No. 4.] IXDUSTRIxiL EDUCATION. 23 



I have singled out the department of agriculture for illus- 

 stration for two reasons : first, because I assume that a 

 session of the Massachusetts Board of Agriculture is in- 

 terested chiefly in teaching agriculture ; and, secondly, 

 because the department of agriculture in our institutions 

 of industrial education is the department which suffers most 

 from the lack of definite form in teaching. The same con- 

 siderations lead me, at this point, to dwell upon the relation 

 between agriculture and other departments of industrial 

 education. 



We have always to consider the end to be attained in 

 education. Few parents would be satisfied if their sons 

 were to receive from the institution they attend nothing but 

 the training which would prepare them for the mere drudgery 

 of the occupation they choose. Wood-working and iron- 

 working are included in the mechanical courses not simjDly 

 that the students may be fitted to be carpenters and machin- 

 ists ; students must master preliminary details for the sake 

 of larger constructive operations. A boy may learn the 

 carpenter's trade by an apprenticeship of three years, and be 

 paid for his work all the time. It would hardly pay him to " 

 go to a technical school for four years, meeting the neces- 

 sary expenses out of his own i)ocket or out of the treasury 

 of the State or the nation, only to gain such skill as he 

 might be paid for acquiring in less time. A simple trade 

 school, which attempts nothing but to produce skilled arti- 

 sans, can justify its being only by turning out better work- 

 men than the shop can turn out, or by reducing the time of 

 apprenticeship, or by adding something which an apprentice 

 would not learn. As a matter of fact, the technical schools 

 of the lower grade do not attempt to reduce the term of 

 apprenticeship, lequiring, as they commonly do, more than 

 three years' time. Nor do they, as a rule, claim to produce 

 better artisans. A journeyman carpenter will not have spent 

 over the construction of perfect joints so much time as the 

 graduate of a trade school, but he will have gained much 

 more in deftness and quick facility in the use of tools. On 

 the whole, the journeyman carpenter who has served his 

 apprenticeship will be a better carpenter, for general work, 

 than the school graduate. It is not by giving the same in- 



