B90 ANNUAL REPORT OF THE Off. Doc. 



those desiring to talie their graduate work in law, medicine and 

 other professions. Lack of a substantial body of agricultural know- 

 ledge, and business principles in pedagogic form were also at first 

 a very great hindrance to the development of education in agricul- 

 ture. 



The engineering courses of these colleges on the other hand had 

 less to handicap them. In the various lines of engineering a definite 

 body of knowledge and practice work was early brought together 

 in splendid form for teaching. The rapid growth of industrial, 

 transportation, and merchandising enterprises afforded large num- 

 bers of salaried positions to which general and scientific collegiate 

 courses led. Students seeing the halting and unsatisfactory char- 

 acter of instruction in agriculture, naturally flocked to the courses 

 of study which seemed to give them individually the best opening. 

 Presidents and boards of trustees traveling the lines of least resis- 

 tance responded to the development of general and mechanics arts' 

 courses and failed to secure from the legislatures the large necessary 

 equipment for agricultural education. 



During the last one or two decades one State college after another 

 has succeeded in bringing forward its agricultural instruction, and 

 toda}^ success has been reached in large proportion of these institu- 

 tions giving assurance that this class of collegiate education has a 

 grand future. 



Success had hardly been attained in collegiate courses in agri- 

 cultural education when secondary schools for agricultural educa- 

 tion began successfully to develop. In 1888 the IFniversity of Min- 

 nesota began an experiment at developing an agricultural high 

 school course. This experiment is of none the less value, and of all 

 the greater interest because it was an outgrowth of the failure of 

 agricultural courses of collegiate grade to gain a foothold in a State 

 university. Just as Congress by its land-act grant forced colleges 

 of agriculture upon the states, this agricultural high-school move- 

 ment was injected into the school system upon the initiative of 

 farmers and business men. At present between thirty and forty ag 

 ricultural high schools have been established in the United States. 



In one line of country-life education school men and non-school 

 men have together taken up the practical in school work. Farmers 

 and educators together have entered upon the development of rural 

 schools, as to have them cover agriculture and home economics as 

 well as the three R's. Thus the school people are especially champ- 

 ioning the consolidation of rural schools, and the farmers are lay- 

 ing stress upon the introduction of agriculture into all rural schools. 

 Both classes are rapidly coming to favor with both propositions. 

 The farmers are coming to see that agriculture and home economics 

 are to have very strong positions in the primary country-school cur- 

 riculum along with tlie three R's. 



The need of a unified system of agricultural education with rural 

 schools, agricultural high-school and colleges of agriculture, articu- 

 lated throughout as are the three classes of primary, secondary 

 and collegiate schools devoted to the education of the city or non- 

 agricultural classes is gaining wide recognition. Courses of study 

 for agriculture and for home economics covering the sixteen years 

 of primary, secondarv and collegiate work have ibeen designed, dem- 



