EXPERIMENT STATION RECORD. 



Vol. XXIII. . September, 1910. No. 3. 



Among the subjects of educational discussion at the present time, 

 in teachers' conventions, in professional journals, and in the public 

 jDress. there is probably none more prominent than the questions con- 

 nected with the teaching of agriculture in the public schools. This 

 interest centers chiefly in the high school and the place which should 

 be assigned to agriculture in its curriculum. The relations of the 

 subject to other science studies, whether it should be taught at the 

 beginning or toward the end of the course, and the entire question 

 of its proper pedagogical setting, are included in the discussion. 

 Such interest justifies a somewhat detailed consideration of the 

 advantages which agriculture offers as a study introductory to other 

 lines of science work in the high school. 



No one-who has studied high school courses in the last two decades 

 will have failed to note the growing demand for a more consistent 

 organization of the work in science. It is increasingly recognized 

 that the educational results of science teaching are not all that was 

 hoped or predicted from its introduction into the curriculum. And 

 the failure to achieve ideal results has been attributed largely to the 

 want of a well-perfected method of teaching. It is generally ad- 

 mitted that a large part of the superior culture and disciplinary 

 value claimed for mathematics, history, and the classics, is due to 

 the advantage derived from the excellence of the teaching method 

 through w^hich they have been presented to successive generations of 

 high school students. Science has suffered from the lack of this 

 pedagogical organization and presentation of its subject-matter, and 

 has not yet come fully into just comparison with the older subjects 

 in this respect. 



Probably the most striking defect of the science curriculum is its 

 lack of proper gradation and coherence. The prevailing tendency 

 has been to present in successive years a variety of loosely related 

 subjects no one of which is definitely planned to be a preparation 

 for those that follow. The futility of such a course has recently 

 been vividly parabled by Dr. John Dewey in the following hypo- 

 thetical history of language study in the later seventies and eighties 



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