PROGRESS IN AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION, 1906. 



By Dick J. Crosby, 

 Expert in Agricultural Education, Office of Experivient Stations. 



INTRODUCTION. 



The attitude of the thinking piibhc toward industrial education in' 

 general and agricultural education in particular is rapidly assuming 

 a decidedly friendly aspect. There are many indications of this. 

 The President of the United States in his message at the beguining of 

 the second session of the Fif ty-nmth Congress said : 



There is no longer any failure to realize that farming, at least in certain branches, 

 must become a technical and scientific profession. This means that there must be 

 open to farmers the chance for technical and scientific training, not theoretical merely, 

 but of the most severely practical type. The farmer represents a peculiarly high type 

 of American citizenship, and he must have the same chance to rise and develop as other 

 American citizens have. Moreover, it is exactly as true of the farmer, as it is of the 

 business man and the wage worker, that the ultimate success of the nation of which he 

 forms a part must be founded not alone on material prosperity but upon high moral, 

 mental, and physical development. This education of the farmer — self-education 

 by preference, but also education from the outside, as with all other men^s peculiarly 

 necessary here in the United States, where the frontier conditions even in the newest 

 States have now nearly vanished, where there must be a substitution of a more inten- 

 sive system of cultivation for the old wasteful farm management, and where there 

 must be a better business organization among the farmers themselves. 



Several factors must cooperate in the improvement of the farmer's condition. He 

 must have the chance to be educated in the widest possible sense — in the sense that 

 keeps ever in view the intimate relationship between the theory of education and the 

 facts of life. In all education we should widen our aims. It is a good thing to produce 

 a certain number of trained scholars and students; but the education superintended 

 by the State must seek rather to produce a hundred good citizens than merely one 

 scholar, and it must be turned now and then from the class book to the study of the 

 great book of nature itself. This is ( specially true of the farmer, as has been pointed out 

 again and again by all observers most competent to pass practical judgment on the 

 problems of our country life. All students now realize that education must seek to 

 train the executive powers of young people and to confer more real significance upon 

 the phrase "dignity of labor," and to prepare the jjupils so that in addition to each 

 developing in the highest degree his individual capacity for work, they may together 

 help create a right public opinion, and show in many ways social and cooperative 

 spirit. * * * 



While the farmers must primarily do most for themselves, yet the Government can 

 also do much. The Department of Agriculture has broken new ground in many direc- 

 tions, and year by year it finds how it can improve its methods and develop fresh use- 

 fulness. Its constant effort is to give the governmental assistance in the most effective 

 way; that is, through associations of farmers rather than to or through individual 



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