Problems of Instruction in the Secondary School 173 



as " thin," or " kindergarten." The printed page was evidently 

 not meat but milk for the young mind beginning to realize its 

 own power. Judicious use of government bulletins, which could 

 be obtained free, might have served as an agreeable corrective. 



With the appearance of new books which are sufficiently ad- 

 vanced for use in the high schools, the text-book difficulty is 

 solving itself. Books written for the elementary schools are 

 being relegated to use in the grades for which they were in- 

 tended. In this list may properly be included nearly all of 

 those given in Table 34 as the texts used in schools reporting. 

 Two or three others that have appeared in the last two years, 

 are of the same class. The quality of some of the latest does 

 not promise any contribution to the problem of teaching agri- 

 culture in the grades. The texts by Bailey, Jackson and 

 Daugherty, and Ferguson and Lewis, are in many places too 

 difficult for use below the high school. Warren's " Elements 

 of Agriculture " is intended for the upper years of the high 

 school, and seem.s to be the first book written expressly for that 

 purpose. There seems to be a noticeable tendency on the part 

 of the special secondary schools of agriculture as shown by their 

 catalogues, to make liberal use, as texts, of books that have 

 heretofore found their function in high schools solely as refer- 

 ence books, and that have not been used as texts outside of the 

 agricultural colleges. The result of this on the colleges is obvious. 



The Methods Problem 



Agriculture is probably taught as well as other sciences in the 

 same schools. But the deficiencies are more prominent on ac- 

 count of the greater opportunity afforded to make concrete the 

 principles of the various sciences. So much have the sciences 

 been regarded as instruments of a disciplinary education, that 

 the absence of concrete applications has not seemed to many 

 to be such a marked defect. The pedagogy of agricultural in- 

 struction must take account of the essentially utilitarian aspect 

 of this study. The philosophy underlying the methods of in- 

 struction is not consistent with that conception of education, that 

 to be cultural is to be useless ; nor does agriculture in the schools 

 depend for its justification on any supposed disciplinary values. 



