VOCATIONAL AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION 17 



Through the Individual to the Mass. 



Vocational education, it is evident, has a massive problem. 

 Its central concern, however, is not with the mass but with the 

 individual. While this is a day of great aggregates, when we 

 prosecute a trust we look for the man higher up. When there is 

 a strike, it is for the ultimate benefit of particular persons. In the 

 rush of school work the class has sometimes blinded the teacher 

 to the individual, — fit cause for repentance. Perhaps you recall 

 these memorable words of Edward Howard Griggs in his preface 

 to "The Story of a Child" by Pierre Loti: 



"There are always two points of view possible with reference to 

 life. From the standpoint of nature and science, individuals count 

 for little. Nature can waste a thousand acorns to raise one oak, 

 hundreds of children may be sacrificed that a truth may be seen. 

 But from the ethical and human point of view the meaning of all 

 life is in each individual. That one child should be lost is a kind 

 of ruin to the universe." 



Education by Action and Affairs. 



Vocational education, sure of the dignity and worth of its task, 

 turns as much to action and to affairs as it does to books and school- 

 rooms for its teaching materials and methods. This is no conces- 

 sion that its task or its pupils are inferior to those of any other 

 branch of education. In training boys and girls for life, there is 

 no proper place for snobbery. Vocational training is not higher, 

 cultural training is not lower as such on the ethical and human 

 i5cale, nor vice versa. They are different. Each must have its 

 own methods, its own standards and its own rewards of merit. 



We are likely to overrate books and to underrate affairs as 

 educational forces. At the Atlanta banquet of the National 

 Society for the Promotion of Industrial Education, President 

 Elmer Ellsworth Brown, former United States Commissioner of 

 Education, almost startled his audience when he reminded us: 



"It was not until the nineteenth century that even one-half of 



