BOYS' AND GIRLS' CLUBS 



877 



BOYS' AND GIRLS' CLUBS 



class room, laboratory and experiment station, 

 and gathers a variety of information from 

 books, bulletins and institutions. It carries to 

 every home, regardless of its remoteness from 

 class room or college, by means of this ex- 

 tension agency and through a program of 

 follow-up work, printed instructions, field 

 meetings, demonstrations and personal direc- 

 tion. Paid leaders or itinerant teachers through 

 this means make education universal, and com- 

 mon knowledge more readily becomes com- 

 mon practice. 



Beginnings of the Movement. The boys' 

 and girls' club work had its inception in a few 

 agricultural counties of the central states of 

 the American Union, and was promoted by a 

 few county superintendents of schools in Iowa, 

 Illinois, Indiana and Ohio, as early as 1896. 

 The movement, however, made little or no 

 permanent progress within these states until 

 the colleges of agriculture, through their ex- 

 tension departments, assumed definite leader- 

 ship of the movement and made the project 

 statewide in scope. The early development 

 of the work with young people was fraught 

 with considerable difficulty, in that the leaders 

 looked upon the movement as a temporary 

 agency through which to exploit the benefits 

 of a college, or to make it possible to adver- 

 tise and also to popularize more rapidly the 

 work for adult farmers. Consequently much 

 of the work was outlined on a basis of tem- 

 porary contests in crop production, the mak- 

 ing of big yields and the exhibiting of corn, 

 vegetables and chickens at county and state 

 fairs. No adequate follow-up system was made 

 available for the work. State appropriations 

 for extension work were used in the promo- 

 tion of the work for men, and so the work for 

 young people was not provided with the paid 

 leadership needed, and very little definite di- 

 rection was given to the movement. 



It remained for the United States Depart- 

 ment of Agriculture in the year 1908 to launch 

 the club work as a permanent and worth-while 

 cooperative educational movement. This was 

 first undertaken in the state of Mississippi, in 

 cooperation with the county superintendents 

 of schools; later, during the period from 1910 

 to 1916, the movement spread to all the states 

 of the Union and was supported by Federal 

 and state legislative enactment. Under the 

 terms of the Smith-Lever Act it became a defi- 

 nite agency with a fixed policy of extension 

 education, the work being carried on coopera- 

 tively by the United States Department of 



Agriculture and the state colleges of agricul- 

 ture through the States' Relations Service. In 

 the year 1916 over half a million dollars was 

 spent in the support of the work. 



Every state in the Union has now a corps 

 of paid cooperative leaders, and a total of 

 from four to forty club leaders are now 

 cooperatively employed in each of the states 

 of the Union. In addition to this body of 

 workers there are four county agricultural 

 agents, both men and women, in most of the 

 counties of the Union, who serve the people 

 in a very practical way in the interests of 

 better agriculture and home-making. A, corps 

 of specialists, supervisors and directors in vari- 

 ous phases of extension work are also engaged 

 in this extension service. All of these contrib- 

 ute a great deal of their time to the promotion 

 of the boys' and girls' club work. 



The Scope of Club Work. The scope of the 

 work carried on with young people is limited 

 only by the amount of funds and leadership 

 available for the proper support of the move- 

 ment in any given state or locality. The real 



A CLUB GIRL 

 Making use of a neglected yard. 



motive for the club organization is industrial 

 and has to do with the growing of gardens, 

 trees and farm crops, the raising of poultry 

 and farm animals, or the carrying out of defi- 

 nite home projects in connection with the 



