LEAFLET IV.
WHAT IS AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION?[5]
By L. H. BAILEY.
Agricultural education has made great progress within the past few years. Methods are crystallizing and at the same time the field is enlarging. We once thought of agricultural education as wholly special or professional, but we now conceive of it as an integral part of general and fundamental educational policy. As a college or university subject it is necessarily technical and semi-professional; but college work must articulate with the common-school work, as language and science now articulate with the schools. That is, agricultural subjects are now to be considered as a part of primary and secondary school work, leading naturally to special work in the same subjects for those who desire technical training. In the schools the subjects are to be treated non-professionally, as primary means of educating the child. The reason for using these subjects as means of educating lies in the principle that the child should be educated in terms of its own life rather than wholly in subjects that are foreign to its horizon and experience. It is most surprising that, while the theory of education is that the person shall be trained into efficiency, we nevertheless have employed subjects that have little relation to the individual child's effectiveness.
Not long since my father showed me a letter that he received from a school girl in 1851. It read as follows: "I seat myself expressly for the purpose to finish this letter which has been long begun. I go to school room to Mr. Wells and study parsing mental Philosophy grammar and penciling." This sounds as if it came from "The Complete Letter-Writer." This person lived on a farm. She lives on a farm to this day. Her parents and grandparents lived on a farm. The family had no expectation of living elsewhere than on a farm. Yet, in her entire school life, I presume there was not a single hour devoted to any subject directly connected with the farm or with the country. If her studies touched life in any way that she could comprehend, it was probably in habits of thought of the city and of the academician rather than in anything that appealed to her as related to the life she was to lead. It is small wonder that the farm has been devoid of ideals, and that the attraction has been to leave it. The direction of the stream determines the course of the river.
The future course of education will develop many means of training the child mind. Heretofore these means have been few and the result has been narrow. We shall see agricultural, commercial, social subjects put into pedagogic form and be made the agencies whereby minds are drawn out. These will be at least as efficient as the customary methods that we happen thus far to have employed. How much of one or how much of another is a detail that must be left to the future. Nor does it follow that the old-time subjects are to pass away. They will be an important part of the system, but not the whole system. These new subjects are now coming into the schools as rapidly, perhaps, as they can be assimilated. It is a general feeling that our schools already are overcrowded with subjects; and this may be true. The trouble is that while we are introducing new ideas as to subjects, we are still holding to old ideas as to curriculums and courses of study. We will break up our schools into different kinds; we will employ more teachers; we will not endeavor to train all children alike; we will find that we may secure equal results from many kinds of training; we will consider the effect on the pupil to be of much greater importance than the developing of the particular subject that he pursues; there are many men of many minds; some system will be evolved whereby individual capabilities will be developed to the full; the means will be related to the pupil: one of the factors will be subjects making up the environment of the pupil that lives in the country.
My plea, therefore, is that agricultural and country life subjects become the means of educating some of the pupils of at least some of the schools. To be sure, we have already introduced "natural science" into many of the schools, but, for the most, part, this has worked down from the college and, necessarily, it usually stops at the high school. We need something much more vital for the secondary schools than science as commonly taught. The great nature-study movement is an expression, as yet imperfect, of the feeling that there should be some living connection between the school life and the real life.
A college of agriculture, therefore, is as much interested in the common schools as a college of arts and sciences is. It should be a part of a system, however informal that system may be, not an establishment isolated from other educational agencies. But even as a college it will reach more persons than it has ever reached in the past. In any self-sustaining commonwealth it is probable that one-third of the people must be intimately associated with the soil. These people need to be as well-trained as those who follow the mechanic trades or the professions. It is immensely difficult to put these agricultural subjects into teachable form and to reach the agricultural people in a way that will mean much to them, because agriculture is a compound of many wonderfully diverse trades in every conceivable kind of natural conditions. Nor can one institution in each large state or province hope eventually to reach all these people, any more than one institution can reach all those who would best be taught in terms of books. But there must be at least one institution that is well equipped for the very highest kind of effort in these fields; Congress long ago recognized this fact in the establishment of the land-grant colleges, and all persons who are informed on agricultural education also now recognize it. The agricultural colleges have been handicapped from the first for lack of funds. It is now coming to be recognized that the highest kind of effort in these colleges cannot be sustained on a farm that pays for itself nor by means that are copied from the customary college work in "humanities" and "science." If it is to be efficient, agricultural education of a university grade is probably more expensive to equip and maintain than any other kind of education.
Once it was thought that the agricultural college should be wholly separate from any "classical" institution. The oldest of the existing American agricultural colleges, the Michigan institution, is established on this principle. So are the Massachusetts, Iowa and Pennsylvania colleges and a number of others. It is natural that this should have been the feeling in the original movement for the establishment of these colleges, for the movement was itself a protest and revolt from the existing education. Time, however, has put agricultural subjects on an equal pedagogical plane with other subjects, and there is no more reason why the agriculture should be segregated by itself than that the architecture or law or fine arts should be. The agricultural colleges connected with universities are now beginning to grow rapidly. This is illustrated in the great development of the agricultural colleges at the universities in Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Nebraska, Missouri, Ohio, and elsewhere. It was once thought that the agricultural student would be "looked down upon" in a university or in a college with other departments. This was once true. It was true once, also, of the student in natural science and mechanic arts. Pioneers are always marked men. The only way to place agricultural students on an equality with other students is to place them on an equality.