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Farming and Agricultural Training in 
term of, say, two or three years, according to the age at which 
the apprenticeship commenced. ... It would be a great advan- 
tage if to each farm there could be attached a teacher capable of 
continuing the general education of the apprentices, by lessons 
given in the mornings and evenings, but the remainder of 
whose time might be otherwise employed. . . . He should be 
capable of teaching the elements of chemistry, land-surveying, 
book-keeping in a simple way, and the elementary principles of 
agriculture. Most of this technical instruction could be given 
during the winter evenings, and the apprentices should be 
entitled to pass the examinations of the Science and Art 
Department in the same way as pupils of science classes, if they 
desired to do so, and to earn for themselves and their instructors 
all the distinctions and rewards that are given to pupils and 
teachers in elementary schools and science classes. . . . The 
apprentices should be selected from those who distinguish them- 
selves most in an examination held annually in connection with 
that of the Science and Art Department." 
To enable the sons of farm-labourers and farm-bailiffs, who 
obtain all their education at elementary schools in rural districts, 
to obtain technical as well as general instruction, I recommended 
several alterations in the schedules which had then been recently 
issued, and also the addition of practical work on the land to 
the school curriculum. By these means I thought that it would 
be possible to silence the complaints of farmers that the educa- 
tion given to farm-labourers' sons in rural districts seems de- 
signed to unfit them for an agricultural career. In other words, 
while, on the one hand, farmers assert that they are compelled 
to pay for such an education being given to their labourers' 
sons as unfits them for country life, and induces them to 
emigrate to the towns, — thus making farm-labour more scarce, 
more dear, and less effective, — on the other band, the town- 
labourers exclaim that they are being ruined by the influx of 
cheap country labour. 
This is still the position of these two divisions of the great 
subject of Agricultural Education in this country. Some people 
doubt the possibility and others doubt the desirability of com- 
bining technical with general instruction. The success of this 
plan in other countries is met by the stock argument, rarely 
stated, but generally the pith of what is said, " Englishmen are 
not as other men are." 
Having obtained the permission of the Council of the 
Society to visit and report upon some of the Reformatory and 
Industrial Schools to which agricultural land is attached, I 
addressed, in the first place, a schedule of questions to the 
authorities of those schools in England and Wales, where, 
according to the Annual Reports of Her Majesty's Inspector, 
