RURAL EDUCATION 37 



useful things they were capable of doing. This cus- 

 tom, however, was a wrong one, not on the score of 

 health, but because it deprived the children of educa- 

 tion, and wiped out the period of child-life with its 

 leisure and play. Still, if we are to have a continuous 

 race of agriculturists, this "initiation," this training, 

 must be begun at the same early age, and the elemen- 

 tary school is the only place where such training can 

 be given to an extent sufficient for the object in view, 

 and in a manner that will leave the pleasures of child- 

 life untouched. Work in connection with the land is 

 not like that in factories and workshops. Children have 

 a natural bent to busy themselves in it whenever they 

 can o^et the chance of doino- so. 



It is useless, however, to expect that this alteration 

 in rural education will be sufficient of itself to stop 

 migration, at any rate, so far as the cleverer children 

 are concerned. Indeed, so long as there is no visible 

 career on the land, and to become "little clerks" 

 remains the ambition of sharp children in rural 



* A letter recently received from a clergyman illustrates this point. 

 " I have been Vicar and Rector of two country parishes : twenty-two years 

 in Suffolk, twenty-one in Berkshire. During most of that time I have 

 taken children out of school hours and had them to work in the house ; 

 if girls, in the garden, and in the stable if boys. Many have thus got 

 'technical education' and have started in good places on leaving me. I 

 have a boy now nearly twelve, who came to me eighteen months ago. 

 He has learnt to clean shoes, knov/s how to milk, to help in the stables, 

 even to harness a pair, and has got some knowledge of poultry-keeping, 

 growing cucumbers and melons in frames, and, in fact, is generally useful 

 and perfectly healthy. He regularly attends school. He began at is. a 

 week, and now earns 3s. a week. If he were free from school he would 

 be worth 6s. a weelc." (From the Rev. C. T. Cornish, Childrey Rectory, 

 Wantage, August, 1903.) 



The present writer could dig, plant, attend to poultry and pigs, and 

 do other work of the same kind at ten ; could mow, harness, and " put 

 to" a horse, and do other things on the land at twelve to fourteen, the 

 doing which was regarded as a pleasure, and not as a toil. 

 C 



