SEMI-CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION 105 



rural conditions has long been actively fostered. But our atten- 

 tion today must be centered upon the development of organized 

 agricultural education, and to that subject we will turn without 

 any further delay. 



Let us first note some bearings of agricultural education 

 which have often been discussed, but must be considered here 

 again in the interest of true educational perspective. Historically 

 it has been found extremely difficult to bring the subject of agri- 

 culture into any manageable pedagogic form. The fact that 

 everybody in the country knows something about it is at first 

 a hindrance rather than a help. It is difficult to treat the sub- 

 ject in such manner as to avoid, on the one hand, an excess of 

 platitude, a repetition of what everyone knows or thinks he 

 knows, and, on the other hand, an excess of unutilized natural 

 science, deeply interesting in itself but hard to apply on the farm. 

 Certain other subjects, of which education itself is one, share in 

 this handicap. It is a difficulty met with in European schools 

 of agriculture, and it had not been overcome in Europe or Amer- 

 ica when the Michigan State Agricultural College came into 

 being. The most effective training for manual occupations was 

 still some form of apprenticeship, apart from schools, while the 

 school had long held the foremost place in preparation for liter- 

 ary pursuits. How to combine, in one educative process, the 

 advantages of the school and the advantages of the apprentice 

 system was the problem of agricultural education. In one form 

 or another it has been the problem of all our education for spe- 

 cial occupations in the past half-century. For the student of 

 educational history, then, this problem of agricultural education 

 appears as one phase, and a peculiarly difficult phase, of the 

 larger problem of training for any particular vocation in life. 

 You will not look to me to contribute anything to the special 

 history of this institution, which others, here on the ground, 

 may be expected to treat so much more effectively than I could 

 treat it. But my theme deals rather with the broader move- 



