Q 



14 Missouri Agricultural Report. 



have responded so well as to discover that in the last analysis there 

 is an intellectual basis to all industry and an industrial basis to 

 all education that is safe for everybody to use; they have shown 

 that the names of various occupations are but names for different 

 forms of activity and service ; that all fundamental occupations are 

 learned professions, and that any form of education that fits for 

 nothing in particular is worse than useless, even dangerous. 



So we must look at this matter broadly. Our problem is but 

 a part of a more general one; moreover, this general problem of 

 how to educate for all the useful activities is the very problem 

 upon which all educators are busily at work, and they are solving 

 it inch by inch and day by day. It is for us to stay with the crowd 

 and be in at the finish. 



The American high school is a form of secondary education 

 that has arisen, or, more properly speaking, is arising, to meet this 

 new demand for universal education. Agriculture, and industrial 

 education generally, have found their true place in the universities. 

 The next step is that they should find their true place in our sec- 

 ondary schools, where, after all, our attempt at universal educa- 

 tion will render its greatest service. 



And so reasons might be multiplied indefinitely, showing why 

 it is wiser to go forward meeting our educational necessities to- 

 gether — but they would all be of the same general tenor, viz., 

 that our educational problem is after all a single problem — com- 

 plex, puzzling, and all that ; but it is a single problem after all, and 

 we should stay together and solve it. 



If the high schools were as indifferent and as antagonistic 

 toward industrial education today as the colleges were fifty years 

 ago, I would raise my voice loudest for a separate system of agri- 

 cultural high schools. But they are not indifferent, they are in- 

 terested, they are not antagonistic, they are exceedingly friendly. 

 Agriculture has found its place in our American system of educa- 

 tion so far as colleges are concerned, and its place is in most honora- 

 ble company. It remains to find its place in the high schools, and 

 when that place is found, may it be equally honorable and equally 

 favorable with the place it occupies in our great universities where 

 it has done so well. 



And now, after having argued, even pleaded for the preser- 

 vation of the integrity of our system of secondary education, there 

 are two points on which I wish especially not to be misunderstood : 



The first one is this : When I speak of teaching agriculture 

 in our high schools, I mean agriculture. I do not mean Nature 



