ILLINOIS STATE DAIRYMEN'S ASSOCIATION. 



49 



I mean more especially in Perry county; in your county it may be differ- 

 ent — but a majority of the teachers are from city homes or the towns and 

 villages. If they are ladies going to the country schools, they dress prob- 

 ably nicer than the country girls, with probably a little more of the frills 

 of fashion; use a little smoother language All this appeals to the coun- 

 try girls as being something above them. If it is the city men teachers, 

 the same holds good. Every teacher, if he or she is a true teacher, is an 

 example ttat is followed by the children under them. With so many city 

 teachers there is a tendency to draw the boys from the farm into the city, 

 instead of keeping them at home. Other conditions being equal, always 

 favor a country teacher for a country school. They know your condi- 

 tions at home and can get into that country school and interest the 

 children in their work so! much butter than a person probably better 

 educated can go into the same district, but who is unfamiliar with 

 those conditions. This seems to be one of the features that is very 

 frequently overlooked in this educating the boys and girls. You ask 

 the most of these city teachers about the different breeds of horses, 

 or the difference between a beef or dairy type, or the difference be- 

 tween the kinds of sheep, they will tell you "I don't know." And the 

 greater per cent of the teachers in the Teachers' Institutes would have to 

 acknowledge they do not know what hame strings are, or else would have 

 to make a guess at it. A country teacher can understand the boys and 

 girls of the country in their home work and can interest them as they 

 should be interested. 



How, then, can we interest them? How reach them in their own 

 lines of work? I think not by ma king any additions to the present course 

 of instruction, but by causing them to open their eyes to the every day 

 things about them in the country schools. Every school has thirty min- 

 utes' time of so-called "observation work." If the teachers, during that 

 period, not of course all at once, but scattered through the school term, 

 would bring in questions of soil, a study of the soil in the locations where 

 they live; whether sandy soil or loam, or whether acid matter. Let 

 them illustrate it, and would not that get the children to studying their 



