56 AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS 



will be limited to those phases of farm life in which women usually, or 

 frequently, or may properly participate, and to that portion of agricultural 

 instruction which may properly be given by female teachers in elementary 

 and high schools. 



The course includes besides some of the regular normal courses, 

 horticulture, elementary agriculture, rural sociology, poultry- 

 raising and bee culture, dairying, forestry and floriculture, and 

 theory and practice in rural arts. 3 The other is a course of two 

 years known as "rural industrial education" given by the Ohio 

 State Normal College of Miami University. Its requirements 

 for admission are the same as for other college courses. This 

 course is expected to meet the needs of township superintendents, 

 principals, and science teachers of high schools in rural communi- 

 ties, and to enable these teachers to adapt the work of their high 

 schools more nearly to the life of the school communities. The 

 course includes education, school administration, rural sociology, 

 agriculture (two years), forestry, botany, manual training, rural 

 education, methods of rural-school organization, physical geog- 

 raphy, entomology, and physics of farm machinery. In plan- 

 ning this course, which is at present a tentative one, the in- 

 fluence of the high school of an agricultural community on 

 the elementary schools was carefully considered. Most of the 

 teachers in the elementary schools of these communities are 

 graduates of these high schools. They seldom receive further 

 training. Therefore, with a high school organized to meet the 

 needs of the community, its influence should thus extend to the 

 elementary schools through its graduates who become teachers 

 (76). 



Any account of the work of the state normal schools in agri- 

 cultural education would be incomplete without some special 

 reference to the teachers themselves who are engaged in this 

 work. Many are doing their work under considerable disad- 

 vantage. This applies not only to the fact that agriculture is a 

 new normal-school subject to be adapted to new conditions but 



' Bitllclin Slate Normal and Industrial School, Harrisburg, Va., I, No. i (1909), 88-92. 



