160 The State and the Farmer 



nature-teaching. Yet they are likely to follow 

 the tendency of the time and to produce a 

 class of teacher that is dominated by the for- 

 mal laboratory. I cannot help feeling that the 

 greatest professors of agriculture or agronomy 

 or horticulture or animal husbandry will be of 

 the field-naturalist type. Laboratory-teaching 

 may be pedagogically just as incorrect as 

 book-teaching. 



It is not necessary to have an entirely new 

 curriculum in order to redirect the rural 

 school. If geography is taught, let it be 

 taught in the terms of the environment. Geog- 

 raphy deals with the surface of the earth. It 

 may well concern itself with the school - 

 grounds, the highways, the fields and what 

 grow in them, the forests, hills and streams, 

 the hamlet, the people and their affairs. We 

 are now interesting the child in the earth on 

 which he stands, and, as his mind grows, we 

 take him out to the larger view. A good part 

 of geography in a rural community is, or 

 should be, agriculture, whether so called or 

 not. 



