The country has been spanned and crossed in every direction by great systems of standard and interurban rail-ways. Automobiles are in popular use on the highways and powerful tractors do the threshing, corn-shelling and plowing on the farm. Oil engines and electric motors are in use on the farms and in the homes of the people. The last of the good agricultural lands have been opened for settlement and are now occupied. Agriculture, animal husbandry, horticulture, dairying and even housekeeping have been reduced to a science, by the statement of essential principles, the same as in architecture and civil-engineering. Success in them depends on a practical knowledge of the art, as well as a theoretical knowledge of the science.
A few years ago the pressing demand was for teachers and normal instructors for their preparation. The demand for teachers in constantly increasing numbers continues, but it is now rivaled by the present demand for young people, who understand the principles of mechanical construction, whose hands have been trained to use costly and delicate machinery aright and properly care for it. Success and self-support on the farm as well as elsewhere now require the trained hand as well as the intelligent mind.
INDEPENDENT HOMES
Self-support is essential to the possession of a permanent and happy home.
No home can be permanent while there is no assured means of support. While the father depends on uncertain day labor and the mother knows little or nothing of economy in the household and even less about the care, training and discipline of children, there can be but little progress made in the home or church life.
Dependent homes mean dependent churches, while prosperous homes mean self-supporting churches. In this fact is found a great motive for the church in her educational missionary work to make suitable provision for teaching the young the useful or necessary arts of life, and some knowledge of the sciences, while offering to them the bread and the water of life, through the establishment of christian educational institutions.
DOMESTIC TRAINING
A recent debate in the House of Congress at Washington developed a unanimous sentiment, that a good cook is more cultured than a pianist, and that girls should not be allowed piano lessons until they learn how to cook good biscuits. We have read of girls "whose heads were stuffed with useless knowledge, but not one in twenty knew the things that would be serviceable to her through life. They could not sew or cook."
At Oak Hill it is different. Every girl at ten begins to take her monthly turn in learning to cook, mend and sew. She is taught the art and the rules of these useful employments the same as those of reading, writing and arithmetic in the school room.
The business of housekeeping is thus early introduced to the mind of the child, to awaken its thoughtfulness and develop efficiency in the future work of managing a home. This connects the teaching of the school with the life of the home. It makes the instruction a real and practical help instead of being merely theoretical. It affords pleasant and profitable employment to the pupils during spare moments that would otherwise be lost in idle loafing or play.