310 Missouri Agricultural Report. 



man. If farmers and lawyers and editors and engineers and artists 

 and merchants are educated separately, they will either hate or 

 despise each other, or both ; if they are educated together, each will 

 acquire, besides proficiency in his own line, a sympathy for others 

 that comes so easily with that partial knowledge and acquaintance 

 through daily association in the school age, and that comes with 

 so much difficulty in any other way. A farmer at our university 

 is a little different man, because law and economics and engineer- 

 ing and Greek are well taught in neighboring buildings, even though 

 he never take one of the courses laid down in the catalogue. The 

 very fact that they are taught and that he associates with those 

 who do take them — all this has its effect, and in a thousand ways 

 a man absorbs something out of every activity that is going on 

 about him. My point, again, is that this is the only adequate at- 

 mosphere in which to educate an American citizen, whatever his 

 occupation is to be. 



6. To establish separate schools for agriculture is to injure 

 the development of existing high schools. These schools are not 

 "city schools" in any proper sense of the term. The great bulk of 

 them are located in small towns and villages in a distinctly rural 

 environment. To denominate all these as "city schools," to be de- 

 voted solely to the interests of city people, is as absurd as it is un- 

 just to them. These schools, like all others, have the natural right 

 to minister to their constituency; but if now agriculture is to be 

 put off into a separate system of schools just because the high 

 schools have not yet taught the subject, then it will be easy, later 

 on, to cleave off another industrial slice, and again another, until 

 the remnant that remains will be -suited to nobody's need, unworthy 

 alike of the school and the community it was established to serve ; 

 and instead of an organized system of effective education we shall 

 have an incongruous medley of separate and independent schools, 

 each serving its little clientele in a narrow way without much re- 

 gard to the public good — all of which is against the true spirit of 

 universal education. 



The American high school is a new institution. It has arisen 

 from our determination to make education truly universal. Now, 

 universal education means that all the people shall be educated, and 

 in such a way that all the activities necessary to a highly civilized 

 race may develop and go forward. Only a small per cent, of the 

 people will ever go to college, and the experiment of universal 

 education will be tried out in the field of the secondary schools. 



