photo Etfe.ca; 
Vol. LXIX. No. 4041 
NEW YORK, APRIL 9, 1910 
WEEKLY, JljOO PER YEAR 
A LITTLE LEARNING. 
The Farm Child’s Education. 
We have been told in classic rhyme of the danger 
of “a little learning,” and surely in these later days 
of short cuts and hurry, the danger has grown none 
the less marked. From many sides of the educational 
question we hear the cry going up for vocational 
training. Some of these cries come from theorists 
and some from those interested in furnishing that 
particular brand of modern education, and some from 
those intensely practical people who are largely re¬ 
sponsible for the strenuous speed with which we are 
supposed to be rushing toward our individual goals. 
I certainly have no disparaging word to say against a 
man being on to his “job,” 
being equipped for his 
special line of work, hav¬ 
ing a complete knowledge 
of all the technical para¬ 
phernalia of his calling, 
work or profession, but I 
object to his getting this 
special training instead or 
in place of a general edu¬ 
cational, intellectual and 
moral development. 
We have in America 
to-day more need for a 
higher conception of purer 
morality, ethical hones¬ 
ty, civic righteousness, 
clearer thinking and pa¬ 
triotic politics, than we 
have for a simple voca¬ 
tional training, that shall 
merely equip its owner 
to “get there.” I think 
first we should make a 
special effort to educate 
our coming citizens in 
the direction of building 
them up, and not with 
the idea that this one is 
to Le'a teacher, that one 
an engineer, the other 
one a preacher, lawyer, 
forester, doctor, farmer 
or merchant; but with 
the broad fundamental 
plan of making as many 
well-educated men and 
women, good citizens, 
good neighbors, good 
voters, good patriots, 
whose patriotism begins 
right at home; good 
husbands and wives. Ed¬ 
ucate a voung man properly and we have started 
him toward being this good man, and have assuredly 
laid in his structure the foundation of success, what¬ 
ever may be his calling, and the first essential in any 
subsequent vocational training it may seem wise to 
give him. A farm student who only knows how 
plants grow, feed and make seed, the functions of 
feeding stuffs, the use of lime and fertilizer, knows 
when to plow, sow and reap, of course knows much, 
but he is equipped for good farming and good citi¬ 
zenship about on a par with the preacher for effective 
preaching who has confined his studies to dogmatic 
theology or the art of exegetically building a sermon. 
A man who can merely farm and make money, 
without imprinting the stamp of his individuality, his 
thought, his unselfish loyalty, into the life of his 
community, so that that community is the better and 
finer for its having fostered and allowed him to 
flourish in it, may be a mighty good farmer and use¬ 
ful as an industrial example, but he is a deplorably 
poor citizen. It appears to me that we have come to 
a time in our national, civic and political develop¬ 
ment when we have most urgent need of strong, pa¬ 
triotic citizens to take in hand and unravel some of 
the twisted questions that have grown out of our 
systems and practices. I believe that the conditions 
of rural living will have to produce these strong, ac¬ 
tive, capable men, and on this account I would ask 
that we do not train our children to the restrictions 
of a vocation, but that we educate them, to develop 
them in all the attributes of men and women on whom 
society and government may safely place their bur¬ 
dens. Certainly if a man is to be a lawyer he should 
have the best legal training, if a machinist he must 
have all his inventive faculties trained and the skill 
of his hand made exact, if he is going to be a farmer 
he should be taught, should learn and know all the 
things his fields, his flocks and herds shall demand 
of him, but in all cases these vocational equipments 
should follow and not displace the earlier education. 
There are no short cuts in education. It must 
come by the slow 'processes of growth, properly ad¬ 
vised and directed. It means work and environment. 
We may make “experts”—whatever that means in the 
professional world—and professors in agricultural 
matters from books, but we can’t make farmers that 
way. We can give the young farmer, and rarely the 
old one, invaluable help and direction in the schools 
and through the books, but the real farmer writes 
his thesis furrow deep in his fields, and the intelligent 
completeness with which he writes it, and its signifi¬ 
cance as an individual performance, depend wholly 
upon his training as a man. 
I advocate and in one case have successfully as¬ 
sisted in introducing some agricultural studies in our 
rural schools, so that our boys and girls may early 
learn of some of the things that may be learned about 
the great occupation of farming; that they may know 
that there have been books printed about the soil, 
the farm animals, crops and the other familiar home 
surroundings. But I look for the best results from 
this teaching to come in an aroused interest in farm 
things, and in the educational culture that follows 
the study and contemplation of nature. We expect 
these students better to understand the primal im¬ 
portance of the relations the farm and farmer bear 
to the life and institu¬ 
tions of the nation. We 
hope that this aroused 
interest in things rural 
will influence more of 
our brighter boys to 
look further into con¬ 
ditions social and politi¬ 
cal as they now exist, 
and induce them to cast 
their lots with us who 
remain in the country 
for various good and 
satisfactory reasons. To 
such we would surely 
not offer the narrow in¬ 
ducement of a strictly 
tech/nical or vocational 
training. In his public 
school days I would 
much prefer that my boy 
have inspired in him an 
abiding love of English 
literature, and all that 
means to the cultured 
man, than that he should 
hold the fairest sheep¬ 
skin from the best agri¬ 
cultural college in the 
land—and his mother’s 
prayer and my hope is 
that he will first be a 
good man and then a 
good farmer. I hear 
many men talk to us 
farmers from the various 
platforms, and the thing 
that usually most im¬ 
presses me in these talk¬ 
ers is the limitation if 
not the danger in a lit¬ 
tle learning. These 
speakers are often ad¬ 
vertised as “experts” and are very practical and of 
course well-meaning and generally helpful, but from 
the addresses of most of them there is such a painful 
•absence of culture, such an obvious lack of intellectual 
breadth, that the messages they bring to me fail to find 
lodgment, by the sheer lack of force, and my sus¬ 
picion is that this one thing, by which this man just 
keeps me awake, is all the poor fellow knows. 
W. F. MCSPARRAN. 
MULCH METHOD OF CULTIVATION. 
On page 22, Win. Hotaling, Columbia County, New 
York, says, “I have a firm conviction that the mulch 
method, no matter how carried out in this section, 
must be more or less a failure, while I know of other 
places where 1 am just as sure no system of cultiva¬ 
tion would be an entire success.” Mr. Hotaling is 
right in recognizing the soundness of different meth- 
A ROOT CROP AND THE TAP ROOT OF THE HOME. Fig. 168 . 
