What is to be the policy of the state in agriculture-education? Where is the headship to lie? What are to be the spheres of the different institutions and agencies? What board or agency is to correlate and unify all the parts, to insure a progressive and well-proportioned program?
Outline of a state plan.
A general law should define the state's policy in education by means of agriculture and in the development of rural affairs, and outline methods that it proposes to follow, so that the work may be coördinated throughout the state and that a definite plan may be projected. The duties of all the classes of institutions should be defined and relations should be established between them. The people should know to what they are committing themselves.
This law should not, of course, be designed to suppress the activities of any institution. It might not place any institution under the domination of any other institution. The schools, colleges, and other institutions for the betterment of agriculture should have their own autonomy and responsibility, and they should be developed to the highest point of efficiency in their respective spheres.
The fundamental consideration in such a law should be to develop the agriculture and advance the country life of the state by organizing the work of all the agencies on a systematic plan, so that an orderly development may be secured. Such a recognized general policy should do much to insure each institution in the system its proper state support.
It is probably too much to expect that a fundamental state law could be projected abstractly. Laws are gradually built up to meet urgent needs as they arise; but if the principles are kept in mind, the making of separate and special laws might be so guided as to produce a harmonious result.
Some of the particular points that I think should be desired in such a law or series of laws are these:
1. It should propound a policy in the development of country life;
2. It should name the classes of institutions that it proposes to utilize in the execution of this policy;
3. It should define the functions of the different classes of institutions;
4. It should state the organic relationships that ought to exist between them all;
5. It might provide an advisory council to guide agricultural education and advancement in the state. I think that the directors or responsible heads of such institutions established for the betterment of agriculture throughout the state should constitute such consulting body, to which questions of policy and procedure should be referred and which, of course, should serve without remuneration. This council might include also the commissioner of agriculture and the superintendent of public instruction. It might be well to have one, two, or three other persons appointed by the governor. The council would constitute a natural conference of the parties that are immediately responsible for this work, without taking the management of any institution out of the hands of an existing board. The idea of such a body is to further the coördination by conference, rather than to have plenary power. Its moral influence ought to be all the greater because of its lack of conferred power.
A state extension program.
As soon as a state has produced strong institutions for research and education in agriculture, it will need to provide an agency for utilizing the results. A state extension program, on a coördinating plan between all the institutions but proceeding from one educational center, and which all the institutions would have a right to use for the spread of their work among the people, could accomplish vast benefits. It should comprise institutes, utilize the state system of fairs educationally, afford an organ for the making of agricultural surveys and demonstrations, spread an educational propaganda on the agricultural law, collect and collate the experience of the farmers of the state. It could assort and apply the information that the state, at great expense, accumulates through its various separate agencies. It could utilize the students, whom the state provides with free tuition. The germ of such an enterprise already exists in most of the states.