164 Agricultural Instruction in the Public High Schools 



may also prove to be a temporary expedient, lasting only until 

 the different sciences and their immediately related agricultural 

 topics are welded together and rescued from pedagogical chaos. 

 At such a time we may see the general high schools presenting, 

 with fairly competent teachers, courses in science in appropriate 

 years, so strongly " agriculturized " that they might bear indis- 

 criminately the names of the present sciences, or the terms, 

 agronomy, horticulture, farm mechanics, etc. With this state 

 of teaching the present first-year agriculture would be largely 

 relegated to the grades, as agriculture, nature-study, or ele- 

 mentary science according to the taste of the writer of the 

 course of study. The more serious technical courses, requiring 

 expensive equipment, large observational and experimental facili- 

 ties where real plant and animal breeding and crop rotations 

 may be studied under observation, may be taken in special schools 

 not so far from the farmer, in time or place, but that he may 

 see the results and profit by them himself as well as send his 

 more ambitious and reliable boy thither for still more direct in- 

 struction. When we bear in mind that nearly one-half of our 

 agricultural colleges have courses whose first year or two is 

 secondary work in everything but name, it will be appreciated 

 that the special agricultural school is not such a new thing in 

 our educational system, and that only as such schools are de- 

 veloped will the state agricultural college be able to serve as a 

 research center and do work of as truly college grade as the 

 other colleges of the state. 



One of the questions perplexing the small high school is : 

 How can we relate the teaching of our sciences to agricultural 

 education ? The question is largely bound up in the large propo- 

 sition of making agricultural instruction " incidental," or " cor- 

 related " strongly with the other sciences, versus the proposition 

 of teaching it entirely separately. The ideal would involve a 

 combination, but in schools teaching agriculture separately, many 

 presenting the subject in but one year, there is a woeful lack 

 of any such tendency. So far as I can discover, the sciences 

 are taught just as abstractly, in most cases, whether agriculture 

 is in the school or not. Or where an attempt at " correlation " 



