Mower County transcript., 1904-08-24
AGRICULTURAL
EDUCATION
Return to the SOil-Tendencv Of
the Country Boy Toward the
City.


The little red brick school house of
the earlier days of the settlement of
the Mississippi Valley states was the
principal factor in the elevation of our
great middle class which made of the
American nation people Of intelligent
thinkers, ready and able in time of
crisis to decide right and to do. Higher
education has followed and new sys-
TENS and methods have supplanted the
"Hoosier Schoolmaster" and the birch
rod, identified with the little red school
house. The educational level of the
country has undoubtedly risen many
degrees, but with this advance have
come problems more perplexlng than
those which troubled the pedagogues
of our fathers. The trend of the coan-
try raised boy is all too irresistably to-
ward the city, while there is no counter.
vailing current impelling the young
people of the cities to ill his place in
the country. The problem is one for
the most serious consideration of our
best statesmen, this constant and
centripetal movement which is over
crowding our centers of industry, where
men work for day wages and which is
steadily drawing from our rural COM
munities where men own the land they
live upon and get there sustenance from
the soil.
Yet there are quiet forces at work,
year by year becoming better organized
and of broader power whose tendency
is to overcome this hurtful condition
and induce migration back to the
land and away from the overcro wded
centers. Industrial and agricultural
educations are playing an important
part, and nature-study courses, and city
school gardens where children are
taught to know something of the soil
and plants and the real wonders of
nature working around us at every
hand, are no longer looked upon as
fads,
Such an industrial public school sys-
tenn which will include the teaching of
domestic science and both agricultural
and manual training in all the public
schools, so that children shall be taught
to work with their hands and farm as
they are taught in the public schools of
France and Denmark would be of i'm
mense value. Every school should have
school garden where every child
should be taught to be lover of nature
and of the country and trained toward
the land as source of honorable liveli-
hood, rather than away from it.
Such a system of education would
undoubtedly tend to very largely check
the constant movement toward the
cities. The farm boy who receives a
fair school or high school education
naturally turns toward the place where
he can best apply it. His training has
not been such as would help him to
farm better or make farming an inter-
esting science. And so he goes to the
city. On the other hand, the city boy,
as he grows up and marries would like
to have home of his own on the land,
but he only knows the trade he has
learned. HIS knows nothing of farm
ing and he would not know what to do
on piece of land if he had it. It has
been often said that it is useless to put
the poor of the great cities out in the
country because they will not stay
: there. They cannot be expected to,
for to them it is a strange and barren
story. The experience of the Saliva
tion Army, however, found in its many
irrigated colonies, shows that men will
go out from the cities and live on the
land and make good citizens where
they are taught what to do with the
land after they get on it.
The irrigated farms of the west show
the great capacity of land when we'll
and intensively farmed, and that men
can live in plenty and comfort on five
acres and even on single acre. Sup
pose that the $4,000 recently discharged
employees of the Pennsylvania Rail
road each had a highly cultivated acre
of rich land to which he could turn his
attention. Instead of being drag on
the community and the country, in
stead of having stopped producing and
consuming, they would still be able to
at least get living from the soil.
Does not this instance of the disem-
ployment Of 5000 men, who might, if
they owned each an acre, be getting a
living from the soil, supply food for
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