The Rice belt journal. (Welsh, Calcasieu Parish, La.) 1900-19??, 1909-03-12
THE SORT OF SCHOOLS THE SOUTH NEEDS
More Practical Learning and Less
Smattering at the Higher Branches.

But without disparaging the college
or the university, ] would say that
first of all. we must give greater atten-
tion to the public schools. 1t is in
them that the farmer, the average man,
gets his education, We can not make
orr Southern farmers adopt Iowa
methods so long as in the average
Southern State there are five times as
MANY white farmers who can't read a
farm paper or fertilizer formula, as
there are in Iowa. We can not I'M
prove our farming until we educate
our farmers: we can not develop the
South until we develop our South
erners.
Nor is it enough that we have longer
school terms; we r'ust have better
public schools. Aud we must make
them train for life, for practical things
Teach the farm boy how cotton and
corn and tobacco may be improved nv
seed selection; how n plant feeds, and
how soils are exhausted; what elements
are found in common feedstutfs, and
which make fat and which make mus
Gle: which COWS make money IN the
dairy, and which should be selected
for beef-and thousand other things.
Not only should the elements OF agrl-
culture be public school study in the
rural districts, but there should be a
revolution in the textbooks for other
studies. In your spelling book, for
instance, where do you find such words
as nitrogen. potash, protein, or even
such common farm words as clevls,
singletree, mattock, ETC.? Made by
city people for city people. the books
and teaching have not been adapted
to the country children. We shall
take a long step forward when the
farm boy has proportionately fewer
problems in arithmetic about foreign
exchange and latitude and Longitude
! and the metric system of weights ant
Q measures, and more about how to cal
culate feeding ration for COWS or
r fertilizer formula from certain quan
titles of potash phosphoric acid ant
nitrogen, and when he studies proper
. tionately less about far-away Aus
g tralia and Kamchatka, and NOR
abot the soil that he walks over an
g plows in every day of his life.-Fror
. an address by Clarence Fl. Poe, edito
of the Progressive Farmer and tn
!. Southern Farm Gazette, before th
Southern Commercial Congress, WASH
l. ington, D. G.
The above article is thorough
- practical and applicable to the school
throughout the entire country. Will
-. such time, talent and treasure is bein
5 spent for the propagation and mail
d tainance of the public schools toda!
81 yet it is coming to be more and MOI
- - recognized fact that the publ
r. school system of the present day
,e not fitting the boys and girls for tt
~ duties of life as they should be fitte'
N The tendency to ignore the fundamen
es al value of the thorough teaching
Or the three RS, is one of the thin!
that is undermining our present scho
$50 system. While we are thorough b
70 levers in higher education, we do
8 believe that the teaching of the high
z branches of science and langua
. should be forced into the pub
Q schools.
. The majority of the boys and gil
z of the present time, complete TIT
: 9 education in the public schools, q
. should be given such work in the
z schools as will best fit them for
g life duties, which they are so soon
. 3 assume. Instead of that, we have
@S system today in which boys and CIR
who hardly know the first rudime
of English grammar, are spendi
~ hours grinding over Latin. Frer
= and German, who are unable to &C
~ pute the area of a field of rice or
Il termine the contents of q cistren, q
IA vet, are spending hours endeavor
90 to solve complicated algebraic eq
IS lions, and to demonstrate geometri
s. proposition. Years before the child