SEVENTH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK-PART III. 101 



The President: This paper is open foi^ discussion. 



A Member: How are you going to award those scholarships? 



Prof. Curtiss : No plan has been devised by the college author- 

 ities. The action is something like this: The scholarships are of- 

 fered to each farmers ' institute upon such conditions as the officers 

 may deem best, with the suggestion, however, that they be of- 

 fered for some form of competition, such as stock or grain judg- 

 ing. Quite a number of county institutes have suggested plans of 

 this kind; others didn't know whether it would be practical or 

 advisable. So that the college authorities in awarding these schol- 

 arships do not fix any conditions under which they would be 

 granted, but leave it to the officers of the institute as far as prac- 

 ticable, to be placed upon some form of competition. 



The Vice-President : Owing to the fact that Mr. Stickney will 

 deliver his address this evening, our program for this afternoon is 

 cut somewhat short. JMr. Collingwood, who spoke to us this morn- 

 ing, has kindly consented to give us another talk this afternoon. 

 We will be glad to hear from him now. 



Mr. Collingw^ood : I would like to speak for a few moments 

 about this matter of educating our farm boys. I think that our 

 system of education in the East, as I understand it, is at least 

 partly w^rong. When we tried to get an appropriation to build our 

 Agricultural College in New York, a strange thing happened, and 

 that was, that the hardest opposition we had came from the classi- 

 cal colleges. Wlienever we had a hearing at the state house, be- 

 fore the Governor or the Ways and Means Committee, there were 

 from seven to eight college presidents ranged up against us in 

 every move we made for a uniform agricultural education. These 

 men said, that the old classical ideas of teaching the boy the dead 

 languages and the higher mathematics, was the only thing that 

 would make a man out of them. Now, just think of it. Chan- 

 cellor Day of the Syracuse University, who was the hardest fighter, 

 made this point: When a farmer takes his scythe to a grindstone 

 and sharpens it, he sharpens the blade, and then does not take a 

 piece of the grindstone with him, and the same thing was true when 

 he sharpened his mind on Greek and mathematics. I told him 

 any farmer I ever saw sharpen his scythe on the grindstone, always 

 put a whetstone in his pocket when he went out in the field, and 

 that was, that the hardest opposition we had came from the clas- 

 an agricultural education ; that the latter gives the farmer his 

 grindstone and his whetstone. 



