64 REPORT OF THE SCOTTISH COMMISSION 



obtained by considering the agricultural educational institutions in 

 the following order : — 



1. Rural Schools. 



2. Consolidated Schools. 



3. Macdonald Institutes. 



4. Agricultural Colleges. 



5. Farmers' Institutes. 



Rural Schools 



" Any system of education which aims at, or proposes to help 

 the people who work on the farms, must be a system that will help 

 the elementary rural schools, where the future men and women of 

 the farm will get their formal education." Thus spoke Professor 

 James Robertson before the Select Standing Committee on Agri- 

 culture and Colonisation. Professor Robertson is one of the first 

 educationists in Canada, and his statement will admit no denial, 

 for the number of school children who will adopt rural pursuits, and 

 who are of an age to benefit from a longer or shorter course at an 

 agricultural college, would require for their tuition several hundred 

 such colleges; a requirement, at present, completely outwith the range 

 of practical politics. The rural school must, therefore, be the basis 

 of agricultural education. In Canada, as in nearly all other countries, 

 the curriculum of the rural school has been designed on the urban 

 school model to give children a good general education, apart alto- 

 gether from country pursuits, and in the rural, as in the town school, 

 stress has been laid upon verbal study. A further handicap arises 

 from the small numbers and varying age of pupils in an average 

 country school. One teacher may have charge of fifteen to twenty- 

 five children of five to fifteen years of age, and of as many grades 

 of intelligence. 



Previous to the year 1900 attempts to improve the usefulness of 

 rural schools by the introduction of school gardens and out-door 

 study had been made tentatively and intermittently. In 1899 

 Professor Robertson laid the foundation of a great movement by 

 offering prizes to school children for the largest heads of the best 

 wheat and oats picked on their fathers' farms. The response was so 

 gratifying, that in the following year Sir William C. Macdonald of 

 Montreal offered 10,000 dollars in prizes to boys and girls who would 

 select the largest heads of cereals and from them grow seed of their 

 own. By 1903 the yield of spring wheat thus sown and reaped was 

 28 per cent, heavier than that of three years before from unselected 

 seed ; in oats the increase was 27 per cent. From this beginning 

 arose the Canadian Seed Growers' Association of seniors as well as 

 juniors, an association which by 1906 had bettered the crops of 

 Canada to the extent of 500,000 dollars, and which is in a fair way 

 to produce incalculable improvement on the farm crops of the 

 country. Since 1900, when this very practical and successful 

 attempt to introduce something living and interesting in the schools 

 was made, the history of the correlation of agricultural education 

 from rural school to University has been the history of the Macdonald 



