SELECTED SAYINGS 



"Skill is the result of intelligence and practice. The man not 

 trained to think, to observe carefully, to remember, to reflect, and 

 to reason cannot attain great skill, except the work be subdivided 

 and limited to the capacity of his brain, as in the large manufactur- 

 ing establishments. This cannot be done in agriculture. Labor is 

 scattered over the farm and if unskilled it becomes enormously ex- 

 pensive, by reason of misdirected energy, lack of judgment, and cost 

 of superintendence. To an industrially trained young man skill is 

 almost an intuition. It does not go through a slow process of mental 

 reasoning. The eye grasps the object lesson, the memory retains it, 

 and the hand is trained to execute. This vigilant eye enables him to 

 observe the short way of doing things." 



"Is it more important that the farmer should speak classic 

 English, or that he shall understand the principles of agriculture and 

 be skilled in the tools and machinery of the farm? Be he ever so 

 highly educated, he will lapse into unclassical English when he pounds 

 his thumb-nail through lack of skill." 



"I know a well educated blind woman. She had recently com- 

 pleted a course in natural history; on examination her instructor 

 handed her a stuffed red squirrel and told her it was an elephant. 

 She felt it over carefully; at length, running her fingers along the 

 tail, a gleam of intelligence lighted her countenance and she re- 

 marked, 'Oh yes, this is the trunk.' To-day there are hundreds of 

 men pulling at the tail of a squirrel and think they are leading the 

 elephant." 



"Now let us have an education of the masses for the masses, one 

 that will fit them to become a great, honest, faithful, intelligent, 

 toiling, thrifty common people, upon which great nations alone are 

 founded ; obedient to orders, but not servants ; tenacious of right, but 

 not anarchists." 



"Had I the power I would excerpt from the common school 

 curriculum all readers, which are mainly filled with the gilded thought 

 of stage and forum, all histories which overflow to the margin with 

 dates and battles, and with heroes who differ from ordinary scoun- 

 drels only in the magnitude of their crimes, all geographies, dealing 

 in the romance of climate and situation, and the hyperbole of won- 

 derful production; then substitute for them truthful readers, about 

 common people, and the things of nature; histories of our own com- 



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