244 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND. 



Education to counteract this lack of skill 

 in the agricultural labourer is only supplied 

 by evening classes where the schoolmaster, 

 without any agricultural knowledge, gives 

 lessons in measuring a haystack. This is, 

 I suppose, what the Board has meant in the 

 past by giving education a "rural bias," that 

 is, a bias towards giving lads an aptitude to sit 

 on a stool in an auctioneer's office. 



In Ireland the county council agricultural 

 instructor, who has either been a farmer or is 

 the son of a farmer, will, as we have seen, 

 take off his coat in the arable field and show a 

 group of farmers how to handle a plough of 

 modern design. In Hungary and Denmark 

 winter schools are established in the villages, in 

 which the young men are shown by an in- 

 structor who knows how to weave a hedge, 

 thatch a stack, or cleave a rod with an adze. 



Educationalists in town so often forget 

 that the countryman learns more by his seeing 

 than by his mental eye. It will take the 

 countryman a week to learn from printed 

 descriptions and diagrams what it will take 

 him an hour to learn by a practical demon- 

 stration in front of his eyes. 



To create a lasting interest in agricultural 



