FARMERS' INSTITUTES. 61 



farmers. Before such a combination of facts, what becomes of the state- 

 ment about educating away from the farm? It is untrue. The college 

 is doing its full duty in counteracting the home influences that are draw- 

 ing our boys away from the farm. It is unfair to compare our out-put 

 with that of a medical college, because the conditions are so different. 

 As you stand before an entering class in the medical department of our 

 great university, ask that all who intend to be physicians will raise 

 the right hand. How many hands would remain down? But with 

 us in answer to the question: ''How many intend to be farmers?" 

 only eleven out of every hundred would raise the hand. Yet even a 

 medical college does not make all 'its graduates physicians. Our Dr. 

 Kedzie is a medical graduate of the U. of M., but the greater part of his 

 long and useful career has been passed as a teacher. So little does youth 

 know its own powers or is able to control its own destiny! 



A FEW SUGGESTIONS. 



There is, however, one change that, I think, would operate beneficially 

 in this direction. Our Agricultural College has its vacation in the winter 

 and is in operation during the summer. The avowed objects are two- 

 fold: (1) to give proper farm work during the summer, and (2) to 

 enable our boys to teach during the winter. Now I think this practice 

 works in a doubly hurtful way: on the one hand it keeps the boy from 

 10 hours per day during the summer of the best kind of farm drill either 

 on the home place, or on the college farm. This would be comparable 

 to the medical student's hospital-walking during his course, or to the 

 summer campaign among the mines undertaken by the mining students 

 at Houghton. On the other hand our boys are deliberately inducted 

 into the teaching profession. Year after year three or four months are 

 spent in teaching. The only form of money-getting they know anything 

 about by actual experience is teaching. Before thej^ know it they have 

 come to depend on it for their support and in the absence of opportunity 

 and initiative fall back into it after they are graduated. Moreover the 

 middle class of farmers, those whom we desire to reach, can not spare 

 their sons during the summer, but could arrange to let them go 

 during the winter. I believe a change of vacation from winter to 

 summer would give us at the College a class of boys that we have 

 never reached before, namely those earnestly striving and sacri- 

 ficing not for some kind or any kind of an education, but before 

 all things for an agricultural education. Finally, it would give an oppor- 

 tunity for a great object lesson in the shape of a model farm — a farm 

 conducted most sagaciously and tested by actual money tests, a farm for 

 constant comparison and illustration when the students return from the 

 summer campaign. This is not possible with 2| hour per day student 

 labor during the summer. But there is, besides the regular work for boys 

 and girls, another work which the Agricultural College can and must do. 

 I spoke of the second method of handling science teaching, viz., by dog- 

 matic enunciation of facts and rules and constant practice in doing. It is 

 the playing of poor Blind Tom, compared with the science and skill of a 

 Liszt or a Rubinstein ; but it is of infinite importance to Blind Tom and a 

 source of pleasure and instruction to thousands. There are men who have 



