78 AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS 



conditions is set forth. Special emphasis is placed upon the 

 value of agricultural high schools and of consolidated rural 

 schools. At that time there were twelve agricultural high 

 schools in the United States; in 1910 over seventy-five. 



Another account of important work in agricultural educa- 

 tion was published in the same year (1903) with the title 

 "Teaching Farmers' Children on the Ground" (107). It is of 

 interest to compare the opinion of Superintendent Kern as to 

 the needs of the rural school with that of the writer of this 

 article who was not professionally engaged in education. The 

 following is taken from his description of a rural school: 



But there is more the matter with the ordinary country school than its 



smallness of scale Yet that these children come from homes where 



the livelihood is earned out of the ground is ignored in the lessons. The 

 instruction as far as it goes is good: it is staple reading, writing, and arith- 

 metic, with a little grammar, geography, and history. This is all. It might 

 do well enough if the boys and girls were all going to be clerks or traders; 

 or if, in the fulness of their ambition, they were to strike out for profes- 

 sional careers. But of sowing and reaping there is never a word; nothing 

 about planting and tending of trees, the production of milk, butter, and 

 cheese. Never, even remotely, does a lesson touch on building and drain- 

 age, on the composition of foods or chemistry of fuel, or light up for so 

 much as a moment the drama of struggle and survival of which every 

 clover patch is a theater. It is well that children should learn at school 

 useful lessons they can learn nowhere else, but should not the children 

 of the farm be led to see somewhat of the inexhaustible scope for brains 

 which offers itself to the farmer? The fact is, that rural instruction has 

 been largely devised in cities with a view to city conditions. And the 

 courses in city schools are faulty enough, ridden as they are by clerky tra- 

 ditions which permit the word to usurp the place of the act, instead of 

 being merely its symbol and aid. The second evil in rural education 

 throughout America is the stress laid upon verbal studies, the blinking of the 

 actual world of duty and joy for which country children should be in- 

 formed and trained. 



This is followed by a description of the proposed scheme for 

 the improvement of rural education in Canada planned on a 

 scale to include the whole Dominion. Not only is this descrip- 

 tion accurate but it includes a good historical and economic 



