Education in Breeding. 169 



The new educational machinery is being made 

 more effective than the old to induce mental growth 

 while in school and has the additional values of better 

 continuing this growth throughout life, and is more 

 useful also' in helping to produce the wherewith not 

 only to live but to own the position and the facilities 

 for continuing the education throughout life. The 

 classics and special literary training have become in 

 large part technical specialties. 



Our schools to build up country life need also to be 

 articulated into a unified system, with primary and 

 high schools at the base and the middle of the pyramid 

 leading by natural steps to the agricultural college at 

 the apex. As nearly 50 years ago the city high school 

 began its conquest for the field of secondary life educa- 

 tion, crowding out the academy so the agricultural high 

 school has started a successful conquest for the field of 

 secondary education for country life. The first of these 

 schools, started in Minnesota in 1888, now has 600 stu- 

 dents. The agricultural colleges of North Dakota and 

 Oklahoma and the Universities of Nebraska and Maine 

 have successfully inaugurated similar schools as parts 

 of their organizations. And in Alabama an agricultural 

 high school has been started in each congressional dis- 

 trict. 



It seems reasonable to hope that the wonderfully 

 successful plan of consolidating rural schools will grad- 

 ually become general. The rural school of three to six 

 rooms to which pupils are hauled in vans from the larg- 

 est practical area the county to be systematically di- 

 vided into districts four to five miles square and ex- 

 tended through the second high school year, promises 

 to become the strong base of the new pyramid. Agri- 

 cultural high schools each serving ten or more counties 

 in which the pupils are supplied their junior and senior 

 years of high school training seem best adapted to sup- 

 ply most of the technical portion of the secondary 

 school the so-called people's college. The agricultural 

 college, with its numerous long, short and special 



