Live Stock Breeders' Association. 307 



by means of his environment, because that is the compass of his 

 own experience; but if we educate him within his environment, we 

 dwarf him in the process, and we do not truly educate him. 



Again, many a boy, city born, has the instinct to get back to 

 Nature. He should have at least a fair chance to do so. Because 

 a girl is born in the country is no sign in America that she should 

 be a farmer's wife ; nor if she is born in the city is it a sign that 

 she should not. My plea is, in the name of common sense and 

 American citizenship, educate all these people together in one 

 school, with a curriculum varied enough to fit for more than one 

 occupation and more than one mode of life, to the end that a man 

 may follow the occupation of his father or may change it, as he 

 pleases; but whether he follow or whether he change he shall do 

 so intelligently, and for a reason, and in either case he shall have 

 some knowledge of and sympathy for the occupation and the life 

 of his neighbor. 



It is said that if you give a bright boy a good education and 

 broad associations, he will leave the farm, and the only way to keep 

 him there is to train him to be contented with a humble life. That 

 false theory of education was exploded long ago. Experience has 

 abundantly shown that education does not necessarily result in tak- 

 ing people out of the country except when that education is one- 

 sided and faulty, as witness the graduates from some of our great- 

 est universities. I have no sympathy with the plan of keeping boys 

 en the farm by the blindfolding process. 



There was a time, now happily past, when the schools ignored 

 not only agriculture but all industry. Then unthinking teachers 

 advised bright boys and girls to "get an education so they would 

 not have to work." This sort of doctrine found fertile soil in the 

 young of hard-working, self-denying pioneers, and it was not 

 strange that most young men who had much contact with the schools 

 were lost not only to the farm but to industrial life. Then it was that 

 men saw the best of the young crowding into professions already 

 overcrowded, and they noted with sorrow and regret that education 

 served principally to draw men away from the useful callings and 

 to pile them up like salmon in the spawning season where they were 

 not needed or wanted, and where little awaited but their own de- 

 struction. 



The country is, and always will be, the great breeding-ground 

 for the nation, and the consequence of this insane movement city- 

 ward of the choicest men and minds could have had but one final 



