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In many states strenuous efforts are being made t<» Improve the general condi- 
tion of these schools. Our urban communities are coming to see more clearly 
that their prosperity is vitally associated with the prosperity of agriculture, 
and they therefore more readily assent to state taxation for the benefit of the 
rural as well as the city schools. Advantage should be taken of the increased 
prosperity of many of our agricultural regions to impress upon our farmers the 
wisdom of building better schoolhouses, improving the school grounds, Increas- 
ing the pay of teachers, and introducing the teaching of agriculture in the 
country districts as an investment which will greatly aid in perpetuating and 
increasing the prosperity they now enjoy and make the lot of their descendants 
more Fortunate than their own. The agricultural colleges and the farmers' 
Institutes can have great Influence in this direction. 
OBJECT or TEACHING AGRIC1 LTURE. 
Coming now to consider what should he the aim of instruction in agriculture 
in the elementary school and how it should he related to the general scheme of 
elementary education as formulated and approved by educational authorities, 
we have for our guidance the report of the Committee of Fifteen of the National 
Educational Association. In this report it is assumed and argued that the 
studies of the si hool fall naturally into five coordinate groups: (1) Mathe- 
matics and physics: (2) biology, including chiefly the plant and the animal: 
(3) literature and art: (4) grammar and the technical and scientific study of 
language: and (.">) history and the study of sociological, political, and social 
institutions. Dr. W. T. Harris, L T . S. Commissioner of Education, in a paper 
discussing this report and the necessity for five coordinate groups of studies in 
the schools, says : 
" Each one of these groups, it was assumed, should he represented in the 
curriculum at all times by some topic suited to the age and previous training of 
the pupil." 
Continuing, he says : 
" The first stage of school education is education for culture and education for 
the purpose of gaining command of the conventionalities of intelligence. These 
conventionalities are such arts as reading and writing and the use of figures, 
technicalities of maps, dictionaries, the art of drawing, and all of those semi- 
mechanical facilities which enable the child to get access to the intellectual 
conquests of the race. Later on in the school course, when the pupil passes out 
of his elementary studies, which partake more of the nature of practice thau of 
theory, he comes in the secondary school and the college to the study of science 
and the technic necessary for its preservation and communication. All these 
things belong to the first stage of school instruction whose aim is culture. On 
the other hand, post-graduate work and the work of professional schools have 
not the aim of culture as much as the aim of fitting the person for a social voca- 
tion. In the post-graduate work of universities the demand is for original 
investigation in special fields. In the professional school the student masters 
the elements of a particular practice, learning its theory and its art. 
"It is in the first stage, the schools for culture, that these five coordinate 
branches should be represented in a symmetrical manner. It is not to be 
thought that a course of university study or that of a professional school should 
he symmetrical. But specializing should follow a course of study for culture in 
which the symmetrical whole of human learning and the symmetrical whole of 
the soul should be considered. From the primary school, therefore, on through 
the academic course of the college, there should be symmetry and five coordinate 
groups of studies represented at each part of the course — at least in each year, 
although perhaps not throughout each part of the year." 
Discussing the second coordinate group, the biological. Doctor Harris argues 
that it should include " whatever is organic in nature — especially studies 
relating to the plant and the animal — the growth of material for food and cloth- 
ing, and in a large measure for means of transportation and culture. This 
study of the organic phase of nature forms a great portion of the branch of 
study known as geography in the elementary school."' 
While it is probably true that eight years ago, when this was written, geog- 
raphy as taught in the primary grades of the best city schools included all the 
studies relating to the plant and the animal that were at that time considered 
necessary, it is also true that at the present time much of this study is iutro- 
