152 Agricultural Instruction in the Public High Schools 



munity will depend to a greater or less degree upon the recog- 

 nition given it by the colleges and universities. Cases are known 

 where schools have abandoned the work because it could not 

 be presented for entrance at the state university, although meet- 

 ing with favor among patrons and pupils. 



The separate agricultural colleges, and the agricultural de- 

 partments of state universities as well, have not, as a rule, 

 set up as stringent entrance requirements as have the private 

 literary colleges and the " liberal arts " colleges of the state uni- 

 versities. The agricultural colleges have been filled with a desire 

 to use their plants, the only facilities for agricultural instruc- 

 tion which the states have had until recently, to their utmost 

 capacity for the good of their constituencies. While they have 

 taken students with less scholastic attainments than have the 

 literary colleges, the agricultural colleges still have had to take 

 them from the same public school system. Few if any condi- 

 tions have been prescribed that would not be required for en- 

 trance into the literary colleges. The agricultural colleges have 

 gladly taken any farmer boy with a classical course, and with 

 no high-school science, for the village schools probably teach 

 the classics less badly than they do or would teach science. 

 Nearly every state university is liberal about accepting various 

 combinations of well-taught high-school sciences, with certain 

 minimum requirements in history, language, and mathematics. 



Agriculture as a high-school subject is comparatively new. 

 The agricultural colleges could not well avoid accepting it as 

 an entrance subject and have, with a few exceptions, gladly 

 done so. The departments of arts, letters, and science, of the 

 state universities, have, however, looked upon it with suspicion, 

 while private colleges have, almost without exception, refused 

 to have anything to do with it. Within the last two years the 

 college attitude toward the subject has grown much more favor- 

 able. Up to this period probably not one of the larger uni- 

 versities could be found willing to accept it for entrance to 

 any but the agricultural college. So rapidly is this change in 

 feeling going on that one set of responses regarding the official 

 recognition given agriculture is scarcely all in before the in for- 



