Administration, Equipment, and Methods 99 



Over one-third of the schools reporting some kind of home 

 garden work are in Ohio, where the State University in 1906-7 

 and 1908 made a well organized effort to stimulate the movement 

 among the few high schools then teaching agriculture, by send- 

 ing out seed, printed directions, and blanks for reports. The 

 effort w^as discontinued as soon as the work seemed fairly well 

 established, and the schools have since been encouraged to con- 

 tinue in the work without outside aid and to carry on breeding 

 experiments, etc., with home grown seed. In some cases the 

 high schools seem to have continued and enlarged this work, 

 in other cases it has been continued by grade children, while 

 still other schools have allowed this line of agricultural work 

 to lapse. Similar work is carried on extensively by school chil- 

 dren of the grades, or independently by the local school itself, 

 under the patronage of the county superintendents, the county 

 fairs, granges, agricultural colleges, and state departments of 

 education in New York, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, North Dakota, 

 Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Georgia. 



In the North the result is the " corn contests," " flower shows," 

 and " home economics exhibits " ; in the South it is the " corn, 

 cotton and chicken contests." 



There is not the evidence, however, that the friends of edu- 

 cation would like to see, to show that these movements are a 

 part of the actual daily life of the school room, furnishing the 

 problems for solution therein, and material for the work in 

 English, arithmetic, and geography. 



A surprisingly small number report taking trips to stock 

 farms, creameries, cheese, butter, or canning factories — only 

 fifteen in all, and two-thirds of these in Nebraska. Three teach- 

 ers cite " lack of time for field trips " as their chief difficulty, 

 while one laments that no " fields are located conveniently for 

 observation." 



Text and Reference Books 



The less of special preparation a teacher has, the more truly 

 the character of the work done is likely to be represented by 

 the text used. By keeping in mind the preparation of the teach- 

 ers indicated in the next chapter, and the number of different 



