The Pulaski citizen. [volume] (Pulaski, Tenn.) 1866-current, 1883-05-24
PULASKI TENN, THURSDAY. MAY "a. 1883.

Should Students be Made to Labor
Prof. W. j. Beal, of the Michigan
Agricultural College, to the Rura
New Yorker says:
Our educational labor has no
been made as prominent as any o
US thought it should be. 1t has
not been marked and put on record
To encourage our students to get
good lessons, we urge regular at
tendance on classes, lectures and lab
ratory work. We call on them tt
recite at odd intervals and mark
them for their effort. We frequent
| ly examine them by requiring
written answers to close questions
in great variety. These marks for
recitations, lectures, labratory
work and examinations go on re
cord, are seen and discussed by all
at the college. With the exception
of short period, no attempt has
been made to place manual labor on
an equal footing with recitations or
lectures. Students are not stimu-
lated to learn how to perform vari-
Gus kinds of work by being marked
on scale, as they are for class
room work. Remove all class
marks and all final examinations,
and see how soon it would detract
from the application to study. The
same rule holds good regarding la
Dor. To be sure, students are now
paid wages for their work per-
formed. This does not go on the
same record with the studies.-
Work for wages does not nesessa-
rily induce a young man to seek all
kinds Of work to secure a high
rank.
1 would insist on a good manual
training of every stndent of agri-
culture or horticulture. He should
be examined with tools in hand as
well as in the class room, and
marked for proficiency. This has
been tried enough to guarantee its
success Such manual work alone
would make mere manipulators and
not necessarily good thinkers
Classroom work alone in agricul-
ture or horticulture is like a course
in elementary chemistry without
experiments, course in surveying
without field work, a course ofmedi-
cine without dissection of subjects,a
course in botany with the examina
ton of flowers left out. 1t is mere
book-learning; it is cramming; it is
a study of words without knowing
their meaning.
In college course two or three
hours of work daily are often OBJ
iected to because they occupy so
much valuable time. Students not
unfrequently ask to be excused
from work to put more time on
their studies. But a long expert
ence in this and other colleges in
watching the progress of students
who work regularly thereitimes day
and those who do not enables me
to affirm with much confidence that
manual labor is not him
drance to intellectual progress. On
the contrary, manual labor is
a great benefit, in several respects.
No person can study all the time
while he is awake. There must be
some change, some physical exer-
else.
In the minds of some, an agri-
cultural college should teach why to
plow, and not how to plow, why to
trim apple trees and grapevines,
and not how to trim them
There is time enough for studies
and the work too. The one aids
the other, the practice will enforce
the theory or the indoor instruction
and help fix it in the minds of the
pupils. 1 have taught horticulture
for the past ten years; have tried
several methods and have watched
the results, and am prepared to say
of mere lectures and book instruc-
tion what Huxley says of book
knowledge in natural history, cit is
a sham and q delusion," or in the
words Of Agassiz,, "It is a poor ba-
sis of culture" Without practice in
connection with most or all of their
studies in horticulture, students can
not fully understand it.