334 RURAL RECONSTRUCTION 



Minister of Agriculture declaring : " We have come to the conclu- 

 sion that we can best help on that great work (the creation of 

 rural civilisation) by freely and generously assisting the cause of 

 education. If we are told that that is an innovation, we answer 

 that it is the people's money, drawn from them, and that it is not 

 only defensible, but desirable that much more should be spent on 

 what we believe to be the most effective way to obtain the objects 

 referred to." 



Education will help at all points of the problem. If, as people 

 having to do with horses say : It is the belly which lifts the legs, so 

 it is education which lifts the whole body of the entire mass of 

 people, helping in all quarters. It will teach men to farm better. 

 It will train them to higher social and intellectual ideals in life. 

 It will lead them to understand better, and to value more highly, 

 the advantages in respect of health and longevity of quiet, less 

 wearing but more lasting and less corrupting enjoyment of life, 

 attach people to the country, attach them to their family, and help 

 them to build up in their peaceful and contented existence ample 

 provision for old age and the increasing wants of their upgrowing 

 offspring. And in respect of education in the country, as it happens, 

 much remains to amend. We are busy providing helps to educa- 

 tion there, surely enough — libraries, classes, schools. But all these 

 things, good as they are in themselves, seem to have a bias in them 

 which leads the mind town wards. They are shaped on town models ; 

 they do not train young people to look upon the life in the midst 

 of which Providence has placed them, and in which we may assume 

 that Providence also intended the majority of them to spend their 

 lives, as their proper and desirable sphere of existence. There is 

 no ring of " country " about them. Children learn arithmetic ; 

 but they are at a dead loss how to keep husbandry accounts. They 

 learn something elementary about physical science ; but they do 

 not in the least know how to apply that to their practical doings. 

 Time was when this did not matter, when one kind of education, 

 elementary as it was, would do indifferently for all. However, 

 the world has now grown so unwieldy in all its aspects that under all 

 those aspects we have been compelled by necessity to discriminate 

 and specialise. Just as we bring up a negro to adapt his way of 

 living to his own hot climate, and the Eskimo to his cold, so shall 

 we have to train up the country child in the main for country life 

 as the town child is brought up for town life. 



Opinion with regard to education for country, and specifically 

 farming, folk has changed not a little during the past sixty or seventy 



