1 66 Agricultural Instruction in the Public High Schools 



salary than they could have commanded in the callings usually 

 open in a country town. This school also offers other courses 

 in agriculture. 



Likewise the Babcock tester has been used in various physics 

 classes to illustrate centrifugal action. 



" Waste of teaching effort " may be well illustrated by a num- 

 ber of instances observed where opportunities similar to those 

 just mentioned had not been used to advantage. A certain well 

 endowed New England academy has a lot of land, a herd of 

 cows, a Babcock tester for their milk, and a cream separator ; 

 but no use is made of either piece of apparatus by the physics 

 teacher, who is more intent on the fifty " Harvard experiments," 

 none of which call for the use of those articles. There is an 

 orchard on the school grounds, but the botany teacher makes 

 no use of it, nor does he even show what a graft is, although 

 his class studies the structure of the stem and the cambium cells 

 with the compound miscroscope. A western high school has 

 courses in agriculture taught by a man who had considerable 

 training in the state agricultural college. Some of the students 

 in his class in farm mechanics failed to " pass " because they 

 had not mastered the mechanical principles involved in the 

 machinery. They took their physics under a different teacher, 

 who did not use these implements to illustrate the principles in 

 the mechanics he was teaching as a branch of high-school physics. 

 Most schools doing laboratory work in botany make cross and 

 longitudinal sections of the corn kernel, but they do not test 

 the seed for viability, or test the relation between depth of germ 

 and vigor of growth of the seedling. 



Waste of educational energy is a fault that always attends 

 poor correlation or lack of effort altogether in this direction. 

 The example of the class work in physics and in farm mechanics 

 just mentioned is an instance. One school in its printed course 

 of study shows " plant life " as a study in the first year, and 

 botany as a third-year study. The former turned out to be 

 more or less book study of plant functions, and the latter, book 

 study of plant structures, until the spring flowers bloomed, after 

 which it was plant analysis, given for its " disciplinary value," 

 as the principal expressed it. But there was, from the nature 



