362 AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION IN THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS. 



by devoting a portion of the time to study, under competent in 

 structors. At these schools system, economy, the right adaptation 

 of means to ends, the knowledge of what can be cultivated with 

 profit, by learning to calculate the cost of production, in short the 

 doing of everything, with the reason for doing it, to be shown by a 

 satisfactory result, these are the main points to be observed in es 

 tablishing them. 



Many other States liave taken similar action. The promi 

 nent farmers of Illinois urged the preparation and introduction 

 of works on the elements of natural history into the public 

 schools. The State Teachers Association of Wisconsin, in the 

 winter of 1874-5, recommended a revision of the school course, 

 with the same object in view. The combined influence of the 

 great publishing houses, whose interests were against change, 

 and of the body of teachers, who are generally conservative, 

 Lave thus far prevented the effectual prosecution of this much 

 needed reform. Hear what Prof. Turner, of Illinois, says of 

 the influence of text-book monopolies on the public schools : 



We take the child out of God s natural industrial university and 

 send him to school, where, at best, only a fraction of his entire 

 manhood can be properly developed; and after all we do not fit pu 

 pils for actual life, even in those elemental studies, after forty weeks 

 school per annum, as well as they used to be fitted in ten weeks half 

 a century ago, yet we never had better teachers or brighter children 

 than now. 



One prime cause of this result is. that the bookmakers and pub 

 lishers have, in fact, assumed . about as absolute control of our 

 public schools as the politicians have of our postoffices. Rich pub 

 lishing houses have offered as high as seventy thousand dollars for 

 the introduction of a single book into a State. And yet not one of 

 these books teach us the things which it is our chief interest to 

 know, and our protracted school* drill on the elements leaves no 

 room for anything else. I wish to make room for some of the sub 

 jects that underlie the industrial arts. For botany, and entomology, 

 and zoology, for instance. The State of Illinois spends, say, 

 twelve millions of dollars on her common schools, and looses every 

 year from ten millions to twenty millions of dollars from noxious 

 insects, and Dr. LeBarron, our State Entomologist, tells us that 

 about one hundred species do all this mischief. Now, I would have 

 these insects, every mother s son of them, with pins in their backs, 

 put up in a show-case in every public school in the State, and I 

 would have every child know them by sight, as well as he knows his 

 father s cows and horses; instead of having one or two lone men to 

 look after their habits and remedies, I would turn millions of eyes 

 directly and intelligently upon them, and thus prepare for their 

 amelioration and cure. *I would have this whether or no the child 

 knew there was such a word as Entomology in the English language. 



