The progressive farmer. [volume] (Winston, N.C.) 1886-1904, 1903-09-01
FARMER CHILDREN NEED FARMER STUDIES

FARMER CHILDREN NEED FARMER STUDIES.*
Our educational system has been made by city
people for city people, and the country school
finds it secondhand, ~ill-ftting and unattractive.
To this fact more than to any other, perhaps, is
due the backwardness of education in agricul-
tural States. The school has not taken hold on
farm life. Plants, soils, animals, insects, flowers,
the weather, the forests and the sky-from all
these things it has stood apart, while it has bah
bled of subjects unfamiliar and uninteresting
to the country-bred child. ALI rural education
has been hacked and hewed to fit the Procrustean
bed of the city model.
A striking protest against the present ~irration-
al policy is found in a private letter now before
me, written by one of the most efficient American
professors of agriculture:
statistics show that in this State each year
sixty young men take up the ministry
~sixty-six law and seventy-two medicine, while
$4,000 annually take up agriculture as a gainful
pursuit. But our school-books are written for the
few, not the many. = x X Put such words as
phosphate, protein and nitrogen prominently in
our ~spelling-books, and they will not be as mean
ingless as Greek to adult farmers. Let nature
lore give freshness to our reading-books and the
mass of country boys will not be so blind to the
everyday life about them. Let our arithmetics
apply addition, subtraction, percentage and COM
mon fractions to agricultural problems, and the
farm boy will see the need of education as prepa-
ration for his own life work. At present, how
ever, the entire curriculum leads away from the
farm"
Nor is it in the West and South alone that this
evil exists. Doctor John Graham Brooks, of
Cambridge, Mass, has said:
"Look with me into an average Massachusetts,
schoolhouse. It's arithmetic, its geography, it's
penmanship, it's bookkeeping, and it's reading-book
appeals to the imagination of the farmers child,
are still dominated by clerk and trading point of
view. AS one listens to the teaching, it is as if
the one object were to create discomfort with the
country life, to make every bright child hate his
surroundings. The instruction seems to assume
the failure of the farm life. The inexhaustible
charm and resource of the country have no part
in this teaching"
This is a severe Indictment of our present
methods, but it is not a whit too severe-To find
proof you have only to examine the textbooks in
use in our rural schools. Apparently they have
been written solely for city children, sons and
daughters of clerks, merchants, bankers and
traders. They do not even suggest to the farm
ers child the possibilities of science and training
in agricultural work. On the contrary, the nat
uraF and logical inference from our general
scheme of rural instruction is that education is
~ThIs article by the Editor of THE PROGRESSIVE FARMER
was begun with the intention of using it as an editorial in
this paper, but later it was sent to the World s Work, aud
published in the August, 1908, number OF that magazine. II
is Orintpd here nv Daru1isafOn Of DOuhIadau pooo T. ~