January 21, 1916] 



SCIENCE 



81 



There may be need, also, of a kind of agricul- 

 tural work that can best be done in an institution 

 that is independent of direct state support, and 

 that is not at once responsible to popular will. 



The fuller statement, from which this 

 sentence is a quotation, is this : 



The teaching of agriculture of college and uni- 

 versity grade ought not to be confined to colleges 

 of agriculture. AH universities at least, on their 

 own account and for their own best development, 

 will in time have departments of agriculture, if 

 they are real universities, as much as they have 

 departments of language or of engineering. They 

 can not neglect any fundamental branches of learn- 

 ing.s 



At an earlier date, I had written : 



It is strange that private benevolence has not 

 discovered that the founding of schools of agri- 

 culture is one of the very best means of serving 

 mankind.* 



As these statements seem not always to 

 have meant the same to others as I thought 

 they meant to me, I shall now enlarge on 

 them ; and thereby shall I both explain my- 

 self and make my application. 



My primary contention at the moment is 

 that the agricultural and rural subjects 

 may be made a means of education, used as 

 so-called culture studies, and that a knowl- 

 edge of them on the part of a large propor- 

 tion of the people, in their general bearings, 

 is essential to training for citizenship. They 

 therefore become by right a part of the con- 

 tent of a school and of a college course. If 

 any institution essays to cover the field of 

 higher education, and is free to do so under 

 the terms of its charter or of its state rela- 

 tions, then agriculture can not be omitted. 

 Of course no institution should admit agri- 

 culture into its curriculum until it is ready 

 for the subject and can provide the neces- 

 sary support, any more than it should admit 

 Greek or economics until it is ready for the 

 subject. To be ready for agriculture re- 



3 "The Training of Farmers," p. 225, 1909. 

 *"The State and the Farmer," p. 166, 1908. 



quires much more than equipment and ade- 

 quate funds : the institution, in its govern- 

 ing body and in its faculty, should come to 

 the subject on the same educational basis 

 as it comes to any other subject, prepared 

 to give it opportunity and sympathetic con- 

 sideration, and to make it in fact a worthy 

 coordinate with other departments. 



The agricultural work of which I here 

 speak is to be a contribution to other courses 

 and departments in a university. It might 

 very well be a department in an arts course. 

 Unfortunately, we think of agriculture in 

 higher institutions of learning only as a 

 very highly developed series of technical 

 courses, maintained mostly on a semi-pro- 

 fessional basis. This is properly the devel- 

 opment in the land-grant colleges of agri- 

 culture ; and in them, although the differen- 

 tiation has gone very far, it will go still 

 farther, for we must bring our rural situa- 

 tion up to its proper level. But in general 

 and liberal-arts endowed universities, agri- 

 culture of another species may well be in- 

 troduced, comparable with a department of 

 a college rather than with a college entity 

 itself. It need not provide "a course in 

 agriculture," in the sense of a complete cur- 

 riculum by itself, and it would not give a 

 degree in agriculture. We can not expect 

 all students desiring agricultiare as part of 

 a liberal education to matriculate in a col- 

 lege of agriculture. 



The content of such teaching of agricul- 

 ture would probably run strongly along the 

 lines of the so-called humanities — along 

 economics without being the customary 

 economics, along civics without being the 

 usual civics, along ethics without bein.g 

 speculative ethics, and always be founded 

 on good sources of technical information 

 touching the nature and processes of pro- 

 duction, the values in rural life, knowledge 

 of agricultural conditions, with frequent 

 visits in rural communities and excursions 



