In the United States a number of agricultural societies were formed early in the century, and a private school of agriculture was opened in Maine, in 1821, and another in Connecticut, in 1824. With the opening-up of the new West to farming and the change of the East to manufacturing, after about 1825, the agitation for agricultural education for a time died out, reappearing in Michigan, in 1850. In that year a new constitution was adopted which required the legislature to create a State School of Agriculture, and in 1857 the Michigan Agricultural College opened its doors. Two years later a "Farmers' High School," which later became the Pennsylvania State College, was opened in central Pennsylvania. In 1862, in the midst of the greatest civil war in history, the American Congress passed the very important Morrill Act, which provided for the creation of a college to teach agriculture, mechanic arts, and military science in each of the American States. It was a decade before many of these institutions opened, and for a time they amounted to but little. They had but few students, little money, and the instruction was very elementary and but poorly organized. Cornell University, in New York State, was one of the first (1868) of the new institutions to get under way and find its work. The Centennial Exposition (1876) gave the needed emphasis to the engineering courses, and by 1880 these were well established. The agricultural courses did not flourish for two decades longer, and the military science not until the World War, Despite feeble beginnings, the result of the aid given by the national government has in time proved very valuable, and to-day very large sums of money are being appropriated by the American States and Territories for instruction in engineering, agriculture, home economics, and related sciences, and large numbers of students are now enrolled for this technical training.
THE RECENT NEW INTEREST IN AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION. Since the latter part of the nineteenth century agricultural education has awakened new interest in many lands. The German States have created many schools for instruction in agriculture and forestry. Denmark has regenerated the rural life of the nation (R. 370) by its "People's High Schools" and its special schools for instruction in agriculture. Italy has recently made special efforts to extend agricultural instruction to its people. Canada, Australia, and New Zealand have established agricultural schools. In Algiers, Morocco, Japan, China, the Philippines, and India, good beginnings in agricultural education have been made.
As agricultural knowledge has been worked out and classified, and agricultural instruction has become organized, it has become possible to relegate some of the more elementary instruction to the school below. This was done in European nations before it took place in the United States. In 1888 the first American agricultural high school was established in Minnesota. By 1898 there were ten such schools in the United States, but since 1900 the development has been very rapid. By 1920 probably a thousand high schools were offering instruction in agriculture, while elementary instruction in agriculture had been introduced into the rural and village schools of practically every American agricultural State.
The agricultural schools, colleges, and experimental stations established by the national, state, and local educational authorities of different nations have added another new division to the work of public education, and one which is both very costly and very remunerative. Out of the work of these schools has come a vast quantity of useful knowledge, and hundreds of important applications of science to farm and home life. Old breeds in stock and grains have been improved, new breeds have been derived, and productivity has been greatly increased. Through the teachings of home economics the farmer's home is being transformed, while the applications of science made in these schools are modifying almost every phase of agricultural life and rural living.
MEDICINE AND SANITARY SCIENCE. Closely related to sanitary, biological, and public-health engineering has been the enormous recent development of medicine and surgery. Within half a century instruction in these subjects has been entirely transformed, and large and costly laboratories and hospitals are now required for the work. There has also been much specialization in medical training, within recent years, and especially has preventive medicine been developed. Extending the newly found biological and medical knowledge to the animal and vegetable worlds has resulted in a similar development of veterinary medicine [10] and plant pathology. A combination of medical knowledge with engineering and chemistry has produced the sanitary engineer, while medical knowledge and applied biology has produced the public-health expert. [11]
So important, too, has the control of all kinds of disease become, now that people, animals, insects, plants, and goods move so freely along the great trade routes of the world, that nations everywhere feel the necessity, now that scientific research has revealed to questioning man the methods of transmission of the diseases which once decimated armies and cities, destroyed stocks, and ruined harvests, of developing ample quarantine service and medical staffs to cope with diseases—human, animal, and plant—from without, and to control those which arise within. Nations too poor as yet to provide such service for themselves are today having such provision made for them by other nations, or by great national foundations, [12] so that other lands may be protected from the ravages of their diseases and the economic wealth of all may be increased. The element of Christian charity has also entered into the service, the labors of Dr. Grenfell in Labrador, and the work of the Rockefeller medical and surgical boat traveling among the Philippine Islands and its hookworm work on every continent, being good examples of such Christian effort.
[Illustration: FIG. 232. THE PEKING UNION MEDICAL COLLEGE A well-equipped center for instruction in western medicine, endowed by the Rockefeller Foundation. A similar school is being created at Shanghai, in central China. Existing medical schools at two other points, and nineteen hospitals scattered over the Republic, have also been aided by this American foundation. In addition, many medical missionaries, Chinese physicians, and nurses have been sent to the United States for study. To improve health standards and living conditions throughout the world is the purpose of the work of the Foundation, which now has work under way on every continent.]
APPLIED SCIENCE THE NATION'S PROTECTOR. To-day applied science stands everywhere as the nation's protector. Applied in sanitation and preventive medicine it has reduced the death rate, prolonged life, and protects homes from many hidden dangers. In the engineering fields it has transformed the face of the earth and all our ways of living and doing business. Applied to industry it builds factories and railways, and works out new processes to eliminate wastes, improve production, and utilize by-products. Thousands of labor-saving inventions owe their origin to a new truth worked out in some laboratory, and applied in another. Applied chemistry has wrought wonders in advancing industry, protecting the public welfare, eliminating unnecessary labor, and making life richer for all.
To-day the engineer with his railway and irrigating dam and power plant in the desert has replaced the monk as the vanguard of the forces of civilization. The scientist in his laboratory in part replaces armies and navies as the protector of the nation's safety. The scientifically trained Red Cross nurse is fast replacing the unskilled devotion of the older Sister of Charity. The doctor and the surgeon at the medical mission are carrying a very practical type of Christian civilization into far-away lands. The laboratory expert in the quarantine station has succeeded the priest with bell and book in keeping pestilence away from the land. The public-health officer in the little town, and the sanitary engineer in the city, protect the health and happiness of millions of homes. The plant pathologist and veterinarian guard the crops and herds from which food and clothing are derived. The scientific experts in plant and animal industries work steadily to improve breeds and increase yields. When one compares present-day scientific knowledge with that represented in the thirteenth-century Encyclopaedia of Bartholomew Anglicus (R. 77); our modern knowledge of diseases with the theories as to disease advanced by Hippocrates (p. 197), and taught for so many centuries in Christian Europe; our modern knowledge of bacterial transmission with the mediaeval theories of Divine wrath and diabolic action; our modern ability to annihilate time and space compared with early nineteenth-century conditions; or modern applied science with the very limited technical knowledge possessed by the guilds of the later Middle Ages—the stories of Aladdin and his wonderful lamp seem to have been even more than realized in our practical everyday life.
Engineering, agriculture, and modern medicine stand as three of the great applications of modern science to human affairs, and as three of the most important and costly additions to state educational effort made since the time when nations began to accept the political philosophy of the eighteenth-century reformers and to take over the school from the Church, because by so doing the interests of the State could better be advanced thereby.