Part 5 (1/2)

_Special local schools for agriculture._[2]

I am committed to the idea that there should be strong local centers of interest in rural communities, for thereby we develop local pride and incentive. There are several ways, on the educational side, of developing local inst.i.tutions and interest.

[2] See ”The State and the Farmer,” p. 150; ”The Training of Farmers,” p. 167; ”Cyclopedia of American Agriculture,” IV, p. 474.

The first way is to make it possible and practicable for the existing public schools to introduce agriculture and domestic economy. I suggest that many or most localities would do better to develop the country-life work in the existing schools than to ask the legislature for a separate special school. We have only begun to understand what such redirected and expanded schools may accomplish.

Another means of securing local knowledge and developing local interest is by the establis.h.i.+ng of demonstration farms and field-laboratories. It is doubtful whether a permanent demonstration farm in a community is desirable; in general, the demonstration may be temporary, depending on the presence in the community of some special difficulty. In some circ.u.mstances, the enterprise may amount to a local testing station.

Enterprises of this sort are bound to take on great importance in the redirection of country life.

Local societies and organizations may be encouraged to take up educational and experiment work.

Departments of agriculture will probably be added by colleges or other educational inst.i.tutions, and these will serve as local centers at the same time that they reach the larger field.

Again, a winter school or short-course of, say, a month's or two months'

duration may be held in different parts of the state. The localities should cooperate in the expenses, thereby becoming partakers in the enterprise.

Eventually there should be an agricultural agent resident in every county, and perhaps even for smaller regions, whose office should be to give advice, to keep track of animal and plant diseases and pests and secure the services of experts in their control, to organize conferences, winter-courses, and the like, and otherwise to be to the agricultural affairs what the pastor is to religious affairs and the teacher to educational affairs. (See ”The Training of Farmers,” p. 257.)

Finally, we may ask the state to place a special school of agriculture in the locality, but only after it is clear that other means cannot produce the desired results. An unattached school of agriculture is not an easy thing to administer successfully, even at the best; and the difficulty would be all the greater if its care were to be confined to local boards, which would probably have small understanding of the peculiar educational requirements. It is probable that a state may wisely establish a very few special schools, but an educational program needs first to be worked out, a competent system of control must be found, and the people should know in advance what is involved. It is not enough merely that a locality desires a school: the larger question is the state's interest. In all local enterprises of this kind in which state aid is asked for, it ought to be understood that the locality itself is to cooperate in the securing of equipment and funds.

_The lessons of experience._

The demand for agriculture-education is now widespread; the subject is becoming ”popular.” All kinds of plans are being tried or discussed.

Persons do not seem to realize that we have had about one hundred years of experience in the United States in agriculture-education, and that this experience ought to point the way to success, or at least to the avoiding of serious errors. The agricultural colleges have come up through a long and difficult route, and their present success is not accidental, nor is it easy to duplicate or imitate. First and last, about every conceivable plan has been tried by them, or by others in their time or preceding them; and this experience ought to be utilized by the other inst.i.tutions that are now being projected in all parts of the country.

Plans that certainly cannot succeed are now being projected. The projectors seem to proceed on the idea that it requires no background of experience to enable an inst.i.tution to teach agriculture, whereas agriculture-education is the most difficult and also the most expensive of all education yet undertaken.

To teach agriculture merely by giving a new direction or vocabulary to botany, chemistry, geology, physics, and the like is not to teach agriculture at all, although it may greatly improve these subjects themselves. To put a school of agriculture in the hands of some good science-teacher in a general college faculty with the idea that he can cover the agricultural work and at the same time keep up his own department, is wholly ineffective (except temporarily) and out of character with the demands of the twentieth century (but in high-schools a good science teacher may handle the work, or an agriculture teacher may carry the science). To suppose that ”agriculture” is one subject for a college course, to be sufficiently represented by a ”chair,” is to miss the point of modern progress. To give only laboratory and recitation courses may be better than nothing, but land-teaching, either as a part of the inst.i.tution or on adjacent farms, must be incorporated with the customary school work if the best results are to be secured. To make a school farm pay for itself and for the school is impossible unless the school is a very poor or exceedingly small one; and yet this old fallacy is alive at the present day. To have a distant farm to visit and look at, in order to ”apply” the ”teachings” of chemistry, botany, and the like, falls far short of real agriculture instruction. To develop a ”model farm” that shall be a pattern to the mult.i.tude in exact farming is an exploded notion: there are many farmers' farms that are better adapted to such purpose (the demonstration farm is the modern adaptation of the idea, and it is educationally sound).

To teach agriculture of college grade requires not only persons who know the subject, but an organization well informed on the educational administration that is required. There must be a body of experience in this line of work behind any teaching on a college plane that shall be really useful; when this body of experience does not exist, the work must necessarily grow slowly and be under the most expert direction. The presumption is still against successful agriculture work in the literary and liberal arts inst.i.tutions, because such teaching demands a point of view on education that the men in these inst.i.tutions are likely not to possess. Agriculture cannot be introduced in the same way that a department or chair of history or mathematics can be organized; it requires a different outlook on educational procedure, a different order of equipment and of activities, and its own type of administration.

I am much afraid that some of the newer unattached inst.i.tutions, in their eagerness to make departures and to be self-sufficient, will not profit by our long development, and that the secondary schools and others may make many of the mistakes that the regular colleges of agriculture long ago have made. The presumption is against any school that expects to develop merely a local enterprise, without reference to other schools or to experience.

I am sure we all want to encourage the introduction of agriculture into all educational inst.i.tutions, but we should not be misled merely by the word ”agriculture”; and in the interest of good work we should be careful not to encourage any enterprise of this kind until convinced that it has been well studied and that it will be administered in the interest of rural progress.

WOMAN'S CONTRIBUTION TO THE COUNTRY-LIFE MOVEMENT

On the women depend to a greater degree than we realize the nature and extent of the movement for a better country life, wholly aside from their personal influence as members of families. Farming is a co-partners.h.i.+p business. It is a partners.h.i.+p between a man and a woman.

There is no other great series of occupations in which such co-partners.h.i.+p is so essential to success. The home is on the farm, and a part of it. The number of middle-aged unmarried men living on farms is very small. It is quite impossible to live on a farm and to run it advantageously without family relation.

It follows, then, that if the farming business is to contribute to the redirection of country life, the woman has responsibilities as well as the man. As the strength of a chain is determined by its weakest link, so will the progress of rural civilization be determined by the weakness of the farm as an economic unit, or by the weakness of the home as a domestic and social unit.

Now, the farmer himself cannot have great influence in redirecting the affairs of his community until he is first master of his own problem,--that is, until he is a first-cla.s.s farmer. In the same way, a woman cannot expect to have much influence in furthering the affairs of her rural community until she also is master of her own problem, and her problem is primarily the home-making part of the farm. In the mastering of his or her own problem, the farmer or his wife may also contribute directly to the progress of the community. Every advance in the management of the household contributes to the general welfare: it sets new ideas under way.