 the future of the College on the part of any of my associates has filled 

 me with wonder. A long familiarity with the work of industrial and 

 technical education for which our Agricultural College stands has given 

 me every opportunity to understand its problems, purposes and methods. 



