76 Missouri Agricultural Report. 



agriculture, are (1) personality, and (2) teaching for efficiency, for 

 usefulness, for healthfulness. With these two ideas in view I believe that 

 any teacher can make a beginning. The beautiful thing about teaching 

 agriculture in the public schools is : that when a teacher takes up the 

 subject he need not know it all. I know of no one who is teaching 

 agriculture who pretends to know the whole subject. Each one thinks 

 he has learned a little and is wdlling to tell of that little to his pupils ; 

 but every one who professes to teach agriculture has only begun him- 

 self to be a student of the subject. So when we begin the teaching of 

 agriculture is it any wonder that we hesitate and do not know how to 

 carry on the work? Now if the teacher has the personality that a 

 teacher should have, and desires to teach these young people the facts 

 that are necessary for them to learn if they are going to become farmers, 

 if that teacher has the ability to teach them so that they can study 

 subjects, so that they can understand subjects, so that they learn to 

 investigate, then he can make a beginning. That beginning may be a 

 very simple affair. Perhaps with something like nature study, the 

 study of the birds, of the trees, of the crops and the soils, or of farm 

 animals, or almost anything. Everybody knows a little about some 

 subject on the farm, and why not begin with that? Then the teacher 

 can say candidly to his pupils, "I don't know a great deal about this 

 subject, but T will tell you what we will do — we will study together." 

 He will probably get an opera glass and take them out in the field. 

 They examine the birds through the glass, or they study the trees along 

 the road side. Some teachers will tell you that they haven't time for 

 the teaching of agriculture, or nature-study, and certainly no time 

 for home-economics. The teacher who has the right personality will 

 find the time, and the beautiful thing about it is that the taking up of 

 one of those subjects soon so interests the students that they become en- 

 thusiastic over it, and are ready to exert themselves more in their other 

 work. AYhen the boys find their arithmetic terribly hard and their 

 grammar difficult to understand, if the teacher will get their minds off 

 of those studies for a while by giving them a little work in nature- 

 study, they Avill become interested and the first thing the teacher knows 

 they will be doing better in arithmetic and grammar and everything 

 else. I think that taking up nature-study or agriculture is something 

 like calisthenics. Sometimes you go into a school room and find the 

 doors and the windows all closed, and the air heavy, and the teacher 

 has a headache, some of the pupils are almost asleep, and everybody 

 listless and slow. The teacher says to some of the boys, "Open the 

 windows," and they open them and let in the fresh air. Then the 

 teacher says, "Stand up." They all rise. He tells them to go through 



