432 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



educational progress. The improvement of agricultural conditions is 

 the single issue on which the highly diversified population of the coun- 

 try might be expected to agree. 



Whether any ordinary system of formal education in schools will 

 have any practical result in Palestine seems very doubtful. Some parts 

 of the country are already overstocked with different kinds of charitable 

 and religious institutions, many of them engaged in educational work, 

 but apparently with as little relation to the requirements of actual life 

 as similar institutions in Europe and America. Though most of the 

 colonists are already past school age when they arrive in Palestine, yet 

 they are acutely in need of learning how to work and live in the new 

 country. For effective agricultural education in a country like Pales- 

 tine, there must be places where men, young or old, can acquire correct 

 habits of doing farm work, become accustomed to the atmosphere of 

 farm life, and learn something of its possibilities. Agriculture is a 

 habit and a method of life, not merely a science to be studied or an art 

 to be pursued for profit alone. 



Agricultural education, in the narrow sense of formal scholastic 

 instruction in agricultural facts, commonly fails to accomplish its 

 intended purpose of improving the life of the farm. At the same time 

 that the boys are being instructed in agricultural knowledge they may 

 also be losing their agricultural habits and becoming less adapted to 

 agricultural life. After their courses in agriculture they are more 

 likely to enter some other line of activity involving less responsibility 

 than agriculture and more similar to the work and life of the school 

 to which they have become thoroughly accustomed. The unintentional 

 training in town life usually has a stronger influence than the formal 

 insti-uction of the school. The event proves the boy has been educated 

 away from agriculture rather than towards it. Whether agriculture or 

 other subjects are studied makes little difference in a comparison with 

 the change of habits of life. Thus the general effect of agricultural 

 schools and colleges in the United States has been to take more of the 

 boys away from the farm, or, in other words, to make our civilization 

 more industrial and commercial, rather than more agricultural. 



Even less can be expected in Palestine than in the United States 

 from the establishment of agricultural schools of the ordinary sort, 

 because of the lack of previous agricultural contacts on the part of the 

 students. The American student wlio has grown up on a farm and is 

 thoroughly familiar with farm conditions is much more likely to project 

 some of the new facts that he learns in the school against the back- 

 ground of farm life, but in Palestine most of the newly arrived colo- 

 nists are witliout agricultural experience. They need practise in farm 

 life and farm operations even more than they need instruction in agri- 

 cultural facts. 



