July 28, 1904] 



NA TURE 



297 



THE PRESENT STATE OF AGRICULTURAL 

 EDUCATION IN ENGLAND. 



WE have just received from the Essex Education 

 Committee a little illustrated pamphlet which 

 ti.-lls us what is being done in that county for the 

 education of the agricultural community. It repre- 

 sents a different system from any prevailing else- 

 where, hence it may be worth while to examine it not 

 onlv on its own account, but from the more general 

 point of view of the organisation of rural education, 

 so great is the diversity of procedure in the various 

 counties. 



The centre of the Essex system is a set of 

 laboratories, chemical and botanical, in Chelmsford ; 

 here samples of manure, foods, soils, seeds, &c., are 

 tested for the local farmers ; here also various 

 investigations in connection with the field experi- 

 ments or with special problems arising in the 

 agriculture of the county are carried out. The 

 laboratories form primarily an investigating and 

 advisory centre ; at the same time a considerable 

 amount of direct instruction is given there, mainly in 

 the form of short courses for adult students. There 

 is a winter school of agriculture giving a nine weeks' 

 course, shorter courses still in horticulture and dairy- 

 ing, Saturday classes for the instruction of elementary 

 schoolmasters, and a series of occasional lectures on 

 market days for farmers. From this centre also 

 emanate the lecture courses given in the winter up 

 and down the count)-. 



Of course, this does not exhaust all the work being 

 done in this direction by the Essex County Council ; 

 at Dunmow there is an intermediate school with a 

 strong agricultural side, and at one end of the scale 

 there are scholarships to be won at Cambridge, at the 

 other classes in sucfi manual operations as ploughing, 

 shepherding, farriery, &c. On the whole, then, the 

 Essex farmer is not badly served ; he has a scien- 

 tific organisation working out the local problems 

 which he can consult for technical advice, and a recog- 

 nised system of education by short courses is being 

 developed for him, though as yet it is in a somewhat 

 imoerfect state. 



But it is noteworthy that neither the Board of Agri- 

 culture, which has charge of all higher education in 

 atrriculture, nor the Board of Education can even 

 advise, much less control ; the whole scheme is 

 managed by a committee " which, with the single 

 e.xception of the Chairman, consists entirely of Essex 

 farmers." All honour to such a committee for the 

 open-minded way it has attacked the problem, but 

 in the end so restricted an administration cannot make 

 for efficiency. 



The county unit for educational purposes is valu- 

 able, always provided the central authority is active to 

 coordinate, to give continuity of policy, to prevent, on 

 the one hand, overlapping agencies, and on the other 

 to see that the whole f-eld is covered. It would be easy 

 to point out the weak 5pots in the Essex programme, 

 the scanty provision for secondary and the neglect of 

 primary instruction of a rural character, but the county 

 authority is working hard according to its lights and 

 to its resources. Turn to the neiglibouring counties, 

 and the need of some central stimulus is seen ; Herts 

 does about as little as it can, a few lectures and some 

 courses on cottage gardening represent its method 

 of shelving its duties, while in Suffolk we are informed 

 that part at least of the technical instruction money 

 goes in 5!. doles to village flower shows ! These 

 counties and many others like them have but slender 

 funds to devote to technical education, so slender that 

 it does not seem to be worth anyone's while, inside the 



NO. 181 3, VOL. 70] 



county or out, to see that they are rationally spent. 

 The only authority which has any power is the Local 

 Government Board, the auditor of which has to see that 

 the expenditure is on something that can be made to 

 square with a definition of technical education ! 



The time has come when either the Board of 

 Education or the Board of Agriculture (and it is 

 also a pressing matter that one or other of these bodies 

 is made wholly responsible for agricultural education) 

 should step in and tell the county councils what they 

 ought to do and how they must set about it. By this 

 time experiments enough have been made, for it is 

 well known what sort of work will succeed and what 

 schemes are feasible; in one county or other every 

 sort and grade of rural education has had a trial, and 

 some survive to do excellent work of their kind. Only 

 a central authority knows what has answered else- 

 where and can be made to answer again ; at present 

 we see county after county embarking on schemes 

 foredoomed to failure, schemes which each committee 

 thinks to be new inventions instead of the obvious 

 mistakes into which every beginner falls unless he has 

 the forethought to get up his subject. The free ex- 

 perimenting of the last ten years has done its work ; 

 it is time now to apply the successful results. And 

 unless the central authority does intervene in earnest, 

 it is not too much to say that the purely rural counties 

 will never get any agricultural education at all ; they 

 are poor and unenterprising, they are isolated and 

 bitterly averse to cooperating with neighbouring 

 counties as feeble as themselves (even east and west 

 Sussex cannot join forces to support the same agri- 

 cultural school), lastly, they are angry at being called 

 upon to meet the unexpectedly heavy demands for 

 elementary education, and will divert as much of the 

 " whisky money " to that end as they can. It is_ not 

 that the country is without agricultural education ; 

 we have now many organisations as good as anything 

 in America or Germany, which have equally won the 

 confidence of the farmers for whom they were de- 

 signed. Among others, we need only instance the 

 Kent and Surrey joint scheme which makes a centre 

 of the Wye College, or the Cheshire School at Holmes 

 Chapel, but whole tracts of the countrj' that are even 

 more in need of similar work are absolutely blank, and 

 are likely to remain so unless a central authority can 

 step in vi/ith some power and a determination to shake 

 the self-complacency of the backward county councils. 

 From another point of view the lack of a central 

 authority with a wide general outlook is even more 

 disastrous — there is no "provision for the furthering 

 of research. Now it is not only a truism that any 

 scientific teaching that is to be of value must be based 

 on research, but anyone who has had experience in 

 that line has learnt that you can only secure the 

 sympathy and cooperation of farmers by instituting 

 investigations in which they are interested. A course 

 of lectures on agricultural chemistry would go un^ 

 heeded, little more attention would be paid to a course 

 on manures ; but offer them the results of some first- 

 hand experience in the shape of experiments dealing 

 with a problem of local importance, and they will 

 come to hear and remain to discuss. How does the 

 American Department of Agriculture seek to commend 

 itself to its farmers? Almost wholly by research. 

 Principal Reichel's article, again, in the reports of 

 the Mosely Commission, tells us how the great 

 Canadian agricultural college at Guelph only took 

 root when it got hold of the farmers by experiments 

 followed by discussion. Yet the Local Government 

 Board, which passes many curious things masquer- 

 ading as education, draws the line at research, and 

 even the Board of Agriculture, which has some money 



