The progressive farmer. [volume] (Winston, N.C.) 1886-1904, 1901-08-27

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coulter and share. He knows his
business and is glad of success in 1T.
Shall our schools insidiously touch
him with a dream of finding a no.
bier field than the one whose globe
he turns, and send him wandering
among the professions ?
DIFFERENT KINDS OF IGNORANCE.
Ignorance is a word Of many mean
ings it represents the whole gamut
of intellectual conditions below the
supreme ideal. The philosopher re-
CARDS the blunt and busy grocer as a
very ignorant fellew but the grocer
sneeringly relates how a celebrated
statesman being told by his
wife to buy some dry beans
for the family, sent up a barrel OF
them. There's ignorance for you u
he exclaims but he could no more
understand the great lawyers tech.
nicalities than could the lawyer
grasp the fine points of the bean
problem. Every man to his trade,
and let his only discomfort with is
be on account of his failures to make
the most of an honorable business.
1t is never too late to mend educa-
ton but the earlier the better. Dis
content with slovenly work is the
greatest aid to self training, and this
is the discomfort that schools
should engender. The young nan
who begins life careless of the quail
ity of his industrial output is igno-
rant, no matter what may, be the
record against his name at school +:
for he has not learned the value of
discomfort he needs the stimulating
effect of merciless elf-criticism.
"How ignorant 1 nm I" said a famous
novelist to the present writer. IA
farmer has been telling me things of
great interest that / never heard of
before"
Every person who has conversed
freely with the farmers of the West
and South has been told by them
that the one great objection they
have to sending their boys to college
is that a college education will unfit
them for life on the farm. The
young men come home with diplo
mas in their pockets, and in their
heads burning dreams of a profess
ional career, vast success as politi-
clans, statesmen, lawyers-as any
thing except farmers. Mechanics
and tradesmen make the same OBJ
lection. Their sons cannot be held
to the anvil, the work bench, the
trade-counter, after filling their
minds with what the great of the
earth have accomplished in the fas-
cinating careers of intellectual &C
tivities.
And yet it is a great error to sup
pose shat education is an evil the
trouble lies in breeding. The first
dawn of life should open upon ARE
fully planned preparations for teach
ing that life to flow contentedly in
the channel of its greatest useful
ness. Young men should feel as
they develop that no sphere is in
ferior if it is necessary to human
economy, and that ignorance of how
to hoe a hill of corn or how to house
a crop of grain is just as great a
defect as ignorance of how the law
of gravitation affects the heavenly
bodies.
But every young man owes it to
himself to be disconnected so long
as there fingers in his heart the
slightest aversion to the work that
Nature and the Conditions of his
breeding have fitted him to. If by
earnest application to that work his
superior qualities assert themselves
there will be no difficulty about find
ing a higher arena for their activi-
ties. Nearly all of the unwholesome
and unmanly discomfort amoung
educated young men is but the re-
suit of a foolish excess of self-esteem
= visionary dilution of life with i'm
practical ambition.-Maurice Thomp-
son, in Saturday Evening Post.
HUXLEY's DEFINITION OF A LIBERAL
EDUCATION.
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