44 AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS 



given during the school year and summer school for teachers, 

 the department conducted, in 1908, 1909, and 1910, conferences 

 on agricultural education (46). At the conference of 1909, a 

 committee appointed in 1908 made a report outlining a series of 

 exercises "of experimental character that should serve as material 

 for the teaching of agriculture in the common schools" (45). 

 The department has extended its work to include courses of in- 

 struction during the college year to undergraduates expecting to 

 teach; lectures before teachers' and farmers' meetings; summer- 

 school instruction to teachers of elementary agriculture and 

 school gardening; co-operative work with the North Adams 

 State Normal School; organizing boys' and girls' agricultural 

 clubs; conducting school gardens on college campus for the 

 school children of Amherst. 



The departments of agricultural education in other colleges 

 are just getting under way, and it is therefore not possible at 

 this time to give any report of their work beyond a few brief 

 statements. Boys' clubs and teachers' institutes are receiving 

 special attention in several states. In Missouri the schools of 

 the county in which the University of Missouri is located are 

 taking up the study of agriculture under the direction of the 

 professor of agricultural education who visits the schools with 

 the county superintendent, gives instruction in the seventh and 

 eighth grades and makes suggestions to the teachers for carrying 

 on the work. In 1910-11 work in thirteen of these "demonstra- 

 tion schools" was conducted, and about fifty others were reached 

 by correspondence. The University of Illinois is pursuing a sim- 

 ilar plan. In Indiana the department was established especially 

 to enable the students of Purdue University to comply with the 

 state law requiring teachers in the public schools to have some pro- 

 fessional training. In the University of California the depart- 

 ment of agricultural education is especially well organized, cover- 

 ing the following lines of work : instruction to teachers during the 

 regular and summer sessions ; publication of circulars on school 

 gardening, tree-growing, high-school agriculture, elementary 



