FOURTH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK — PART VIII. £37 



VALUE OF EDUCATION TO THE FARMER. 



E. J. McQiiiston. Before the Worth County Farmers^ Institute. 



All civilized men have more or less appreciation of education and 

 •are in some degree educated, as the term is understood. The more a 

 man knows the more he wants to know, and the more he wants his chil- 

 dren to know. There seems to be hardly a possibility of a doubt of th? 

 value of education to any class of people. 



Observation of the relative condition of races, nations and communi- 

 ties that have long enjoyed educational advantages, as compared with 

 communities and people not so favored, abundantly attest the value of 

 education the very first work of the American pioneer farmer, after pro- 

 viding shelter and sustenance for his family, has been to establish com- 

 mon schools, and even higher institutions of learning, and every year 

 he voluntarily taxes himself to support them. Hence I say that men 

 instinctively believe in the value of education, and I do not enter into 

 a discussion of the subject to establish the fact of its value. That is ad- 

 mitted. But we may be and are led to value anything more that is of 

 real value by thinking about it, and we may derive some benefit by con- 

 sidering this subject in a meeting where farmers convene to discuss 

 matters of mutual interest. Education may be considered, primarily, as 

 the growth or development of the inherent germs of physical, intellec- 

 tual, moral and spiritual powers of the individual, and secondly, as a 

 special training in certain lines, as a preparation for some occupation 

 or profession. 



Education, primarily, I have said, is simply a growing of the indi- 

 vidual in all his faculties. It proceeds from within, not from without. 

 It is not an external something that can be added to the person or per- 

 sons like a coat, or poured in like water into a jug, or laid on in suc- 

 cessive courses, as a mason places the brick upon a wall. Education 

 is the result of self-exertion in living bodies or mind. The tree, indeed, 

 grows by successive rings of wood, formed yearly, each upon the surface 

 of the preceding, but the particles of substance out of which these rings 

 are formed have been drawn from soil and air by its own mysterious, 

 invisible life principles, and transformed into wood, and that, too, of its 

 own peculiar kind. Why does the oak, the pine and the maple that per- 

 chance stand side by side, grow wood of such distinct peculiarities and 

 products, all from the same elements of earth and air — the oak with 

 its tannin, the pine with its pitch, and the maple its sugar? 



Why does the corn, wheat and the barley, growing out of the same 

 kind of soil, beneath the same sunshine and watered by the same genial 

 showers, produce from these similar sources of supply such distinct and 

 characteristic results? Surely the life principle within each moulds the 

 same elements into new forms different from each other and different 

 from the elements out of which they are made. Here is a mysterious 

 power in plant life which we can see only by its results. Man is a com- 



