No. 7. DEPARTME^'T OF AGRICULTURE. 585 



AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION. 



By HON. M. W. HAYS, AfsUtant Secretary of Agriculture, Washington, D. C. 



Ladies and Gentlemen: I am glad to be with you tonight, and 

 I, am x^i'oud to be with you. I am proud of your great State. I 

 have been living near it recently, and have become better acquainted 

 with it. In my boyhood days I heard much about it from my Penn- 

 svlvania German relatives, but it is onlv recentlv that I haA'e become 

 personally acquainted with it, and have learned from my own obser- 

 vation how great it really is. 



I have just learned from your Secretary this eAcning that I was 

 down on the program for two speeches. I did not know I was ex- 

 pected here last evening. I received the program with a red jjencil 

 mark over Wednesday, the 23rd, and supposed I was to be here for 

 this evening only. I don't knoAS' whether the mistake was made at 

 my office, or whether it is to be credited to your Secretary. (Secre- 

 tarv Critchfield savs it must have been made at the Washington 

 office, as they use blue pencils there). Well, if that is the case, I am 

 sorry for it, and will have to try and cover the two speeches in my 

 address of this evening. 



As each hour has its duties and each tilting of the world's axis 

 has its seasonable work, so each decade brings up for solution its 

 own x>roblems. Our country has taken up one after another such 

 political questions as self-government, freedom of sj)eech, the freeing 

 of a race of slaves and the curbing of dominating capital. In edu- 

 cation the first forward movement v/as to secure private schools, 

 then came the movement for free x>rimary schools. The establish- 

 ment of academies and colleges followed to be in turn succeeded by 

 a movement to establish free city high schools and normal schools; 

 also State colleges and universities partly or quite free of tuition 

 charges. Each of these types of schools have been devised to form 

 a wheel in the educational machinery which we, as a people, are 

 gradually perfecting. 



The educational philosophy of the older, church-governed schools 

 which long ruled our educational policy has been powerfully modified 

 by research in tlie sciences and by development in the industries, 

 arts and yu'ofessions. The curriculum once confined to classical 

 learning has broadened out so as to cover the i)ractical as well as the 

 theoretical and the aesthetic. Some of our very best philosophy of 

 education is now found in the minds of those teachers who are suc- 

 cessfully reducing to pedagogic form and weaving into our educa- 

 tional scheme the essentials of education in the industries and 

 Lome making. When the older philosophy met the problems of tech- 

 nical education it said: ^'Educate the man first and the specialist 

 afterwards." Its plan was to give the man a general college course 

 and give him his technical work in a graduate course. That plan 

 limited technical education to college men. It was the aristocracy 

 of education for the few in the professions. If that philosophy had 

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