1 68 Agricultural Instruction in the Public High Scliools 



definition of education as " a working over of experiences," we 

 must grant that children three or four years apart in age have 

 very different stores of experience, and need different treatment 

 as well as texts. Professor Bailey and others seem to be against 

 agriculture as a study by itself and apart from nature-study 

 until the high school is reached. Professor Stevens, of North 

 Carolina, in the course of nature-study planned for that state, 

 provides for text-book work in agriculture in the fifth grade, 

 to be preceded and followed by work in nature-study. The gen- 

 eral trend seems to be toward a specialization in the South and 

 West in the upper grades. 



Leaders in the National Society for the Promotion of In- 

 dustrial Education have much to say just now in regard to the 

 desirability of introducing a differentiation at the age of twelve; 

 but they seem ignorant of the great stride that has already taken 

 place toward that very thing in the industrial education of rural 

 communities. The administrative and legal machinery for it 

 is in much better shape than the methods for carrying it on. 

 The reader will recall the report given in Chapter VI on the 

 grades pupils have or must have completed in order to enter 

 the special schools ; that the special agricultural and semi-agri- 

 cultural schools of the South are settling upon an elementary 

 course of seven grades ; that the special schools of the North 

 desire completion of the eighth grade but often make exceptions ; 

 that the special schools of Oklahoma require the completion of 

 the eighth grade but provide a preparatory course with ele- 

 mentary agriculture in each of its three years. Added to this 

 is the fact that most of the states provided with these schools 

 require agriculture to be taught in the last of the elementary 

 grades, the seventh or the eighth as the case may be. These 

 various plans actually operate to bring the children into the pre- 

 vocational work at anywhere from 12 to 16 years of age, ac- 

 cording to the opportunities of the pupils for completing each 

 year's work, which is admittedly meagre in many rural sections 

 because of the home demands in the spring. So it would seem 

 that the only conditions necessary to make vocational work, or 

 a near approach to it, a vigorous actuality in rural education are 

 money and prepared teachers. The present lack of these seems 



