28 MASSACHUSETTS HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY 



able to secure it. Fifty departments in fifty groups of farms 

 would cost no more than five large schools such as those found in 

 other states. It obviates the necessity of sending the boy away 

 from home in order to secure the benefits of agricultural training. 

 The cost of living for the boy is less at home than it would be at 

 a boarding school. Parents who need the help of their boys are 

 deprived of their services during only a portion of the day. The 

 plan also promises to be wonderfully effective. Co-operative M^ork 

 between the school and the home farm is the most effective known 

 means of trying out under the conditions of individual farms, over 

 widely scattered areas, methods which have proved to be profitable 

 elsewhere, as for example, at the State Agricultural College or Ex- 

 periment Station. Such co-operation furnishes the only experi- 

 mental means by which each boy can try out the merits of the 

 home farm as an agency for producing profits when treated by the 

 best known methods; that is to say, part-time work furnishes the 

 only means whereby the principles and methods taught by the 

 school can be positively adapted by the boy to the economic con- 

 ditions on the farm on which he may spend his working days. 

 Part-time work thus gives to agricultural teaching the reality of 

 actual life as but little school training can give it. Under the 

 part-time work plan, the instruction is adapted to the kinds of 

 farming prevalent in the district surrounding the centers where 

 the work is established. The practical applications of the instruc- 

 tion are thus subject to the obstacles continually encountered 

 under economic farming conditions found in any given district, 

 just as they are also aided by all the influences in this Common- 

 wealth which make for the improvement of farming. 



Productive Farming as Educational Projects. 



The plan as an educational process is believed to possess unques- 

 tionable merit, because farming activities readily resolve themselves 

 into what may be termed farming projects. Let us turn this mat- 

 ter over carefully a moment in our minds. A farming project is 

 a thing to be done on a farm. The thing done may contribute 

 some element of improvement about the farm,— as constructing 



