no THE FUTURE OF OUR AGRICULTURE. 



to the useful work, we have by practice and experience 

 learnt not a little about the requirements of Agricultural 

 Education — much of which, however, appears to have 

 escaped the notice of authorities in this country. 



In the first place, and above all things, we have learnt 

 that Agricultural Education, to prove successful, must be 

 altogether differently shaped and handled from ordinary 

 Education, training to other callings, and carried on on its 

 own lines. Agriculture is a different thing altogether 

 from classics, mechanics, languages, or science. And it 

 is addressed to a different and quite distinct public, bred 

 up amid different surroundings, in a sphere of active labour 

 — a public less patient than town children to undergo dry, 

 wearisome class teaching. The country child lacks what 

 the Germans call " sitzfieisch," the flesh that is content to 

 sit long hours on forms. It feels the pain of this, as did 

 the Xanthias of Aristophanes, It has physically more 

 quicksilver in its blood. It is quick enough to seize what 

 is carried to its mind through the channel of its eyes and 

 what it can readily understand, but it wants its mental 

 pabulum to be handed to it in its own way, just as the 

 stork of the fable required a different receptacle for its food 

 than did the fox. The aim of the teaching addressed to it 

 is avowedly practical. There must, accordingly, be a 

 practical ring about it, instruction tempered by demonstra- 

 tion, with life in it, to keep attention fixed. Slavishly 

 imitating town teaching is Uke serving pap with a hatchet, 

 calculated rather to frighten the child than to feed it. 



Next, we have learnt that, however, practical and dis- 

 tinctly rural must be the tone of the education given for 

 instruction in Agriculture, it is in the majority of cases, 

 certainly in the higher forms of teaching, a mistake to mix 

 up theoretical and practical instruction in the same institu- 

 tion. It has taken us a long time to find that out. But 

 it is now accepted as a general rule. The first shape given 

 to agricultural teaching was as a matter of course composite. 

 Naturally enough it was thought that pupils must be taught 

 the two things pari passu, and that the one would readily 

 blend with and supplement the other. That was the way 



