880 IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 



HOW MUCH EDUCATION SHOULD A FARMER'S DAUGHTER HAVE? 



MRS. K. K. OLMSTEAD, GRAKTTINGER, lA., BEFORE PALO ALTO COUNTY 



FARMERS INSTITUTE. 



This is a question tiiat, though it has been discussed often and from 

 many points of view, will never lose its interest; for whatever our fav- 

 orite theories regarding the best way to feed cattle, most profitable 

 chickens, or how many bushels to the acre, the underlying thought of the 

 whole scheme is, how may we best serve our families, else, much 

 of our hard work ammounts to little more than hard play. 



We all realize that our children need some schooling, but we are 

 too apt to regard book-learning as incompatible with farm life, and we 

 fail to see how mastering great problems in mathematics trains the mind 

 to solve greater ones in after life. 



We have our favorite stumbling-blocks, such as isolation, lack of 

 means, etc, and after we have solved the bread-and-butter problem, the 

 shelter problem, and the shoe and clothing problem, there doesn't seem 

 to be much left for the education problem, and it is too often left to solve 

 itself the best way it can. 



Real education is not merely the filling of the mind with facts and 

 figures, soon to be forgotten; not merely striving to gain the highest 

 marks in the class; it is ihe proper development of all the faculties, and 

 fitting them for the work God intended them to do. Any thing then, 

 that strengthens or disciplines the mind tends to education. Even the 

 struggle with the problem of ways and means becomes a part of the edu- 

 cation itself, particularly if the girl herself helps in. the solution and 

 stumbling-blocks often become stepping-stones. 



The bug-bear, isolation, is not wholly a bug-bear, since it gives the 

 daughter a chance to grow up at her mother's side, accept her as a confi- 

 dential friend and shaie in a measure her trials and responsibilities. 



Let her not learn to despise such a life, fraught, as it is, with hard 

 work and self-denial; but rather let her learn that life itself is a responsi- 

 bility and if lived selfishly it is lived wrong. "She that livith in pleasure 

 is dead while she livith," reads our Good Book, and "Even as the Son of 

 Man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister," so must we, if 

 our lives are to be worth while, learn to live for something better than 

 our own selfish pleasure. So if the daughter can have an education, it 

 is not that she may have an easier life, but a broader, more useful one. 



Our little country school with its handful of pupils, double-handful of 

 grades and variety of text-books, is not altogether an unmitigated evil, 

 since it gives the teacher a chance to learn the individual needs of her 

 pupils and what is learned there is apt to be well learned. Moreover, 

 the foundation of more than one good education was laid there. Given, 

 then, an ambition to become a useful woman, no fear of hard work, and 

 a mastery of the common branches, what matter, if our farmers girl 

 does enter high school a year or two behind her city cousin? And if 



