Mat 5, 1905.] 



SCIENCE. 



689 



persons leave the farm to educate their 

 children than for all other causes combined. 



An ideal condition would be the total 

 abolition of rural schools as such. The 

 custom of setting apart towns and villages 

 into special school districts in order sep- 

 arately to tax the town or village for school 

 purposes has been a misfortune to the rural 

 schools. The whole school system of any 

 state should be organized on a broad enough 

 basis so that every boy and girl, whatever 

 the occupation of the parents, has the op- 

 portunity of securing the same, or at least 

 equally efficient, education. The country 

 mill has gone. The old-time country school 

 is a passing institution. A one-teacher 

 school is as inefficient as a one-man mill. 

 Schools will be consolidated into larger and 

 stronger units. The first pedagogical re- 

 sult will be the differentiation of the work 

 of teachers — perhaps one of these teachers 

 can give special attention to nature-study 

 and country-life subjects. 



The school must connect with real life. 

 It will be one of the strong constructive and 

 dynamic influences in our social organiza- 

 tion. At present its tendency is receptive 

 and passive, rather than creative. The 

 pai^ticular subjects that shall be taught are 

 of less importance than- the point of view. 

 jMany questions of detail are to be dis- 

 cussed, often with much travail; but the 

 final solution must be to allow every sub- 

 ject in which men engage to find its proper 

 pedagogic place in a wider and freer educa- 

 tional system than the world has yet seen, 

 and to place agricultural subjects with the 

 others and not exclusively in institutions 

 by themselves. 



Whatever our dotibts and misgivings, the 

 American farmer is bound to be educated. 

 He will demand it. Having education and 

 being endowed with a free chance, he will 

 not be a peasant. Some persons have made 

 the serious mistake of confounding peas- 

 antry with comparative poverty. Peasant- 



hood is a social stratum. It is a surviving 

 product of decaying social conditions. 



If the open country is to be made at- 

 tractive to the best minds, it must have an 

 attractive literature. There must be a 

 technical literature of the farm, and also a 

 general artistic literature porti'aying the 

 life and the ideals of the persons in the 

 country. The farm literature of a genera- 

 tion ago was largely wooden and spiritless, 

 or else untrue to actual rural conditions. 

 The new literature is vital and alive. The 

 new, however, is yet mostly special and 

 technical, with the exception of the growing 

 nature-literature. Artistic literature of the 

 farm and rural affairs is yet scarcely 

 known. Where is the high-class fiction that 

 portrays the farmer as he is, without cari- 

 caturing him? AVhere is the collection of 

 really good farm poems? Who has de- 

 veloped the story interest in the farm? 

 Who has adequately pictured rural insti- 

 tutions? Who has carefully studied the 

 history of the special farm literature that 

 we already have? Who has written the 

 biological evolution progress that attaches 

 to every domestic animal and every culti- 

 vated plant? We need short and sharp 

 pictures of the man at his work and the 

 woman in her home— such quick and vivid 

 pictures in words as an artist would throw 

 on his canvas. There is nobility, genuine- 

 ness and majesty in a man at useful work 

 —much more than there is in a prince or a 

 general or a society leader, whose role it is 

 to pose for the multitude. The man hold- 

 ing the plow, digging a ditch, picking fruit, 

 the woman sweeping or making bread— 

 what stronger pictures of human interest 

 can there be than these ? If I could have 

 the choice of the mite that I should con- 

 tribute to the developing and the national- 

 izing of agricultural sentiment, I should 

 choose its literatiu'e. 



L. H. Bailey. 



Cornell University. 



