Nov. 1906. j 



40.") 



Education,. 



to be specialised. To secure this it is needful that the practical agriculture 

 be always under the control of, and be tested by, those who control, guide, and 

 value the other educational work of the school. I see the chance of much confusion, 

 of practical agricultural teaching being perverted to improper ends, if, as has 

 been sometimes proposed, the practical work be delegated to purely agricultural 

 officers. It is indeed desirable that these should teach and advise and inspire, 

 but it is the educational value of agriculture, moral, manual, and intellectual, that 

 is to measure out judgment as to its success in school work. 



In Jamaica the difficulty is to make active and efficient and available the 

 labour of a population of nearly 800,000 of mostly very poor people, which for 

 various reasons is not available in the way that it is wanted, nor efficient, nor as 

 profitable as it should be either to the labourer or the community. In improved 

 popular education we may hope to find one of the avenues leading to the solution 

 of our problem. There is so much that is ethical and economic to make it a very 

 complex problem that we must be thankful if, with the help that the Imperial 

 Department of Agriculture has given us, we may venture to hope that we have gone 

 a little way along the right road.— Report of J. R. Williams, Inspector of Schools, 

 Jamaica. 



