904 EXPERIMENT STATION RECORD. 



subsidize agricultural instruction in the public high schools, besides 

 providing $5,000 for each of the three State normal schools with 

 which to maintain courses in agriculture and manual training. In 

 addition lo this, agricultural instruction is also to be given in six 

 summer normal courses for public school teachers, three of these 

 courses being assigned to the three normal schools, one to the State 

 university, one to the State College of Agriculture and the Mechanic 

 Arts, and one to the College of Industrial Arts (for women) at 

 Denton. 



One other case is noteworthy in this connection, that of the estab- 

 lishment this year of Arkansas' first State normal school with a 

 distinct department of agricultural instruction, supervised by an agri- 

 cultural college graduate, Prof. L. A. Niven. And in anticipation 

 of the competent teaching service which this department is to develop 

 in its graduates, the legislature has also appropriated $100,000 for 

 establishing at least four agricultural high schools in the State. 



These new developments furnish additional evidence of a vigorous 

 movement throughout the whole country for bringing agricultural 

 teaching into all normal schools, as a means of spreading its introduc- 

 tion through their graduates into the common schools of the people. 

 The following States, named in the chronological order of their action, 

 have already crystallized this general tendency by appointing profess- 

 ors or assistant professors of agricultural education either in the State 

 university or the State college: Illinois, Tennessee, Massachusetts, 

 Oklahoma, Michigan, Indiana, and Louisiana. Mississippi has a 

 professor of industrial pedagogy, supervising work in agriculture and 

 mechanic arts, and several other States (as Iowa) have developed ex- 

 tension departments that aim to bring agricultural instruction into 

 all the secondary schools as rapidly as practicable. 



So it has come to pass that no single State can hope to gain or 

 maintain a position of distinct precedence in agricultural education 

 extension work; rather each must needs take heed lest it find itself 

 already superseded in rank by one it had supposed to be far in the 

 rear of the movement. And none are awaking sooner to the signifi- 

 cance of this movement than the people who have not had superior 

 educational advantages, who are not wont to be enthusiastic over the 

 technics of education, but who are keenly alive to its practical (or 

 unpractical) tendencies and results. While these people have not 

 been backward in asking for a type of education practically related 

 to their own conceived needs, they have not usually assumed to formu- 

 late its requirements into a working course of study. This duty still 

 remains to be done by men already experienced in the schools; but its 

 real value will be pretty accurately and promptly gauged by the 

 patrons for whom the schools in fact exist. 



