# Popular Science Monthly/Volume 79/October 1911/Agriculture in the High School

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* AGRICULTURE IN THE HIGH SCHOOL
By JOSHIA MAIN
WESTERN KANSAS STATE NORMAL SCHOOL, HAYS, KANS.
THE proposition to put agricultural courses into the existing high schools may seem, at first thought, to be merely one of adding another subject to the curriculum. But experience shows that a curriculum may not be dealt with arbitrarily. To successfully inaugurate this subject it is necessary that study be made of its purposes and, more especially, of the adjustment of this to other high-school subjects.
The subjects of the present curriculum most concerned in this adjustment are the sciences. These, "the most precious achievement of the race," are themselves comparatively new to the curriculum and the promise with which their introduction into the school was made has fallen far short of fulfillment, so that their status is at present far from a final adjustment. And their close relation to the new subject, agriculture, makes the problem of the adjustment of all a single problem.
​The strength of the agriculturists' argument for the inauguration of courses in the schools has usually pertained to the immense economic significance. But the successful teaching of agriculture in the school along with the traditional courses depends, like all the rest, upon its being regarded and developed as a humanistic subject as well. It will have to "make good" pedagogically if it is to have a permanent place. But it is also likely that pedagogy will have to recognize some new educational values before the subject can be considered in good standing by schoolmen. When educational ideals include the highest ideals of social efficiency the economic will, of course, be included. But until there is a recognition of something more than economic ideals there may be danger of the industrial reform getting in the way of educational progress, to the ultimate detriment of both.
A usable pedagogy is necessary to the solution of this problem. If pedagogy does not afford the principles and terms with which to treat the subject it is a sign that we need a new pedagogy. Those who seek unity in education should insist that the "science of education" proceed to attack the problem with such means as it possesses. The result may be worth as much to education as to agriculture.
Without guiding educational principles the common mistake regarding this subject is to suppose that agricultural materials have inherent qualities which determine how they should be marshaled in the course. The result is the confusing variety of mechanically graded topics which secondary courses in agriculture present. As a matter of fact any purely agricultural theme will have phases which might be appropriate for any grade. The thesis here maintained is that the child's mind and body, rather than the materials, should be the controlling factors that determine all courses of study and that in the high school these must first, in this case, determine the organization of the sciences. For the ​only features of agriculture that have pedagogic cohesion are the sciences involved.
Presented as they have been without any experience in their utilization having been afforded, high school sciences have not kept pace with educational needs. The fault seems to be that the student has been held too rigidly to the accuracy of an accumulated knowledge with too little experience with the method of its acquisition. Pure science can be but imperfectly appreciated by the adolescent who still retains his dominant childish interest in the use, rather than the organization and structure, of things. And if science could be taught as pure science its destructive tendency, striking as it does at the root of authority, is of questionable propriety where it does not at the same time furnish a philosophy of life. It is especially necessary under a rational government, such as ours, that it be made humanistic. And humanistic science is applied science.
The purposes of high school agriculture, therefore, await the reform of the high school sciences; and a reform in the direction of applied science is evident to many science teachers who have no special interest ​in agriculture. The biologists, especially, are gravitating toward the use of the familiar things with which agriculture must deal.If the agriculturists do not take advantage of this it will be their own fault. For if the scientists are to assume that part of the burden for the sake of the sciences, such "loss of jurisdiction" over their subject should not be taken amiss by the agriculturists, who may rest assured that the others have no means of cheating so as to achieve their "disciplinary" results wthout thereby doing that which is best for agriculture. Only in making the two phases of work complementary is agriculture securing a permanent place in the course. It may be that keeping the two interests uncorrelated will not only result in the continued decadence of high school science, but will also keep the subject of agriculture pedagogically outside the course of study, however much pains may be used to print it in. Agriculture in the high school will bear one of three relations to the fundamental sciences, namely, it will be taught before the related sciences are taught, or while they are being taught, or after they have been taught.
The success of agriculture in the high school depends upon its being made of such dignity as to challenge the powers of the better students.And the better students will not be attracted to a subject that is long kept in its elementary stages. There is more to lose than to gain in ​attempting to popularize the subject by writing all of the science out of it. If it is not based upon the fundamental sciences it is not secondary but elementary, and, as such ignores the genetic stages of development usually represented by the high school adolescent. Therefore, if agriculture is to be made a secondary school subject it must be put on a secondary plane—that is, it must be made scientific by the utilization of the fundamental sciences. It should not be divorced from the high school sciences in order to precede them.
The deferring of the agricultural work in the high school until after the underlying sciences have been mastered will be at the very imminent risk of starving the peculiar vocational interest upon which its success depends. Investigations as well as experience show that the interest in vocation is born in adolescence and that the manual vocations normally precede the others. It is a maxim of education that to develop a useful instinct it should be exercised and directed during its nascent period. However judicious and far-sighted the plans of the teacher may be regarding the student's high school course, neither the student nor his parents may be safely left indefinitely in the dark regarding them. The average student in the high school should see a generous amount of purpose in all of his work and have the benefit of such experiences as are to be gained only by applying it to its purpose, even though it mean, from the viewpoint of the teacher, a compromise of his science.
Prescribing high school science work to precede the agriculture ​means either the perpetuation of a form of science instruction that has proved a failure in the high school or it means a reformed science, such as many teachers are now advocating, that introduces industrial applications. If the latter kind is contemplated it should be unnecessary to provide for it again in the agricultural course, for to admit that it can not be so utilized is to take all of the meaning out of the reform. If the former kind is contemplated, such students as can not appreciate "pure science" however elementary, may not be expected, after organizing a science in its more perfect form, to profit by any attempt later to open the subject and reorganize it in a less perfect form for agricultural or other utilitarian purposes, as an addendum, loosely attached and unessential, which must deal with drosser materials. The period for such organization is past for the student who can appreciate the science in its more perfect form, while those who might have profited by the compromised science will have been long since eliminated. Thus would both subjects suffer from the divorcement and postponement of agricultural instruction. The conclusion is that agriculture is not supplementary, but complementary, to the fundamental sciences in the high school.
In the days of pre-evolutionary thought, when learning was all a matter of authority, it was quite natural to think of form as dictating function, and formal knowledge monopolized the schools. The acceptance of the doctrine of evolution was a recognition of the fact that function dictates form. According to the present conception the best teacher is that one who does not have the two very far separated in time. In order that the high school science be properly taught it is necessary that the teacher have a ready knowledge of its function and that it be carried to its application while the subject is first being presented and is yet in the formative stage in the student's mind.
The technique and terminology of pure science are the only adequate technique and terminology of applied science. The only difficulties which the student of agriculture meets are scientific difficulties. It would be strange indeed if such difficulties might be better dealt ​with dissociated from the sciences to which they pertain. So far as the two are related, the purposes of science can not be antagonistic to those of agriculture and it is better for the accomplishment of the reform toward vocational education to let the sciences bear their share of the burden of time and responsibility and have the same "charged to their account" while profiting as they will by the inclusion of the latter.
Should agricultural materials and principles be utilized for the purpose of teaching the sciences, and the student progressively pursue his science beyond the ability of agriculture to give any direct benefit, the operation of constantly rejecting the unessential and reconstructing with the (apparently) essential for the purpose of perfecting organization is a mental operation quite familiar to educators and is observed in daily practise by good teachers in all subjects. It is a characteristic merit of the "scientific method" and the "spiral plan," and is generally recognized as the natural order of mental growth. Thus most of the knowledge acquired in school is but transient in its value—a scaffolding for the erection of a more perfect structure. It is not the agricultural work considered as knowledge so much as the right kind of training in science which its inclusion alone insures that makes it the best means of preparation in science for any collegiate course or for any general educational purpose.
But the fundamental sciences can not be depended upon to give a complete treatment of the subject of agriculture as it should be treated in the high school. Where manual skills in technical processes are ​to be taught, or the quality of grosser products studied, independent class work must be provided throughout the course. Then there are certain scientific phases which must be pursued in class further than may be thought profitable to the science student, though the cases are not nearly so numerous as is generally supposed. Such training must be provided largely by collateral courses and from students' projects carried on at their homes. And it is necessary that agricultural students who purpose to apply their knowledge to that vocation, be segregated late in the course for the treatment of the subject as whole, where its ideals may be developed and its various phases synthesized into an independent "science of agriculture."
Could it be known at what stage a young person's schooling is to cease, his best interests seem to dictate a previous substitution of immediately usable knowledge for much of that of merely "disciplinary" or "preparatory" value. The practical difficulty of accomplishing such
​purpose in our mixed schools is not only the inability of foreseeing and planning for individual needs, but also in the inadequacy of funds and teachers to satisfy such needs. On the assumption that a high school course and no more is to be made available to every youth of the land, such needs, except for delinquents and defectives, may best be provided in the latter part of the high school course.
This would mean the utilization of agriculture so far as applicable in the teaching of all subjects and all kinds of students, with a gradual increase of the purely vocational phases for such students as have elected agriculture as a vocation. Thus would the correlated sciences be better treated for their own purposes without greatly disturbing the present system of accrediting schools and subjects, leaving the accrediting of the strictly vocational subjects of the same school to be dealt with separately. And it is necessary, if we would secure the right kind of science teaching as well as vocational courses with thorough foundations, to have them taught in the same school, else may the one be divorced from its source of strength and the other become no more than elementary and baldly utilitarian.
The "preparatory" value of the vocational side of the agricultural course may be considered apart from the reform of the sciences. It is this consideration that makes necessary the admission of educational values, until recently not recognized as such by schoolmen. First might be mentioned the significance to the young learner of testing by a muscular manipulation the objects of his environment. Such objects are of value as educational materials to the degree to which they call for necessary muscular adjustments similar to those which the race from the earliest times has experienced. Every sensation or thought, the psychologists affirm, naturally stimulates a motor adjustment which reinforces the original sensory or central impulse which originated the motion. And this "back stroke" from the muscle furnishing the unifying "kinesthetic factor" is a thing to be encouraged and not repressed, as has too often been done in school work. In the earliest
​years of childhood this need is most urgent, but may be regarded as always necessary in the nascent stages of any instinct. The instincts that pertain to vocation are born in adolescence, and agriculture, whether as a means or as an end, furnishes ideal materials and situations with which to work.
Akin to this kinesthetic factor is the value to the young of discovering and exercising his power of control over natural forces. Hitherto much of the work of the school has trained a passive contemplation of the things which concern an education. Here is a subject that incites to action and rewards in a material way the efforts of the youth to take a hand in directing the outcome. He thus gains a much-needed training in his power to get results and produce something of value to society.
There is an educational factor of great and peculiar value known to our pioneer grandparents as but which we prefer to think sufficiently covered by the term The educational value of responsibility has long been known, but to create situations for its exercise is an unheard of thing in education. Perhaps it will never be possible to prescribe experiences that can be as valuable as the real crises of life, nor to be able to prejudge the ability of youth to arise to the occasion when the crisis comes. But if the attempt is to be made by the school to develop a sense of responsibility for the successful issue of an undertaking—and who shall say what the school may not undertake for the good of the young—certainly no one who has ever made the investment which even a small agricultural undertaking entails, and which can neither be delegated nor hastened, can deny the possibilities of this subject.
​Lastly, there are the unequaled opportunities of a sociological or missionary nature which come oftenest to one possessing practical knowledge and which if taken advantage of make him truly altruistic. Hitherto the real if not the admitted purpose of education has been the good of the educated, however much society, as a whole, may have profited from its educated members. But it is coming more and more to be recognized that no feature of an educational system, supported at public expense and whose single aim is citizenship, can be defended that does not contribute directly to social efficiency. Social efficiency includes all that may be appropriate to the most utilitarian phases of industrial education, but it includes a good deal more. Racial betterment must be the compelling motive. On the final test of social efficiency "he that is greatest among you shall be your servant."
The evaluation of these hitherto unassumed school functions is, to him who insists that everything done in the school be assigned its proper "preparatory" value in credits of admission to higher institutions, the difficult end of the problem of the adjustment of agriculture to the course of study. The purpose of the high school is to undertake them and do them to the best of its ability, leaving it to the college and university to worry over their pedagogical classification and estimation.
* ↑ "No study is worthy of a place in our program which has not commanded the full devotion of some master mind. All students must be introduced to the same civilization, and since all are human their several ways of approaching it will not be fundamentally different."—Brown, "The Making of Our Middle Schools," p. 440.
* ↑ "Science is the most precious achievement of the race thus far. It has made nature speak to man with the voice of God, has given man prevision so that he knows what to expect in the world, has eliminated shock, and above all, has made the world a universe coherent and consistent throughout."—Hall, "Adolescence,"Vol. II., p. 544. "This recognition of science as pure knowledge, and of the scientific method as the universal method of inquiry, is the great addition made by the nineteenth century to the idea of culture. I need not say that within that century what we call science, pure and applied, has transformed the world as the scene of the human drama; and that it is this transformation that has compelled the recognition of natural science as a fundamental necessity in liberal education."—Eliot, "Education for Efficiency," p. 37. "I can not help feeling. . . that we have not yet succeeded in so organizing the sciences as instruments of general education as to fulfill the high expectations which some of us formed for them nearly a quarter of a century ago. There can be little doubt that the sciences of nature and of man, properly organized and presented as educational instruments, are destined to be classified as true humanities."—Butler, Address of Welcome, A. A. A. S., 1906. "It seems to be a fact that the sciences, although dealing in knowledge of matters of the greatest immediate interest, and although concerned with the most elemental of all trainings. . . are still of mediocre efficiency as factors in general education."—Ganong, "Botanical Education in America," A. A. A. S., 1909.
* ↑ "In the study of the concrete problems of education, we need a guiding principle; we need a formula that will cover every case that is presented; we need to know what education means in its simplest terms. Having such a principle we shall have a basis for interpretation—a criterion, perhaps, for approval or condemnation. Lacking such a principle, our results will be the merest empiricism, valuable it may be as separate facts, but totally inadequate to the needs of constructive effort."—Bagley, "The Educative Process," p. 3. "Experience in teaching, covering several years in graded-school work, in an academy, and in a normal school, leads to the conviction that no subject requires more sound knowledge of the principles of pedagogy than does the subject of agriculture."—Abbey, "Normal School Instruction in Agriculture," p. 9.
* ↑ "New and fundamental concepts regarding educational principles are now needed which square with centralized and systematized industry."—Carlton, "Education and Industrial Evolution," p. 13. "If pedagogy or education is to be permanently ranked among the sciences, it must find data in addition to that furnished by cultural imperatives and psychological investigations."—Carlton, "Education and Industrial Evolution," p. 18.
* ↑ "Science teaching has suffered because science has been so frequently presented just as so much ready-made knowledge, so much subject-matter of fact and law, rather than the effective method of inquiry into any subject-matter. . . . "Only by taking a hand in the making of knowledge, by transferring guess and opinion into belief authorized by inquiry, does one ever get a knowledge of the method of knowing. Because participation in the making of knowledge has been scant, because reliance upon the efficacy of acquaintance with certain kinds of facts has been current, science has not accomplished in education what was predicted for it."—Dewey, "Science as Subject-matter and as Method," A. A. A. S., 1909.
* ↑ "What the pupil is unable to use at any time can not be taught him most economically and efficiently at that time."—O 'Shea, "Dynamic Factors in Education," p. 41. "Then (in adolescence). . . come the need of utilities, applications to machinery, hygiene, commerce, processes of manufacture, the bread-winning worth of nature knowledge, how its forces are harnessed to serve man and to produce values. Contrary to common educational theory and practise, the practical, technological side of science should precede its purer forms."—Hall, "Adolescence," Vol. II., p. 153.
* ↑ "An interpretation of humanism with science, and of science with humanism, is the condition of the highest culture."—Symonds, "Culture." "As our schools grow more national they should also grow more humanistic. The older humanism was devotion to. . . an abstract ideal. The newer humanism of the schools can not well dispense with the best that the older humanism had to offer. But it will cease to be abstract. . . . The best that the school can do to guard them (youth) against self-centered commercialism, is to awaken their enthusiasm for some ideal good, which has power of appeal to the imagination. . . . We may look to see. . . a new humanism, leaning more and more on science, mindful of the past, patriotic in the present, and looking hopefully forward to the larger human interests."—Brown, "The Making of Our Middle Schools," p. 463.
* ↑ "I often wish that the phrase 'applied science' had never been invented. For it suggests that there is a sort of scientific knowledge, of direct practical use, which can be studied apart from another sort of scientific knowledge, which is of no practical utility, and which is termed 'pure science.' But there is no more complete fallacy than this. What people call applied science is nothing but the application of pure science to particular classes of problems. It consists of deductions from those whose general principles, established by reason and observation, constitute pure science. No man can safely make these deductions until he has a firm grasp of the principles; and he can obtain that grasp only by personal experience of the operations of observations and of reasoning on which they are founded."—Huxley, "Science and Culture," Chap. IV.
* ↑ "In every case correlation has been successful, when the instructor was sufficiently versed in his own subject and the kindred subjects to know when and how to bring the two together to the best advantage."—Abbey, "Normal School Instruction in Agriculture," p. 29. "Relate the school to life, and all studies are of necessity correlated."—Dewey, "The School and Society," p. 107.
* ↑ "The highest type of spontaneous, whole-souled activity can not be developed about trifling or worthless things."—Hodge, "Nature Study and Life," p. 23.
* ↑ "If a child at any particular epoch in his development is compelled to repeat any fixed form of action belonging to a lower stage of development, the tendency will be for him to stop at that point, and it will be difficult, if not impossible, to get him up on to a higher plane. . . . Thoroughness in the pursuit of any study in the elementary school may result in cessation instead of promotion of mental growth."—Harris, "Educational Creeds of the Nineteenth Century," pp. 39-40.
* ↑ "When he (the pupil) has completed his eighth year, he should have a well-developed sympathy with agricultural affairs and he should have a broad general view of them. Entering the high school he will then be able to take up some of the subjects in their distinctly scientific phases."—N. E. A. Committee on Industrial Education in Rural Schools, pp. 44-45.
* ↑ "It is the business of secondary education to raise all subjects which it touches to the plane of science, by bringing all into the point of view of organizing principles."—Brown," The Making of Our Middle Schools," p. 4.
* ↑ "In almost all great men the leading idea of life is caught early."—Eliot, "Education for Efficiency," p. 28. "Until the instincts of construction and production are systematically laid hold of in the years of childhood and youth, until they are trained in social directions, enriched by historical interpretation, controlled and illuminated by scientific methods, we certainly are in no position to locate the source of our economic evils, much less to deal with them effectively."—Dewey, "The School and Society," p. 39.
* ↑ "If a nerve center is not exercised properly during its nascent period, it will be arrested in its development, for it loses its plasticity when the wave of ripening moves past it to other centers. . . . The absence of appropriate stimulus during the growing period is for the most part irremediable; and this results, as I have already intimated, not only in the arrest of this particular function, but it influences other functions by interfering with the readiness of association between centers that can become connected only through the undeveloped one. . . ."—O'Shea, "Dynamic Factors in Education," p. 151.
* ↑ "As structure follows function, experience in function must have been first in race history."—Baldwin, "Mental Development, Methods and Processes," p. 64.
* ↑ "As far as possible the study of form and function should go together."—Bailey, "The Nature-study Idea," p. 49.
* ↑ "The application in some form should always follow the generalization. The pupil should learn from the start that knowledge as it exists in the form of laws, principles, rules or definitions is utterly valueless, unless, directly or indirectly, it can be carried over into the field of practise."—Bagley, "The Educative Process," p. 303.
* ↑ "Any attempt to 'cut out' the 'impractical' parts invariably results in the inefficient functioning of the remainder. Short courses that aim to give only the essentials, fifth-rate colleges and normal schools that educate you while you wait, are sufficiently damned by their own products."—Bagley, "The Educative Process," p. 233.
* ↑ "In order to develop a subject well, . . . it is necessary to establish and maintain a favorable atmosphere for that particular field of mental activity, and this atmosphere is at its best only in the presence of students interested mainly in that subject; that is to say, there is no more favorable place in which the farmer may study chemistry than in company with others, not merely of his own kind, but of those who believe that chemistry is the greatest thing on earth."—Davenport, "Education for Efficiency," p. 103. "Learning a business really implies learning the science involved in it. . . . A grounding in science is of great importance, both because it prepares for this and because rational knowledge has an immense superiority over empirical knowledge."—Spencer, "Education," Chap. I.
* ↑ "Coarse, crude, rapid work must come before refined, delicate, painstaking work. . . . On the other hand, if we permit the child to take his own gait he will be likely to stop upon some low stage of development. . . . To keep him at coarse, crude work continually would be a serious mistake. We must set the pace for him."—O'Shea, "Dynamic Factors in Education," p. 168. "The most he knows at forty will be learned out of school, and. . . the business of the school is to give him a good start."—Davenport, "Education for Efficiency," p. 76. "All our industries would cease were it not for that information which men begin to acquire as best they may after their education is said to be finished."—Spencer, "Education," Chap. I.
* ↑ When I speak of teaching agriculture in our high schools, I mean agriculture. I do not mean nature study, nor do I mean that some sort of pedagogical kink should be given to chemistry or botany or even geography and arithmetic. Let these arts and sciences be taught from their own standpoint, with as direct application to as many affairs of real life as possible; but let chemistry continue to be chemistry. . . . Every high school that has a natural agricultural constituency of any considerable importance should put in a department of agriculture on the same basis as its department of chemistry."—Davenport, "Education for Efficiency," p. 126. "A thorough grounding in the natural sciences is essential to thorough agricultural courses, but so long as the instruction is confined to the departments of pure science it has had, and will have, very little significance or importance to agriculture. . . . "If the divisions of science were strictly adhered to we should have no such thing as agricultural science. . . . The present-day plan for the classification of agricultural knowledge and its formulation into courses of instruction. . . is based on the application in the natural divisions of agriculture, rather than-on its scientific origin. . . . A proposal to return to the former basis of the primary sciences would find scant indorsement among men who have studied the pedagogics of agriculture."—Editorial in Experiment Station Record, January, 1908, p. 402.
* ↑ "The sharp distinction between preparation for college and preparation for life is fading out. . . . So far as general culture is concerned, preparation for a higher school, rightfully conceived, coincides with preparation for life."—Brown, "The Making of Our Middle Schools," p. 438.
* ↑ "Vocational training is to be postponed as long as possible. It is to rest upon the most extended general schooling which the individual can get."—Brown. "The Making of Our Middle Schools," p. 459. "The human plant circumnutates in a wider and wider circle, and the endeavor should be to prevent it from prematurely finding a support, to prolong the period of variation to which this stage of life is sacred, and to prevent natural selection from confirming too soon the slight advantage which any quality may temporarily have in this struggle for existence among many faculties and tendencies within us. The educational ideal is now to develop capacities in as many directions as possible."—Hall, "Adolescence," Vol. II., p. 88. "Vocational training ought not to be included in the six years that are sufficient for the elementary school course. . . .The grave error of the past has been to frame a school course on the hypothesis that every pupil was to go forward in the most deliberate and amplest fashion to the study of the products of the intellectual life, regardless of the basis of his own economic support."—Butler, "Training for Vocation and for Avocation," Educational Review, December, 1908, pp. 472-474.
* ↑ "We have lately become convinced that accurate work with carpenter's tools, or lathe, or hammer and anvil, or violin, or piano, or pencil, or crayon, or camel's hair brush, trains the same nerves and ganglia with which we do what is ordinarily called thinking."—Eliot, "Education for Efficiency," p. 38. "Every mental state is a fusion of sensory and motor elements, and any influence that strengthens the one tends to strengthen the other also."—Baldwin, "Mental Development; Methods and Processes," p. 440. "No serious thought is possible without some voluntary effort, and no emotion ever arises without inducing some form of action."—Judd, "Psychology," p. 66. "James, Hall, Dewey, Mosso, Wundt, Baldwin and others are preaching a new gospel. They are saying that the child's thought is never dissociated from his muscles; that every idea has a motor aspect; that mind is in one sense a middle term between the senses and the muscles; that it functions for the purpose of guiding conduct; that an idea is not complete until it is realized in action. . . . "Viewed from the psychological standpoint it appears that muscular experiences are essential to the gaining of clear, definite, effective ideas in the world."—O'Shea, "Dynamic Factors in Education," pp. 27-29.
* ↑ "Properly thou hast no other knowledge but what thou hast got by working: the rest is all a hypothesis of knowledge; a thing to be argued in schools, a thing floating in the clouds, in endless logical vortices, till we try and fix it."—Carlyle, "Past and Present; The Blessedness of Work." "The pupil must learn what nature is by trying what he can do with it; thus he measures it in terms of his own strength and skill, and discovers how it can be manipulated; and it is this experience that holds vital knowledge, and that enlists genuine interest."—O'Shea, "Dynamic Factors in Education," p. 52.
* ↑ hardship,
* ↑ responsibility.
* ↑ "One of the last sentiments to be developed in human nature is the sense of responsibility. . . in the development of which our carefully nurtured and protected youth of student age. . . have had little training."—Hall, "Adolescence," Vol. II., p. 415.
* ↑ Effort for the production of property is ethical, and the moment the child engages in it he places himself on the side of law and order in the community. "—Hodge, "Nature Study and Life," p. 30.
* ↑ "No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may possess, and no matter how good one's sentiments may be, if one have not taken advantage of every concrete opportunity to act, one's character may remain entirely unaffected for the better. . . . A character is a completely fashioned will, and a will. . . is an aggregate of tendencies to act in a firm and prompt and definite way upon all the principal emergencies of life. . . . Every time a resolve or a fine glow of feeling evaporates without bearing practical fruit is worse than a chance lost; it works so as positively to hinder future resolutions and emotions from taking the normal path of discharge. There is no more contemptible type of human character than that of the nerveless sentimentalist and dreamer, who spends his life in a weltering sea of sensibility and emotion, but who never does a manly concrete deed."—James, "Psychology," Vol. I., p. 125. "Education must seek to develop social action. It can take no account of possible thought or feeling which exercises no influence upon one's behavior. . . . The school can not have for its leading principle the improvement of the individual as an isolated being."—'Shea, "Education as Adjustment," p. 95. "Education for culture alone tends to isolate the individual; education for sympathy with one's environment tends to make the individual an integral part of the activities and progress of his time."—Bailey, "The Nature-study Idea," p. 63.
* ↑ "The interests of higher education will be better served by such prescription of college entrance requirements, and such tests of preparation, as will do most to vitalize instruction in the secondary schools."—Brown, "The Making of Our Middle Schools," p. 443.