SEMI-CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION 251 



KIND OF EDUCATION NEEDED 



Agricultural colleges and farmers' institutes have done much 

 in instruction and inspiration; they have stood for the nobility 

 of labor and the necessity of keeping the muscles and the brain 

 in training for industry. They have developed technical depart- 

 ments of high practical value. They seek to provide for the 

 people on the farms an equipment so broad and thorough as to 

 fit them for the highest requirements of our citizenship ; so that 

 they can establish and maintain country homes of the best type 

 and create and sustain a country civilization more than equal to 

 that of the city. The men they train must be able to meet the 

 strongest business competition, at home or abroad, and they can 

 do this only if they are trained, not alone in the various lines of 

 husbandry, but in successful economic management. These 

 colleges, like the state experiment stations, should carefully 

 study and make known the needs of each section, and should try 

 to provide remedies for what is wrong. 



The education to be obtained in these colleges should create 

 as intimate relationship as is possible between the theory of 

 learning and the facts of actual life. Educational establish- 

 ments should produce highly trained scholars, of course ; but in 

 a country like ours, where the educational establishments are so 

 numerous, it is folly to think that their main purpose is to pro- 

 duce these highly trained scholars. Without in the least dis- 

 paraging scholarship and learning — on the contrary, while giving 

 hearty and ungrudging admiration and support to the compara- 

 tively few whose primary work should be creative scholarship — 

 it must be remembered that the ordinary graduate of our colleges 

 should be and must be, primarily, a man and not a scholar. 

 Education should not confine itself to books. It must train 

 executive power and try to create that right public opinion which 

 is the most potent factor in the proper solution of all political 

 and social questions. Book-learning is very important, but it 

 is by no means everything; and we shall never get the right idea 



