Manual Training Department of the Same School.
Manual Training in a Small Rural School, Edgar County, Illinois.
As Dr. Warren H. Wilson states so well, “The teaching of agriculture is not for the making of farmers, but men and women. It must be more than a mere school of rural money-making. The teaching of agriculture needed in the schools is for the purpose of training in country life. The country school must make the open country worth while. It will teach agriculture as the basis of an ideal life, rather than as a quick way of profits.” However, though this is strictly true of the boys who study agriculture, if they can actually become proficient enough to give their fathers points, the evident “practical” value of the modern school will appeal so strongly to the farmers that its future support is assured. The farmers cannot be blamed for having little love for the school which alienates their children from country life; but schools which really train for rural citizenship will be appreciated by the country folks. And in time there will be more John Swaneys, men who will show their love for a real school for country life by endowing it after the manner of the old New England academies.
Elementary Agriculture and School Gardens
To delay the teaching of agriculture until the high school years would be to lose its most strategic value. It should be a regular course in all rural schools, beginning before the natural rural interests have been turned to discontent. As a rural educator says, “Let them early learn to know nature and to love it, and to know that they are indigenous to the soil; that here they must live and die. Give us many such schools, and the farm youth is in no danger of leaving the farm.”
Although agricultural teaching has been slowly winning its way into our American schools, it has been a feature of even the primary schools in France since 1879 and in most other European countries more recently. The wonderful agricultural revival of Denmark dates from the introduction of this subject in the schools. Elementary agriculture is taught in every rural district of the land, and it gives the children that love for the very soil which makes Danish patriotism unique.
The Macdonald movement in Canada, backed by the government, has put that country well in the lead on our continent in this matter. It is spreading fast now in the States, however. Seven states in the South alone require by law agricultural instruction in rural schools. Many states now require normal school students to prepare to teach the subject as an essential branch of rural education; so that its future is assured.
The laboratory work in school gardens is a most interesting feature of great value. Only recently has the garden movement developed in America, beginning in Roxbury, Boston, in 1891; but every European nation but England popularized it long ago. Comenius believed that “a garden should be connected with every school,” and his country, Moravia, early enacted this conviction into law. The rural schools of Prussia introduced school gardens as early as 1819; and they are now common everywhere in continental Europe. The movement is now spreading fast in this country and has proved very successful in stimulating interest in listless boys. In Dayton, Ohio, school gardens were established in 1903, and it has been observed there that boys taking gardening make 30% more progress than others in their studies. The moral effects are sometimes notable, especially in vicious surroundings.