24 MASSACHUSETTS HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY 



Danger — too much Reflection, not Enough Action. 



In general, if there is a defect in the large agricultural schools, 

 which boys must leave home in large numbers to attend, and which, 

 in order to secure adequate attendance to justify their cost, must 

 apparently limit their training to six or eight fall and winter 

 months, it is the defect of putting too great reliance upon books 

 and observation, to the exclusion during the intensive learning 

 periods of active participation in the type or types of productive 

 farming the boys intend to follow after graduation. Too great, 

 one may almost say in the cases of many of the boys, fatal reliance, 

 is put on the ability of the students once well grounded in sound 

 theory at the school to put that theory into successful practice 

 on their own farms alone and unaided. Even if the large school 

 undertook to put its plant and equipment to the strictest possible 

 productive farming uses of a profitable commercial character, and 

 to induct its students into its aims and to school them in its methods, 

 its efforts would be more than likely to break down through sheer 

 weight of numbers. School farms at present can hardly be claimed 

 to be thorough-going commercial farming concerns. The most 

 flattering school photographs, where the aims of the school are 

 most emphatically practical, show by far too few actual par- 

 ticipants and by far too many spectators. To see a thing done, 

 however good the demonstration, is not to do it oneself. To par- 

 ticipate in the carrying out of an enterprise planned and ordered 

 by another— by even an agricultural school instructor — may leave 

 one little better than a gang laborer. The pittance paid per hour, 

 where any pay at all is given, can hardly, as an incentive to keen 

 interest and alert action, be considered comparable to the reward 

 the student might hope to realize from an independent enterprise 

 planned and executed by himself and wholly for his own profit or 

 that of his family. It must be feared that however excellent may 

 be its work in selected demonstrations and in certain really valuable 

 experiments, school farming must, from a strictly commercial point 

 of view, always remain more or less artificial. Perhaps the best 

 use to which an agricultural school, large or small, can put its own 

 land or equipment is that of demonstration and experiment. Most 



