direction. Two schools are connected with existing institutions of
higher learning of long-established reputation (being the only schools
of this kind, state-maintained, attached to liberal arts universities)
and one is unattached; none of them has a defined region or territory.
These institutions are established on a more liberal financial plan than
the special schools of other states, standing somewhat between those
schools and the agricultural college type.
While much publicity has been given to the unattached-school plan, the
main movement is the adding of agriculture-education to the existing
public-school systems. Only eight or ten of the states have entered into
any regular development of separate or unattached schools, whereas in
every state the movement for agriculture in the public schools is well
under way. The public schools are of definite plan; the unattached
schools are of several plans, or of no plan; and in some states an
intermediate course is developing by the establishing of public
high-schools (one to a county, a congressional district, or other
region) in which instruction in agriculture and household subjects is
highly perfected.
Aside from the foregoing particular institutions, many general colleges
and universities are introducing agricultural work in order to meet the
increasing demand and to keep up with educational progress.
Agricultural work is proceeding in nearly all the states under the
auspices of the United States Department of Agriculture, some of it
distinctly educational in character; and there is agitation for the
passage of a national bill to further secondary or special
agriculture-education in the states.
State departments of agriculture, the indispensable experiment stations,
veterinary colleges, departments of public instruction, farmers'
institutes, voluntary societies, are all attacking the country-life
problem in their own ways; and the powerful work of the agricultural
press, although not coming within the scope of this paper, should not be
overlooked as an educational agency.
In the meantime, the colleges of agriculture are growing rapidly and are
approaching the subject from every side, and are assuming natural and
inevitable leadership.
_The need of plans to coördinate this educational work._
There is no doubt that all these agencies are contributing greatly to
the solution of the rural problem, and there is now probably very little
inharmony and little duplication of effort. In the newness and
enthusiasm of the effort, good fellowship holds the work together in all
the states or at least keeps it from collision. But the situation is
inherently weak, because there is no plan or system, and no united
discussion of the grounds on which the work rests. I have been in
correspondence on this question with public men in every state in the
Union, and I find a general feeling that the present situation is
fraught with danger, and that there is great need of organization or at
least of federation of the forces within each state; and ultimately
there must be federation on a national basis. The work should be
coöperative rather than competitive.
What is to be the policy of the state in agriculture-education? Where is
the headship to lie? What are to be the spheres of the different
institutions and agencies? What board or agency is to correlate and
unify all the parts, to insure a progressive and well-proportioned
program?
_Outline of a state plan._
A general law should define the state's policy in education by means of
agriculture and in the development of rural affairs, and outline methods
that it proposes to follow, so that the work may be coördinated
throughout the state and that a definite plan may be projected. The
duties of all the classes of institutions should be defined and
relations should be established between them. The people should know to
what they are committing themselves.
This law should not, of course, be designed to suppress the activities
of any institution. It might not place any institution under the
domination of any other institution. The schools, colleges, and other
institutions for the betterment of agriculture should have their own
autonomy and responsibility, and they should be developed to the highest
point of efficiency in their respective spheres.
The fundamental consideration in such a law should be to develop the
agriculture and advance the country life of the state by organizing the
work of all the agencies on a systematic plan, so that an orderly
development may be secured. Such a recognized general policy should do
much to insure each institution in the system its proper state support.
It is probably too much to expect that a fundamental state law could be
projected abstractly. Laws are gradually built up to meet urgent needs
as they arise; but if the principles are kept in mind, the making of
separate and special laws might be so guided as to produce a harmonious
result.
Some of the particular points that I think should be desired in such a
law or series of laws are these:
1. It should propound a policy in the development of country life;
2. It should name the classes of institutions that it proposes to
utilize in the execution of this policy;
3. It should define the functions of the different classes of
institutions;
4. It should state the organic relationships that ought to exist
between them all;
5. It might provide an advisory council to guide agricultural
education and advancement in the state. I think that the directors
or responsible heads of such institutions established for the
betterment of agriculture throughout the state should constitute
such consulting body, to which questions of policy and procedure
should be referred and which, of course, should serve without
remuneration. This council might include also the commissioner of
agriculture and the superintendent of public instruction. It might
be well to have one, two, or three other persons appointed by the
governor. The council would constitute a natural conference of the
parties that are immediately responsible for this work, without
taking the management of any institution out of the hands of an
existing board. The idea of such a body is to further the
coördination by conference, rather than to have plenary power. Its
moral influence ought to be all the greater because of its lack of
conferred power.
_A state extension program._
As soon as a state has produced strong institutions for research and
education in agriculture, it will need to provide an agency for
utilizing the results. A state extension program, on a coördinating plan
between all the institutions but proceeding from one educational center,
and which all the institutions would have a right to use for the spread
of their work among the people, could accomplish vast benefits. It
should comprise institutes, utilize the state system of fairs
educationally, afford an organ for the making of agricultural surveys
and demonstrations, spread an educational propaganda on the agricultural
law, collect and collate the experience of the farmers of the state. It
could assort and apply the information that the state, at great expense,
accumulates through its various separate agencies. It could utilize the
students, whom the state provides with free tuition. The germ of such an
enterprise already exists in most of the states.
_Special local schools for agriculture._[2]
I am committed to the idea that there should be strong local centers of
interest in rural communities, for thereby we develop local pride and
incentive. There are several ways, on the educational side, of
developing local institutions and interest.
[2] See "The State and the Farmer," p. 150; "The Training of
Farmers," p. 167; "Cyclopedia of American Agriculture," IV, p. 474.
The first way is to make it possible and practicable for the existing
public schools to introduce agriculture and domestic economy. I suggest
that many or most localities would do better to develop the country-life
work in the existing schools than to ask the legislature for a separate
special school. We have only begun to understand what such redirected
and expanded schools may accomplish.
Another means of securing local knowledge and developing local interest
is by the establishing of demonstration farms and field-laboratories. It
is doubtful whether a permanent demonstration farm in a community is
desirable; in general, the demonstration may be temporary, depending on
the presence in the community of some special difficulty. In some
circumstances, the enterprise may amount to a local testing station.
Enterprises of this sort are bound to take on great importance in the
redirection of country life.
Local societies and organizations may be encouraged to take up
educational and experiment work.
Departments of agriculture will probably be added by colleges or other
educational institutions, and these will serve as local centers at the
same time that they reach the larger field.
Again, a winter school or short-course of, say, a month's or two months'
duration may be held in different parts of the state. The localities
should coöperate in the expenses, thereby becoming partakers in the
enterprise.
Eventually there should be an agricultural agent resident in every
county, and perhaps even for smaller regions, whose office should be to
give advice, to keep track of animal and plant diseases and pests and
secure the services of experts in their control, to organize
conferences, winter-courses, and the like, and otherwise to be to the
agricultural affairs what the pastor is to religious affairs and the
teacher to educational affairs. (See "The Training of Farmers," p. 257.)
Finally, we may ask the state to place a special school of agriculture
in the locality, but only after it is clear that other means cannot
produce the desired results. An unattached school of agriculture is not
an easy thing to administer successfully, even at the best; and the
difficulty would be all the greater if its care were to be confined to
local boards, which would probably have small understanding of the
peculiar educational requirements. It is probable that a state may
wisely establish a very few special schools, but an educational program
needs first to be worked out, a competent system of control must be
found, and the people should know in advance what is involved. It is not
enough merely that a locality desires a school: the larger question is
the state's interest. In all local enterprises of this kind in which
state aid is asked for, it ought to be understood that the locality
itself is to coöperate in the securing of equipment and funds.
_The lessons of experience._
The demand for agriculture-education is now widespread; the subject is
becoming "popular." All kinds of plans are being tried or discussed.
Persons do not seem to realize that we have had about one hundred years
of experience in the United States in agriculture-education, and that
this experience ought to point the way to success, or at least to the
avoiding of serious errors. The agricultural colleges have come up
through a long and difficult route, and their present success is not
accidental, nor is it easy to duplicate or imitate. First and last,
about every conceivable plan has been tried by them, or by others in
their time or preceding them; and this experience ought to be utilized
by the other institutions that are now being projected in all parts of
the country.
Plans that certainly cannot succeed are now being projected. The
projectors seem to proceed on the idea that it requires no background of
experience to enable an institution to teach agriculture, whereas
agriculture-education is the most difficult and also the most expensive
of all education yet undertaken.
To teach agriculture merely by giving a new direction or vocabulary to
botany, chemistry, geology, physics, and the like is not to teach
agriculture at all, although it may greatly improve these subjects
themselves. To put a school of agriculture in the hands of some good
science-teacher in a general college faculty with the idea that he can
cover the agricultural work and at the same time keep up his own
department, is wholly ineffective (except temporarily) and out of
character with the demands of the twentieth century (but in high-schools
a good science teacher may handle the work, or an agriculture teacher
may carry the science). To suppose that "agriculture" is one subject for
a college course, to be sufficiently represented by a "chair," is to
miss the point of modern progress. To give only laboratory and
recitation courses may be better than nothing, but land-teaching, either
as a part of the institution or on adjacent farms, must be incorporated
with the customary school work if the best results are to be secured. To
make a school farm pay for itself and for the school is impossible
unless the school is a very poor or exceedingly small one; and yet this
old fallacy is alive at the present day. To have a distant farm to visit
and look at, in order to "apply" the "teachings" of chemistry, botany,
and the like, falls far short of real agriculture instruction. To
develop a "model farm" that shall be a pattern to the multitude in exact
farming is an exploded notion: there are many farmers' farms that are
better adapted to such purpose (the demonstration farm is the modern
adaptation of the idea, and it is educationally sound).
To teach agriculture of college grade requires not only persons who know
the subject, but an organization well informed on the educational
administration that is required. There must be a body of experience in
this line of work behind any teaching on a college plane that shall be
really useful; when this body of experience does not exist, the work
must necessarily grow slowly and be under the most expert direction. The
presumption is still against successful agriculture work in the literary
and liberal arts institutions, because such teaching demands a point of
view on education that the men in these institutions are likely not to
possess. Agriculture cannot be introduced in the same way that a
department or chair of history or mathematics can be organized; it
requires a different outlook on educational procedure, a different order
of equipment and of activities, and its own type of administration.
I am much afraid that some of the newer unattached institutions, in
their eagerness to make departures and to be self-sufficient, will not
profit by our long development, and that the secondary schools and
others may make many of the mistakes that the regular colleges of
agriculture long ago have made. The presumption is against any school
that expects to develop merely a local enterprise, without reference to
other schools or to experience.
I am sure we all want to encourage the introduction of agriculture into
all educational institutions, but we should not be misled merely by the
word "agriculture"; and in the interest of good work we should be
careful not to encourage any enterprise of this kind until convinced
that it has been well studied and that it will be administered in the
interest of rural progress.
WOMAN'S CONTRIBUTION TO THE COUNTRY-LIFE MOVEMENT
On the women depend to a greater degree than we realize the nature and
extent of the movement for a better country life, wholly aside from
their personal influence as members of families. Farming is a
co-partnership business. It is a partnership between a man and a woman.
There is no other great series of occupations in which such
co-partnership is so essential to success. The home is on the farm, and
a part of it. The number of middle-aged unmarried men living on farms is
very small. It is quite impossible to live on a farm and to run it
advantageously without family relation.
It follows, then, that if the farming business is to contribute to the
redirection of country life, the woman has responsibilities as well as
the man. As the strength of a chain is determined by its weakest link,
so will the progress of rural civilization be determined by the
weakness of the farm as an economic unit, or by the weakness of the home
as a domestic and social unit.
Now, the farmer himself cannot have great influence in redirecting the
affairs of his community until he is first master of his own
problem,--that is, until he is a first-class farmer. In the same way, a
woman cannot expect to have much influence in furthering the affairs of
her rural community until she also is master of her own problem, and her
problem is primarily the home-making part of the farm. In the mastering
of his or her own problem, the farmer or his wife may also contribute
directly to the progress of the community. Every advance in the
management of the household contributes to the general welfare: it sets
new ideas under way.
If the farming business must in general be reorganized, so also must the
householding part of it be reorganized. The solution of the farm-labor
problem, for example, lies not alone merely in securing more farm
"hands," but in so directing and shaping the business that less farm
hands will be needed to secure a given economic result; so also the
solution of the household-labor problem is not merely the securing of
more household help, but the simplification of householding itself.
So far as possible, the labor that is necessary to do the work of the
open country, whether in-doors or out-doors, should be resident labor.
The labor difficulty increases with reduction in the size of the family.
Families of moderate size develop responsibility, and coöperation is
forced on all members of it, with marked effect on character. The single
child is likely to develop selfishness rather than coöperation and sense
of responsibility. To a large extent, the responsibility of the
household should rest on the girls of the family; and all children,
whether boys or girls, should be brought up in the home in habits of
industry.
It is fairly possible by means of simplification of householding and by
a coöperative industry amongst all members of the family, so to reduce
the burden of the farm wife that she may have time and strength to give
to the vital affairs of the community.
_The affairs of the household._
It is essential that we simplify our ideals in cooking, in ornament, in
apparel, and in furnishing; that we construct more convenient and
workable residences; that we employ labor-saving devices for the house
as well as for the barns and the fields.
We are so accustomed to the ordinary modes of living that we scarcely
realize what amount of time and strength might be saved by a simplified
table and by more thoughtful methods of preparing food. In respect to
houses, it should be remembered that the present farm dwellings are
getting old. A good part of the farm houses must soon be either rebuilt
or remodeled. The first consideration is so to build or remodel them
that steps may be saved to the housewife. We have not thought, in the
past, that a woman's steps cost time and energy. Within twenty years
all first-class farm houses will have running water, both into the
house and out of the house.
It is rather strange that in our discussions of the farm-labor problem,
we do not realize that a gasoline engine or a water engine may save the
labor of a man. Farmers are putting power into their barns. They should
also put power into the house. This may be accomplished by means of a
small movable engine that can be used either in the house or barn, or
else by installing an engine in a small building betwixt the house and
the barn, so that it can be connected either way. This can be used to
lighten much household labor, as pumping of water, meat-chopping,
laundering, dish-washing, vacuum-cleaning, and the like.
Eventually, there must be some form of community coöperation in the
country to save household labor. Already the care of milk has been taken
from great numbers of farm homes by the neighborhood creamery, or at
least by the building of a milk-house in which the men by the use of
machinery perform labor that was once done by the housewife. Whenever
there is a coöperative creamery, there may also be other coöperative
attachments, as a laundry, or other appliances. It will be more
difficult to bring about coöperation in these regards in country
districts than in the city, but with the coming of good roads,
telephones, and better vehicles, it will be constantly more easy to
accomplish.
_The affairs of the community._
I have said that it is important that the country woman have strength
and time to engage in the vital affairs of the community. I am thinking
of the public sentiment that women can make on any question that they
care to discuss thoroughly and collectively, whether this sentiment is
for better orcharding, better fowls, better roads, extending of
telephones, improving the schoolhouse or church or library. It is
needful that women in the country come together to discuss woman's work,
and also to form intelligent opinions on farming questions in general.
The tendency of all "sociables" in country and town is to bring persons
together to eat, to gossip, and to be entertained. We need to redirect
all these meetings, and to devote at least a part of every such meeting
to some real and serious work which it is worth while for busy and
intelligent persons to undertake.
Every organization of women should endeavor to extend its branches and
its influence into the open country as well as into the cities and
towns. Every public movement now has responsibility to country-life
questions as well as to town questions.
I think it important that there be some means and reason for every farm
woman going away from home at least once a week, and this wholly aside
from going to town to trade. There should be some place where the women
may come together on a different basis from that of the ordinary daily
routine and the usual buying and selling. I do not know where this
social center should develop, and in an atmosphere that is not conducive
to gossip. In some neighborhoods it might focalize in the church parlor.
The center should be permanent, if possible. It should be a place to
which any woman in a community has a right to go. An ideal place for
such a center would be the rural library, and I hope that such libraries
may arise in every country community, not only that they may supply
books but that they may help provide a meeting-place on semi-social
lines. I think that if I were a woman in charge of a rural library, I
should never be satisfied with my work until I had got every woman in
the community in the habit of coming to the library once every week.
_The woman's outlook._
The woman needs very much to have the opportunity to broaden her
horizon. The farmer has lived on his farm; he is now acquiring a world
outlook. The woman has lived in her house; she also is acquiring a world
outlook. As the house has been smaller and more confining than the farm,
it has followed that woman's outlook has been smaller than man's.
I think it is necessary also that the woman of the farm, as well as the
man, have a real anchor in her nature environment. It is as necessary to
the woman as to the man that her mind be open to the facts, phenomena,
and objects that are everywhere about her, as the winds and weather, the
plants and birds, the fields and streams and woods. It is one of the
best resources in life to be able to distinguish the songs and voices of
the common fields, and it should be a part of the education of every
person, and particularly of every country person, to have this respite.
The making of a garden is much more than the growing of the radishes and
strawberries and petunias. It is the experience in the out-of-doors, the
contact with realities, the personal joy of seeing things germinate and
grow and reproduce their kind.
_The means of education._
If country women are to develop a conscious sense of responsibility in
country-life betterment, education facilities must be afforded them. The
schools must recognize home-making subjects equally with other
subjects. What becomes a part of the school eventually becomes a part
of the life of the people of the region.