i62 Agricultural Instructiofi in the Public High Schools 



tilizers, or the purity of paints. They do not seem able to stir 

 up much enthusiasm about sporophyte versus gametophyte gen- 

 erations, nor does the structure of four-o-clock seeds seem to 

 create excitement. And the same texts do not mention the 

 difference between kernels of corn that sprout and those that 

 do not. Perhaps the botanist at the university does not care 

 about it either. 



It is clear that if the regular sciences are to meet the demands 

 made upon them, the science teachers of small high schools 

 must have more help than the present texts give them or their 

 university courses furnish. When texts appear, as they are 

 doing, that enable the teachers to make some use of their knowl- 

 edge of the sciences and of their practical farm experience, 

 when they have had any, it is only following the line of least 

 resistance to follow the guidance of such a text or manual 

 of laboratory and field exercises, and not attempt to make over 

 the science texts already in their hands. Text-books are made 

 to sell, and the small high schools can never be large users of 

 texts in the special sciences. It may be too much to expect, 

 as yet, that private enterprise will furnish rural editions of 

 chemistry, physics, or zoology. The later agricultural texts 

 partly perform this function for botany, with minor amounts 

 of other matters thrown in. Even though technical agriculture 

 be introduced into the upper years of the high school instead 

 of the " elementary agriculture " now the vogue in the lower 

 grades, the various sciences should so lend themselves to agri- 

 cultural treatment as to free the technical subjects of the third 

 or fourth years from enough pure science topics to permit an 

 earnest study of the serious problem at hand. 



The movement that has started in various parts of the 

 country in very tentative fashion to work out an " elementary 

 science " course''' has taken on a unique form in California, where 

 the state university plans a first-year high-school course, for 

 which it gives a year's entrance credit, which shall include a 

 variety of agricultural and general topics of nature and science. 

 Over one-half or two-thirds of the work is of direct interest 



'C. E. Peet, What Shall the First-year High School Science Be? 

 Proc. of the N. E. A., 1909, p. 809. 



