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Departments would reach the Greatest Number. An agri- 

 cultural department close at hand, which permitted the boy to 

 live at home and help with the farm work morning 'and night 

 and on Saturdays, would be most likely to appeal to parents who 

 were in modest circumstances. Practically all parents, however 

 well-to-do or however needy they may be, are rightly reluctant 

 to have their children leave home at fourteen, or even at sixteen 

 or seventeen years of age. 



Many agricultural departments widely distributed through 

 the State would induce the attendance of the largest number of 

 pupils, and thus provide a system of agricultural education 

 suited to the needs of the greatest number of farm homes. 



Departments would demonstrate. Surrounded by farms, 

 vocational agricultural departments in high schools would at 

 once enlist the motor instincts and activities of the boys from 

 these farms in the carrying out, simultaneously with their school 

 instruction and as a vital part of it, of practical farming proj- 

 ects on their own premises. 



The best methods would be told and shown. And most boys, 

 as well as most men, in agriculture as in all other productive 

 pursuits, make their best progress by being told and shown, man 

 to man, what to do, and why and when and how to do it. 



General Schooling not Enough. Even in Massachusetts, 

 where the school-going habit has been developed among the 

 people at large to at least as favorable proportions as in most 

 parts of the world, school instruction has had almost no direct 

 bearing on the probable life work of a great number of boys 

 and girls ; and to-day, except in very few instances, it yields no 

 practical knowledge or skill to those boys whose severest need 

 is education for efficiency in the work and affairs of modern 

 farming. 



Books and Bulletins are not Enough. How many of the 

 rank and file of busy farmers have had the time, the opportunity 

 or the inclination for learning the alphabet of agricultural 

 science, that difficult alphabet, in which the most valuable 

 bulletins and treatises on modern agriculture are written ? The 

 higher the aspirations of the men of agricultural knowledge, and 

 the more commendable their accomplishments in the conquest of 



