No. 7. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 595 



While Congress inaugurated industrial education; while Minne- 

 sota has the credit of designing a successful course of agricultural 

 high-school work; while a number of our cities as Philadelphia, 

 Brooklyn, St. Paul, St. Louis, and Chicago have proven mechanic 

 arts' high schools to be practicable; and while Ohio, Indiana, and 

 other states have made practicable that most difficult of changes the 

 consolidation of the rural schools; and while Alabama has the credit 

 of being first to locate an agricultural high school in each Congres- 

 sional district the great Southern state of Georgia has the proud 

 distinction of first proceeding to finance a system of agricultural 

 high schools throughout the state. Last July the legislature of 

 Georgia passed an act authorizing Governor Terrell to locate an 

 agricultural high school in each of the eleven Congressional dis'tricts 

 of the state, and turned over the funds reserved as tag taxes on fer- 

 tilizers and oils for their use as an annual support fund. The act 

 required the. people of the respective districts to furnish farms, 

 buildings and equipments. Governor Terrell secured experts to aid 

 in the selection of farms suitable for school and branch experiment 

 station work. He employed an architect to prepare a bird's-eye view 

 of campus and buildings, and he called upon educators who aided 

 in devising a course of study devoted especially to agriculture and 

 home economics, and particularly with the rural schools below, and 

 with the farm, and at the same time leading toward the collegiate 

 agricultural course in the University of Georgia. 



The people of Georgia were thus so fully aroused to the import- 

 ance of these schools that the bids of different cities and counties 

 for them reached figures which put our rich Northern states in the 

 shade. All but one of the eleven schools have been located, and 

 what will be the bid for the last one is pretty well known. The 

 tdtal thus given almost wholly by individual subscribers for the 

 200 or 300-acre farms for buildings and equifmients amounts to over 

 1800,000— more than |70,0()0 with which to equip each school. 



Is it any wonder that this magnificent response by the people of 

 Georgia to his appeal to thus use modern technical education to 

 bring still higher her rising industries and home-making led Gov- 

 ernor Terrell to suggest to his Congressmen to secure a Federal 

 grant for more money with which to supply to these schools and 

 for a branch experiment station at each school a more nearly ade- 

 quate annual expense fund? 



America has no state more able than Pennsylvania to take a 

 strong pace in the development of industrial education. Building 

 up a system of education in the city industries, in agriculture and 

 in home-making will cost additional funds. But the expenditures 

 to make more efficient the producers of wealth and the home makers 

 who devote themselves largely to the development of people will 

 pay back their cost several times over. Our slatesmen and our 

 educators have before them no more important problem than that 

 of financing a plan of industrial education which is educationally 

 correct. More experiments are needed that we may know how to 

 develop industrial education. Of especial importance are experi- 

 ments to determine how best to organize education in agricultural 

 and home economics in consolidated schools. Pennsylvania's law 

 passed several years ago providing for the consolidation of rural 



