62 THE farmer's education. 



culture in common schools must be the acquirement of the 

 ability to learn from nature direct with no text-book for an 

 interpreter. 



The rural common school deals with pupils from six to 

 fifteen years of age. What can be done in the way of agri- 

 cultural teaching must be what can be comprehended by pupils 

 of that age, and which in practice can be imparted to them in 

 the time winch their own desires, and that of their parents, 

 and public opinion, will permit to be devoted to that purpose, 

 in view of the other claims upon their time and attention. It 

 excludes the ordinary occupations and processes of the farm 

 which they see going on every day, and in which more or less 

 they take part. All such things they will and do learn at 

 home to far better advantage than in the school. 



In their earlier school days the children are engaged in 

 accumulating facts; later the facts begin to unconsciously 

 arrange themselves in classes in the mind, but they begin to 

 reason upon them and formulate theories hardly at all during 

 the years commonly reckoned as of country school age. If 

 compelled to undertake this process they dislike it, seldom 

 succeed with it, and the reasoning which the teacher ma}'^ 

 seem to force upon them for the time is generally forgotten 

 before the end of the first game of "I spy." If the pupils 

 seem for the moment to comprehend, and do, in part, answer 

 intelligently, an examination on the same points a week later 

 will prove that they really never understood the subject. For 

 all abstract matters involving exercise of the reasoning power, 

 they must wait till they are older. Childhood is the time to 

 lean] facts, and such facts as really interest them are never 

 forgotten. This limitation of the powers of childhood forbids 

 any attempt to teach " agriculture " or any other science in 

 any didactic, formal way, or presenting the subject by means 

 of text-books. 



What they can do is to study nature. They can learn how- 

 plants grow, not by reading books, but by planting and pulling 

 up plants and taking them to pieces at various stages of tluir 

 growth. That is the way "professors" continue to study plant 

 physiology as long as they live, and it is the only way to really 



