Some Typical High Schools Teaching Agriculture 55 



ment between authorities and patrons as to the desirability of 

 having agricultural work in the curriculum, and agreement 

 among the superintendents as to its educational value as com- 

 pared with other subjects they were teaching. Many will be 

 willing to admit that the judgment of men of some experience 

 in teaching unrelated subjects may be of value on this point, 

 perhaps equal to that of specialists. For the latter, even with 

 their more thorough scholarship in restricted lines (and perhaps 

 on account of it), must often form their judgments on a priori 

 grounds or from a one-sided experience. 



St. Louis (Mich.) High School 



St. Louis, Michigan, a village of 3,000 inhabitants, is in 

 Gratiot County, in the north central part of the state. The 

 high-school enrollment is between 70 and 80. The superin- 

 tendent teaches the class in agriculture and botany, numbering 

 between 25 and 30. This work is in the second year and is 

 followed by zoology in the third year and chemistry in the fourth. 

 The printed course of study calls for a one-year course in 

 " orchard, garden, and field crops," to follow the elementary 

 course just mentioned, but the superintendent had not yet put 

 it into operation as he wished the second-year course to be 

 placed on a firmer basis. In such a course certain topics would 

 be expanded that are now treated only briefly in the elementary 

 course. While the work is required in only one course leading 

 to graduation, called the agricultural course, it has been elected 

 for several years by a large number of pupils not in this course. 



The school has a good equipment for its size, including two 

 compound and thirty-five dissecting microscopes, and an amount 

 of chemical apparatus sufficient for individual w^ork by the 

 small class. The science classes have ample room at their dis- 

 posal. Many of the usual indoor experiments are carried on 

 with home-made apparatus. 



Some dairying is carried on in the neighborhood, and the 

 class had visited a creamery, although no work in milk testing 

 had been attempted. The class was taken to a diseased peach 

 orchard, where the students pruned and trimmed out the dis- 

 eased and dead limbs of all the trees except one, which was 



