176 



TWENTY-NINTH FRUIT-GROWERS' CONVENTION. 



simple extension of the work of our hands as well as the work of our 

 brains is an individual privilege as well as a duty. The contribution 

 of individual effort to the sum total of human effort, regardless of sex, 

 or class, or creed — this is our privilege and the world's need. 



TRAINING CHILDREN IN THE RURAL IMPROVEMENT IDEA. 



By MRS. AMOS HARRIS, of Fowler. 



To train children in rural improvement ideas means to train children 

 to see, to observe the beautiful in nature, to become interested in plant 

 life. It means to awaken in the child mind a desire to have a plant, a 

 tree, or a garden of his very own, where he can study out the mystery 

 of " how to make things grow." When we have interested the individual 

 child in the individual plant we have formed a nucleus for rural im- 

 provement ideas, which may unfold into an association for creating 

 "homes beautiful" on the treeless lands of the yet unreclaimed deserts. 

 Senator Stanford gave California horses a world-wide reputation for 

 speed by putting his colts to do precisely what he desired them to excel 

 in on the track in after years. In other words, he sent his colts to 

 school to learn to do by doing. Parents should learn a lesson from 

 Senator Stanford's experiment. It is a mistake to bring children up in 

 idleness and expect them to become industrious men and women. That 

 child is defrauded of its birthright which is mistakenly allowed to grow 

 up in idleness, instead of being taught from babyhood to be helpful. 



Our public schools are doing a great deal with their nature studies 

 to interest children in rural improvements, but to the parent should 

 the child be indebted for its first lessons in the industry of tree-planting. 



Children naturally love to do things, but they do not love drudgery, 

 and that which we are compelled to do becomes drudgery. There is, in 

 Booker T. Washington's interpretation of the negro problem, a thought 

 for parents and teachers that should be generalized: "After the war," 

 he says, "it was not unnatural that a large element of the colored 

 people at first interpreted freedom to mean freedom from work with 

 the hands. They naturally had not learned to appreciate the fact that 

 they had been icorked and that one of the great lessons for free men to 

 learn was to work. They had not learned the vast difference between 

 working and being worked." Their difficulty was not peculiar to their- 

 color. How many boys have been driven from the home farm because 

 their fathers insisted on working them, instead of allowing them to 

 work. How much better if parents would lure their children to industry 

 by companionship and pleasant stories. 



When you give your boy his first lesson in tree-planting, don't set 

 Mm to digging the hole while you hold the tree, but you dig the hole 

 while he examines the tree. Tell him to carefully cut away all the 



