FARMERS' INSTITUTES. 73 



WEDNESDAY EVENING. 



UNIVERSITY HALL AT 8 O'CLOCK. 



President J. L. Snyder, Agricnltnral College, in the Chair. 



IMPORTANCE OF CO-OPERATION IN EDUCATION. 



ROBT. M. WENLEY, SC. D., D. PHIL. 



Prof. Wenley made a brief address on "The Importance of Co-opera- 

 tion in Education." Having worked the audience into a happy vein by 

 two apposite and excellently told stories, he went on to say that today 

 farmers must be to some extent scientific men. To get the necessary 

 knowledge they have no resource but to co-operate. As two heads are 

 better than one, so are two pocketbooks. Instructors, lecturers and the 

 like cannot be secured without co-operation. The township school is 

 better than the district school, because more organize for its up-ke,ep. 

 This organization is specially incumbent upon those who, like the 

 farmer, live in sparsely inhabited tracts of the country. Further, imi- 

 tation is a strong trait in man; like the rest, the farmer takes home a 

 hint from his neighbor and applies it. He has peculiar advantages, 

 too, in the ease with which he can co-operate. He needs no laboratory, 

 he needs no elaborate apparatus. His farm is his laboratory, he ex- 

 periments with his implements in the daily round of work. There he 

 observes, learns, a(;Ms here or there a new fact to the store he has 

 been accumulating for years. 



It is often said that the farmer is slow and conservative, and a large, 

 part of the ballast of the ship of state. That he is conservative is true; 

 but the reasons usually given for his conservatism are beside the mark. 

 It is the nature of his occupation that causes this habit of mind. Tn 

 the quiet of the fields, disturbed by nothing but the clank of the har- 

 ness, the chirp of birds, or the rush of the wind through the trees, the 

 farmer becomes reflective, is enabled to go on without distraction in 

 his chains of reasoning. He puts things together and thus arrives at 

 safe conclusions. This makes him conservative. He works out 

 theories, indeed, but theories proceeding from his own practical 

 life. Now this life offers him peculiar facilities for making his 

 own endowments as a human being co-operate. The average man 

 is capable of two main things — understanding and expression. 

 We usually educate to develop the former. But the farmer has 

 wonderful chances of emphasizing the side of expression. In thus 

 educating expression by the work of his hands, he is actually working 

 out co-operation, and is helping himself to become a better all-round 

 citizen — better than the poor professor, who is cooped up within four 

 walls with an abundance of bad air. Thus farmers gather ideas from 

 their own experience, and are enabled, each one in his own individual 

 way, to contribute to the science of agriculture which, in turn, furnishes 

 new ideas to all. 



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