62 THE COUNTY AGENT'S SERVICES 



in skill and in attitude. The ability to educate presupposes 

 careful training and preparation of the teacher and in- 

 dividual attention to the job of teaching. 



The county agent is essentially a teacher of better farm- 

 ing, as has already been pointed out. He is also an or- 

 ganizer of local effort for this purpose. But effective 

 teaching requires knowledge which must be kept up to date, 

 and which in this work must often be expert and technical. 

 Good organization of teaching requires knowledge of 

 method and experience elsewhere. There must be a con- 

 stant source of supply of the latest information as to fact 

 and method or else the teacher goes stale and the teaching 

 becomes ineffective. The average county agent has not the 

 time, even when the nature of his duties permits him to 

 have the inclination, nor can he be expected to search out 

 and study carefully all the facts and the methods in his 

 field that he needs to know, and experience shows that he 

 does not. There may be, of course, a few individual excep- 

 tions. The specialist is the necessary link between the 

 county agent and the investigator. Without the specialist, 

 the county agent would very likely soon cease to be a 

 good teacher. 



The specialist also furnishes a constant and necessary 

 supply of written and printed material, kept up to date 

 and used in the press of the county, as well as in state- 

 wide and regional publications. The county agent has too 

 little time for study, for accumulating data, or for putting 

 what he has into teaching form. For this he properly must 

 depend on the specialist. Experience everywhere shows 

 that this is more and more the case. The specialist serves 

 more and more as a clearing house to assemble the results 

 and the experience of the various counties, to tabulate and 

 to correlate them, and to make the whole available to all 

 the counties. 



