90 



Before the development of modern cities and the resulting 

 industrial conditions, a large majority of growing boys and girls 

 had abundant opportunity to share in productive occupations, to 

 participate in the natural sports of childhood and to acquire 

 industrial experience, simply through contact with their environ- 

 ment. It seems to be biologically true that this basal experience 

 is necessary, as antecedent to the form of education we call 

 academic. 



6. Some Agriculture almost Indispensable to Sound Educa- 

 tion. Manual training and laboratory work in science have 

 been undertaken partly as a means to realize this experience. 

 Both are necessarily made artificial by the cramped conditions 

 under which they must be conducted. Agriculture offers a 

 peculiar opportunity for a more extended and satisfying field, 

 wherein this basal experience may be acquired. 



It must be noted that this argument has no reference to voca- 

 tional training. In fact, it might be urged from the standpoint 

 of liberal education that persons destined for the professions 

 and learned callings stand in greatest need in their earlier years 

 of broad experience with the soil, with domestic animals and 

 with the conditions of production in nature. In many commu- 

 nities a certain number of hours per week devoted to agricultural 

 production, whether in school gardening or in the more complex 

 farming activities, may easily be regarded as an almost indis- 

 pensable part of a liberal education, when one takes into account 

 the conditions involved in modern life. 



7. Agricultural Text-books for Reading Courses. The above 

 considerations serve to define to some extent the part which 

 agriculture may play in a system of liberal education. 



In hundreds of high schools of the United States descriptive 

 courses in agriculture are now offered. They are based on many 

 excellent text-books which have appeared, and the instruction 

 often consists mainly in guiding the reading of the pupils, if 

 the teacher himself be interested in the larger economic and 

 scientific aspects of modern agriculture, as well as in its historic 

 evolution, he can make the subject one of intense interest, even 

 without laboratory demonstration or field experience. 



Much of our high school education must still be obtained from 

 text-books, and the work described above offers surely as attrac- 



