America's contribution to the country-life situation is a new purpose and method in education, which is larger and freer than anything that has yet been developed elsewhere, and which it is difficult for the Old World fully to comprehend.
The founding of the great line of public-maintained colleges and experiment stations means the application of science to the reconstruction of a society; and it is probably destined to be the most extensive and important application of the scientific method to social problems that is now anywhere under way.
The dangers in the situation.
It is not to extol our education experiment that I am making this discussion, but to measure the situation; and I think that there are perils ahead of us, which we should now recognize.
There are two grave dangers in the organization of the present situation: (1) the danger that we shall not develop a harmonious plan, and thereby shall introduce competition rather than coöperation between agencies; (2) the danger that the newer agencies will not profit fully by our long experience in agriculture-teaching.
An internal danger is the giving of instruction in colleges of agriculture that is not founded on good preparation of the student or is not organized on a sound educational basis. Winter-course and special students may be admitted, and extension work must be done; but the first responsibility of a college of agriculture is to give a good educational course: it deals with education rather than with agriculture, and its success in the end will depend on the reputation it makes with school men.
There is also danger that new institutions will begin their extension work in advance of their academic educational work; whereas, extension and propaganda can really succeed only when there is a good background of real accomplishment at home.
There is necessity that we now reorganize much of our peripatetic teaching. It is no longer sufficient to call persons together and exhort them and talk to them. We have come about to the end of agricultural propaganda. All field and itinerant effort should have a follow-up system with the purpose to set every man to work on his own place with problems that will test him. We have been testing soils and crops and fertilizers and live-stock and machines: it is now time to test the man.
There is also danger that we consolidate too many rural schools in towns. If it is true that the best country life is developed when persons live actually on their farms, then we should be cautious of all movements that tend to centralize their interests too far from home, and particularly to centralize them in a town or in a village. The good things should come to the farm rather than that the farm should be obliged to go to the good things.