8
Tuesday, September 1, 1903.
THE-PROGRESSIVE FARMER
The Progressive Farmer.
CLARENCE H. POE,
J. W. DENMARK,
Editor.
Proprietor and Publisher.
A THOUGHT FOR THE WEEK.
Use and assert your own reason. Reflect, ex
amine, and analyze everything, in order to form
a sound and mature judgment. Let not the dic
tum of any man impose upon your understanding,
mislead your actions, or dictate your conversa
tion. Of all the troubles, do not decline, as many
people do, that of thinking. The herd of man
kind can hardly be said to think; their notions
are almost all adopted. From Lord Chesterfield's
Letters to His Son.
FARMER CHILDREN NEED FARMER STUDIES.
Our educational system has been made by city
people for city people, and the country school
finds it second-hand, ill-fitting and unattractive.
To this fact more than to any other, perhaps, is
due the backwardness of education in r cul
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 bab
bled of subjects unfamiliar and uninteresting
to the country-bred -child. All 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 efiicient 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
13,000 annually take up agriculture as a gainful
pursuit. But our school-books are written for the
few, not the many. 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:
cLook with me into an average Massachusetts
schoolhouse. Its arithmetic, its geography, its
penmanship, its bookkeeping, and its reading-book
appeals to the imagination of the farmer's 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 discontent 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 text-books 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
er's child the possibilities of science and training
in agricultural work. On the contrary, the nat
ural' and logical inference from our general
scheme of rural instruction is that education is
This article by the Editor of The Pbogbessivk Fakmkb
was begun with the Intention of using It as an editorial In
this paper, but later It was sent to the World a Work, and
published In the August, 1903, number of that magazine. It
Is printed here by permission of Doubleday, Page & Co.,
publishers of the World's Work.
not indispensable to the farmer, but is intended
chiefly for the commercial and professional
classes.
Take, for example, the first study mentioned
by Doctor Brooks arithmetic. Pick up any high-
grade arithmetic in use in the rural schools and
you will find no lack of attention to banking and
commissions and foreign exchange and commer
cial affairs generally. But agriculture rises to no
such dignity not even in schools that will fur
nish five times as many recruits for the farm as
for the city. Moreover, you will find special de
partments for common mechanical trades plas
tering, stone-work, carpentering, and even gaug
ing and lumber-measuring subjects quite as dif
ficult to teach or to understand as the rules for
compounding feeding rations or mixing fertiliz
ers. But in no school arithmetic have I ever
found one reference to either of these important
forms of agricultural mathematics. You would
never learn from these text-books that farming
calls for anything more than the dull drudgery
that blighted and brutalized Millet's "Man With
the Hoe." Shall we marvel, then, that the boy
who expects to farm finds little to encourage reg
ular attendance on such schools, and his tax-
paying father little to encourage more liberal
support ?
True, the arithmetics give some examples based
on farming, but there are comparatively few of
these, and there are practically none that illus
trate the possibilities of applied science as a
profit-making factor in agricultural work. Your
class of bright farmer boys, for example, may
have learned all the mathematical formulas relat
ing to stocks, insurance and banking, but it is not
at all improbable that nine-tenths of them have
never seen arithmetic applied to agriculture in
such practical problems as the following:
Calculate the value of a ton of fertilizer con
taining 2 per cent nitrogen, 8 per cent phosphoric
acid, and 2 per cent potash; nitrogen being worth
14 cents a pound, phosphoric acid 4 cents, and
potash 5 cents.
Two dairy cows produce each 5,000 pounds of
milk a year. The butter-fat tests of No. 1 is 4.6
per cent, and of No. 2, 6.3 per cent. Butter sell
ing for 25 cents a pound, how much greater is
the yearly income from No. 2 than from No. 1?
(Note. One pound of butter-fat is equivalent to
1 1-16 pounds butter.)
Calculate the nutritive ratio in a feeding ra
tion supplying 3 pounds protein, 1 pound fat and
14 pounds carbohydrates.
The analyses of cottonseed meal, muriate of
potash and phosphoric acid being given, in what
proportion shall we mix, using the necessary filler,
to get a fertilizer with 9 per cent phosphoric acid,
3 per cent nitrogen and 3 per cent potash?
There is nothing impractical or extreme in
such problems as these ; they might well be given
in any arithmetic in use in rural schools. To the
larger number of pupils they would be of im
mensely greater practical value than examples
based on commercial affairs, while as intellectual
gymnatics the agricultural problems would be as
good. Of course, the farm boy's arithmetic should
not be devoted exclusively to such matter. But
from the very first a large proportion of his sums
in addition and subtraction as well as in the
more advanced branches should deal, not with
work foreign alike to his knowledge and his in
terest, but with familiar and practical subjects.
While I have given so much attention to arith
metic, the reader will bear in mind that I have
used it, not for its own sake, but only as an illus
tration of the general misfit in rural school
studies. Reading books, spelling books, geogra
phies, histories all, as Dr. Brooks says, are "dom
inated by clerk and trading point of view."
But the work of improvement should not stop
here. A right point of view should be required
in the branches already taught, but we should so
further. Text-books combining the elements of
agriculture and the brighter forms of nature
study should be adopted for use in all rural
schools. In these books the practical and the
esthetic should go hand in hand. The pleasures
of country living should be set forth, and a con
stant effort made to interest the child in the com
mon things about him the mysteries of plant
and animal life, the beauties of nature, the- every
day wonders of the fields and woods. With equal
earnestness the profit of intelligent farming
should be emphasized ; the elements of agricul
tural science should be given.
Recent educational progress makes it unneces
sary to defend this idea. No one now regards it
as a visionary suggestion; in view of the vast in
terests affected, it is not an unreasonahle one
in view of the great good that would result, it is
not an unimportant one. Millions, for example,
are lost every year by unscientific stock-f ceding
that could be saved to the farmer if he would
practice the Bimple rules for compounding feed
ing rations. Millions more are lost annually by
irrational fertilizing because the farmer is not
taught the properties of the common fertilizing
elements, the needs of different crop rotations,
and proper combinations of farming specialties
the knowledge of a few fundamental principles
being sufficient to enable the farmer to plan
them. To learn of these subjects would require
no special ability. Children of ordinary capacity
in ordinary public schools could practically mas
ter them.
Par-reaching effects would follow in due sea
son. Practical education is the philosopher's
stone that has revolutionized every commercial
and professional calling of civilized man; and,
with a properly modernized school curriculum, its
golden touch would reach agriculture also, trans
forming and uplifting this most ancient of occu
pations. Every class would share in the benefits,
and the nation itself would be immeasurably
strengethened ; for with the rural half of our pop
ulation intelligent and independent, we shall al
ways have a protecting balance of power in our
political life. Anarchy and socialism among the
city poor, greed and snobbery among the very
rich, will each find an antidote in the content and
conservatism of a great farming class. More
over, our commercial supremacy is largely de
pendent on the well-being of the rural districts
men as well as crops being considered in mis
statement. To stop our teachers and text-books from fos
tering the idea that education is needed in the
city but not in the country, needed in managing
a store but not in managing a farm ; to stay the
over-crowding of the professions and city trades
and to develop the latent possibilities in scientific
agriculture; and last, but not least to instil a
love of nature and joy in country living; this task
is not hopeless that we should shrink from it, nor
small that we should neglect it, but it is in truth
a worthy and reasonable one for America to try
its strength on.
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The hero, Rev. Frank Gordon, is a young
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A rich and beautiful young woman of his congre-
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