316 Missouri Agricultural Report. 



competent teachers, but they are coming along, and the demand 

 will bring the supply. The schools look directly to the colleges of 

 agriculture to furnish, out of their experience, the most suitable 

 material for these courses and to train the first supply of teachers. 

 This they are fully able to do, and I am prone to believe that to- 

 gether we can work out this problem, and in the near future, if 

 we are all wise and persistent we can provide as good a home educa- 

 tion for the farmer as for other classes of our people. 



And now if there should be high schools which prefer to go 

 along in the good old way and not to trouble with the newer edu- 

 cational needs and demands, I have a word to say to them. 



What our educational development is to be rests largely with 

 existing schools. They can be quick to catch the spirit of a new 

 order of things educational and enlarge both their conceptions and 

 activities; or the new demands will be met by a new system, to the 

 lasting disadvantage of both parties, as I see it. 



We cannot afford to break in two at any point; least of all 

 can existing schools afford to see our educational effort divided. 

 The logic of the situation is all against it. The new ideal is that 

 education should fit for something instead of fitting for nothing, 

 and this ideal will prevail among a practical people like ourselves. 

 Educators can take hold of this natural bent for practical activity 

 and cultivate it until as a people we shall be both efficient and 

 cultivated. If they do not do this the efficiency will develop by 

 itself, and we shall all come short of our highest possibilities. 



The new demand upon the schools is that they should not only 

 picture life as it was in the past, but also as it is now; that they 

 should assist the student in understanding modern life into which 

 he must plunge, and whose responsibilities he must shortly assume. 

 The student feels the right to demand that some portion of his 

 educational career and some part of his school curriculum should 

 be devoted to making application of the wisdom of the ancients 

 and the philosophy of life to the conditions of modern existence. 



Reduced to the lowest terms and pushed to the last analysis, 

 that is all this new movement means in any of its forms — agricul- 

 tural or other, viz., that the school hold up a true picture of life 

 in all its activities, and that teaching be conducted from the stand- 

 point of living, not merely of mental development ; that the school 

 shall be a true mirror of human life, modern as well as ancient, 

 and of what men do as well as of what they think and say. In 

 other words, that a system of universal education shall universally 

 educate — not in art without industry; not in industry without art, 



