2S4 ANNUAL REPORT OF THE Oft. t>o6. 



Have you ever stopped to think of the progress of the last century? 

 Why, ladies and gentlemen, just about a hundred years ago — you 

 would not think it to look at my wife — just about a hundred years 

 ago she and I rode up from Lancaster county over the hills and 

 mountains and through the valleys with a six-horse team into the 

 then new and crude territory of Erie county. Of course we were 

 with our grandsires, and night before last we goi on a train, took a 

 Pullman, and waked up the next morning in the city of Philadelphia, 

 crossed the State from end to end in a single night, hitched to the 

 chariot of steam, while in the time of my grandfather, we made 

 our slow progress behind a six-horse team. Such has been the 

 grand and steady march of development in our land. So in regard 

 to our public school system; every middle-aged man and woman 

 will remember when we started in to school. You who are farmer 

 boys will well remember that you started in to school somewhere 

 after the fall work was done, and we sometimes trudged miles to 

 the little old schoolhouse and sat on the rude benches of the time, 

 and we opened the old arithmetic just where we had opened it the 

 year before, marked with the thumb-marks and the dog's ears that 

 indicated our efforts to master its lessons. We were submitted 

 to the same tests in that old arithmetic until it sometimes seemed 

 to us that it had neither beginning nor end. Just reflect for a 

 moment what progress has marked the development of our system 

 of public instruction, our common school system since those earlier 

 days. How the gulf has been narrowed and the chasm been bridged 

 and the difficulties smoothed away until now we have in our school 

 system here in Pennsylvania a course of instruction and methods 

 of which we may all well be proud. 



Prof. Bayle then spoke of the necessity of divorcing the manage 

 ment of our schools from politics and of the necessity of keeping 

 the power and authority over our schools in the hands of the people, 

 and of the great benefits to be derived from the township high 

 schools, and urged upon those present that they give their hearty 

 support to the movement now inaugurated to provide for a course 

 of agricultural instruction in our public schools, so that our farmers' 

 boys and girls may be better equipped for the work of the farm, and 

 so that their understanding and interest in agricultural affairs 

 may be cultivated and developed to such an extent that they may 

 not think it a hardship but rather a pleasure to remain on the 

 farm, and to take up the work of the farmer, the greatest and noblest 

 work in all the land. 



The Professor said that one of the most important considerations 

 of to-day's educational problem is that of centralization. He as- 

 serted that by this means our schools would be much improved; that 



