no MICHIGAN STATE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 



commonly recognized as education at all, the pure research of 

 the pure scientist. For no education can continue to be really 

 alive unless it draws directly, from some source of new and 

 abounding knowledge, a fresh supply, never yet handled and 

 made common among mankind. It may be very little that any 

 year or any age may have to give that is altogether new, but that 

 little will sweeten all the rest. Then our system of education 

 must reach down to schools of the lowest grade, the little country 

 schools, in which the capable constituency of the great experts 

 is to be trained; and there, too, some of the future leaders are to 

 make their first beginnings. The most of those in such schools 

 are to live by the practical art of farming. But in these days 

 they are to have the skill to take the science of the scientist and 

 transform it into the art of their lives. They are to read agri- 

 cultural bulletins and understand and use them. They are to 

 pick their way and keep from being mired in the mass of such 

 literature now provided for their reading. They are to attend 

 institutes and conventions, where they will listen with discrimi- 

 nation to long and learned papers, and make short and pertinent 

 speeches of their own. They are to find the farm interesting 

 in the highest degree, because of new hopes of profitable pro- 

 duction which it offers and because of its connection with the 

 great world of ideas. 



When we grow more skilful, we shall make elementary 

 schools of a better-rounded type, in which the book-learning 

 that has long been the distinctive province of the school shall 

 join to itself the best things in the old system of apprenticeship ; 

 and from that combination shall arise something better than 

 either one in its lonesome isolation. Already we are beginning 

 to make institutions somewhat of this order, and it will be done 

 much better yet as time goes on. 



This, then, is what we may see as the ideal, in agricultural 

 education and equally in education of other kinds, and perhaps 

 of every kind: A system of schools complete in its sequence 



