Live Stock Breeders' Association. 73 



to be a helpful institution, must be a school that inspires, gives 

 insight into and leads to an appreciation of rural life and rural 

 activities. The idea that I have advanced, then, is that our teach- 

 ers are better prepared in the problems given in the text books 

 t]ian they are in the knowledge of rural life itself, and this is get- 

 ting to be more and more the case because we are drawing today in- 

 to the rural school teachers who have attended a town school or a 

 city school, whereas, in realty, we should have, and I hope that in the 

 near future we shall have, teachers in the rural schools who have 

 grown up in rural communities, men and women who have ceased 

 to live for a time in the rural community while in training for their 

 profession, but have entered into it again. 



The whole problem, then, is that of vitalizing and making more 

 significant that type of school. This can be done in several ways : 

 One way is to teach agriculture in that school, but there is one 

 trouble with that — offering a course in agriculture two or three 

 times a week, or daily, for the last year of a country school, will 

 not make very much change in the pupils' problems and outlook; 

 it simply adds another subject to the already over-burdened course 

 of study, and adds another subject to the overworked teacher's 

 duties. What is more important, is that the whole education of 

 the school should be directed towards the community in which the 

 school is located. Take, for instance, the subject known as geog- 

 raphy, which is defined as a study of the earth as the home of man ; 

 instead of beginning with some remote parts and studying about 

 the various countries and then coming down to the American conti- 

 nent and dividing this up and studying it, and perhaps in the course 

 of two or three years reaching the home county, why not have a 

 study made first of the streams, of the drainage of the soil, of the 

 forests, and of the animals and plants that grow in that community 

 in which the school is located? I heard much, when I studied geog- 

 raphy, about the various animals that inhabited the Andes and the 

 Valley of the Amazon, but never one word about the cattle and 

 horses and hogs and sheep and mice that are to be found right 

 around home, and therefore I failed to get any concrete or natural 

 basis from which to understand the rest of the world. In our at- 

 tempt to give pupils a knowledge of the world as a whole, we lose 

 sight of the fact that the way to get a correct knowledge of the 

 world is to understand our own part of it first. We are still making 

 that mistake. Those of you who are responsible can help by letting 

 the teacher know that you want that work done ; that is not teach- 

 ing agriculture in one sense, but it is bringing the children into a 



