REGION OF DISCONTENT 29 



But the believers in agricultural education had more in mind than 

 merely the promotion of better farming methods. They wished also to 

 convince farm boys and girls that farm life offered opportunities com- 

 parable with those of city life. Too many farmers still thought of education 

 as a means of providing for their children an easier way of life than farm- 

 ing. As a result, the schools, even the agricultural colleges, some said, were 

 educating farm youth away from the farm. Country schools needed a 

 thorough overhauling. The one-room school with its underpaid, under- 

 trained, and overworked teacher must go. Means must be found to pro- 

 vide for the transportation of children to larger, centrally located schools. 

 Agriculture as a school subject must have an honored place in the curricu- 

 lum, and teachers must be prepared to present it realistically, in terms 

 applicable to the daily life of farm boys and girls. Prospective farmers 

 must be taught to understand their "own soils, climate, animal and plant 

 diseases, markets, and other local facts." 55 Perhaps an enlarged United 

 States Bureau of Education should restudy all public educational activities 

 and furnish more effective guidance to state and local authorities. All this 

 was supposed not only to make the farmer into a better farmer but also 

 to make him want to stay on the farm. Nevertheless, there was room for 

 the word of warning voiced by an experienced observer: 



No matter how much money the government pours out to educate him, he 

 [the farmer] won't be educated except as he educates himself; and his children 

 can not be educated unless he provides better schools than he has now and better 

 teachers than he has now, and takes a greater interest in the education of his 

 own children than most farmers do. No amount of education laid at the farmer's 

 door is going to do him any good unless he takes it with a relish, digests and 

 assimilates it, and puts it actually into practice on the farm. 56 



And yet, taken as a whole, the picture of farm life in the western Middle 

 West during the early years of the twentieth century was by no means 

 discouraging. Agriculture had rarely enjoyed a higher degree of pros- 

 perity. Corn growers, wheat growers, and dairymen farmers of every 



55. Senate Document 705, 60 Congress, 2 session, p. 17; Wallaces' Farmer, XXXII 

 (August 30, 1907), p. 940; XXXIV (August 20, 1909), p. 1025; XXXV (January 7, 

 1910), p. 7. 



56. Ibid., XXXVIII (January 17, 1913), p. 82. See also Senate Document 705, 

 60 Congress, 2 session, p. 56. 



