TRAINING FOR COUNTRY LIFE 33 



schools. The late Secretary of the United States Department of 

 Agriculture appears to have been keen upon that and to have 

 encouraged it in every way. It is not for me to judge of American 

 conditions. But I do not set much store by such school teaching. 

 Theory wears out. The brain wearies of talk which has to mentally 

 transform before it can be taken in. The eye does not tire and the 

 hand learns in being put to work. When I was a farm pupil, sixty 

 odd years ago, with a farmer of distinction, coming fresh from 

 school, in which no agriculture had been taught, I was not treated 

 to disquisitions upon the various points of agriculture. That 

 teaching followed afterwards. I was simply set to do such practical 

 work as happened to be in progress without any studied method, 

 and so learnt in working, in the spirit of the well-known French 

 proverb "A force de forger en devient forger an." And I think that 

 that is the better method to follow for practical purposes. 



Private initiative has discovered a better way still for awaken- 

 ing and developing the germinative power of the infantile brain, 

 which the Agricultural Departments, alike of Canada and of the 

 United States, detecting the excellent promise which was in it, 

 have done their best energetically to encourage and to push forward. 

 After all there is better rural teaching in taking nature as a guide 

 than a printed book. The apostles learned more about man's duties 

 and destiny by the banks of the lake and on their walks through 

 the cornfields, being taught in the right way, and they acquired a 

 deeper insight into the mysteries of life, than the learned scribes 

 in their synagogues with the Talmud on their knees. Life was for 

 most of us — more especially in the country — meant as a life of 

 action. 



It is action — seeing, handling, having things explained in sight and 

 touch of what the explanation relates to — that imparts the living 

 knowledge, the knowledge which will be grasped, and which may be 

 counted upon to remain. Even illustrations are of comparatively 

 little service if compared with a living object. Show a child, or a 

 man too, illustrations of the various kinds of grasses — a rather 

 important subject in country life — and, if I were a betting man I 

 would lay heavy odds that, in face of the living grasses, it or he 

 would go hopelessly wrong in giving the various species their names. 

 We seem sometimes to forget how in our childhood we valued that 

 little bit of garden assigned to us as our " garden" in which we grew 

 what we chose, and pulled it up again, to see how it was growing ; or 

 how we prized that rabbit, or guinea pig, or whatever the animal 

 was, of which we made our pet ; how in the garden we watched ants 



K.E. D 



