Live Stock Breeders' Association. 77 



bulletins from the experiment station, but it must find an opportun- 

 ity also to teach the enthusiastic growing youth, and that I think 

 M'ill best come through the development of rural high schools taught 

 by graduates of the Agricultural College. The rural high-school 

 may come either by the consolidation of rural district schools or 

 without that. 



How are we to get competent teachers? I know you are in- 

 terested in getting such teachers if it is possible to do so. We have 

 here every winter courses running for three months known as the 

 short courses for young men living on the farms. It seems to me 

 that we might devise some similar plan for training teachers for the 

 rural schools. We might devise some plan of giving an opportunity, 

 during this period of three months, to young men who have gradu- 

 ated from district schools and who think of teaching in district 

 schools. If I were employing a teacher for a rural school, I would 

 prefer a young man of 17 or 18 years of age who had passed 

 through one of those country schools and then had come here for 

 the winter course in general agriculture, with perhaps a summer 

 here afterwards to take up other subjects, than one who had gone 

 away from that rural school to a high school and had come back 

 to the rural community with the conditions and methods of the 

 town school in mind. There needs to be some way provided by 

 which we can get the boys who grew up in the country district 

 back into that district to teach. 



Again let me say, I welcome you here this morning, not only 

 because you are here to discuss these questions bearing upon your 

 own farm work, and upon our instruction in agriculture, but be- 

 cause I have this opportunity to speak to you about that which 

 i7iterests all of us — the development and improvement of our coun- 

 try schools, and thereby the enrichment of our country life and the 

 development of our country youth. I trust the days you spend here 

 will be found to your profit and interest. Anything that the uni- 

 versity can do for you will be gladly done, and I hope you will take 

 away from the convention new inspiration, and that you will bring 

 to us an inspiration for the improvement of our work, because 

 really in the university as well as in all other educational institu- 

 tions, we need to keep in close touch with the conditions of the 

 actual life around us. I am sure that these meetings will give our 

 men in the Agricultural College encouragement to take fuller ad- 

 vantage of the opportunities they have to adapt themselves and 

 their work to the needs and conditions of the farming life of the 

 State. 



