14 ADDRESSES 



facts about the history and geography of foreign countries. The varied resources 

 and exhaustless charm of the country have small part in its teachings. Too 

 often, when the teacher opens man's book before the eyes of the child, he closes 

 to him, as far as he can, the book of nature. All schools should be related to 

 the economic life of the people and prepare them to work under the conditions 

 in which they must earn their livelihood. 



It is very fine to talk about giving every boy and girl a liberal education 

 which means usually a 'mere smattering of a literary education but the fact re- 

 mains that the great majority of our children in cities, as well as country, leave 

 school before they are fifteen, with little education of any kind and no training 

 for real life. The result is we have thousands of industrially untrained boys 

 going into the ordinary commercial callings, and few scientific farmers and engi- 

 neers; and thousands of young girls eager to earn the pitiful pittance of a sales- 

 woman, while none can be found for well-paid manufacturing positions. A gentle- 

 man in my city tells me, for example, that an advertisement for a typist at six 

 dollars per week brought scores of applications, while one for an expert candy 

 maker at fifteen dollars failed to find him a single competent person. With the 

 sales positions and typewriting places always overcrowded, the wages of girls re- 

 main below the requirements of decent living, with sad results in too many cases. 

 If the rural school is to accomplish what we expect of it, it must not be a 

 thing apart from the life of the people, as the old school was. We must take 

 the life and the work of the people into the school and carry the teaching and 

 influence of the school into the life of the people. The practical work of the 

 farm and the home must go into the school, and the thought and knowledge 

 of the school must go on to the farm and into the home. 9 The new century 

 found a large, 'growing body of new science related to farm and home voca- 

 tions, and this science is gradually yielding to 'organization in text-book and in 

 practice work in gardens and fields, in barn and dairy, and in home and shop. 

 That this immense body of new knowledge must have a place in the training of 

 our country youth can not now be questioned; and that it will greatly increase 

 the general and economic efficiency of the country people has already been shown 

 "by the work of the agricultural colleges and experiment stations. Various methods 

 of uniting school training with farm and home training have been suggested. 

 Teachers can co-operate with parents, for example, in arranging field and feed- 

 ing experiments, in testing seeds, in studying varieties of plants. The operations 

 of the garden and orchard; pruning, budding, grafting, and spraying trees and 

 vines; testing the value of foods and fertilizers these activities offer many 

 opportunities for co-operation between teacher and farmer in the interest of the 

 children. 



We must not only take the work of the farm and home into the school, 

 but the school must go into the life of the people. In the old days, the church 

 was the centre of the life of the people. The whole life of the people, social, 

 educational, and religious, centred around the old church. The protracted meet- 

 ings were the great social events of the year, and practically all social develop- 

 ments, including the weddings, had their source in the church, the school, or the 

 Sunday-school. Now all this is changed. In this sense, I fear the church is 

 losing its hold upon the life of the country people. It has certainly ceased to be 

 the one centre of their life, as it formerly was. The pastor, teacher, and physician 

 should be the joint conservators of country life and they should all work together 

 from one common centre. 



There may be differences of opinion as to where the new centre of the life 

 of our country people should be located. Some think it should be in the town 

 or village; others, that there should be lyceums or agricultural clubs; and still 

 others that it should be in the country school. It is probable that more than one 



