10 Physical Culture and Talks on Hygiene, both out-door and gymnasium exercise, all four years (afternoon work).

[Or, if preferred, on the same thirty-period week, turn one or more of the study periods into academic or handicraft work, so as to increase the number of lessons in those subjects. This may be found desirable in science, in mathematics, in the first year of a foreign language, in United States History with civics, or in the handicrafts.]

In the first

place I

cannot by any ingenuity of argument convince myself that the boy or girl who is not going to college will profit by losing some of the items in this proposed curriculum in order to gain Latin. In the second place, I am convinced that the desirable, thing called by Doctor De Garmo "the langauge consciousness” ulum, I beg to offer a brief statement.

can be developed, to the full extent to which the adolescent is capable of realizing it, by such study of English, German, and French as is provided for in the curriculum here submitted. In the third place, judging both from the considerable amount of secondary instruction in the classics that I have observed, and from my own experience with the classics, I accept without reserve certain notable sayings on the subject of the classics, uttered by Professor Laurie and Professor Hanus. Professor Laurie was, it seems to me, eminently right when, as long as twenty years ago, he declared, concerning the sympathetic study of English literature, "This, and not the spelling out with tears and vexation of a dozen lines of Virgil, is the humanities." And Professor Hanus, too, is, it seems to me, no less right in his three assertions that "the modern idea of general culture is much broader than classical scholarship;" that a secondary education consisting largely of Latin and Greek is, "for most of the great majority who never go to college, a perversion of opportunity and an economic and educational waste," because classical culture is not obtainable anyhow in the secondary school "by studying the classical languages themselves;" and that "a new culture and a new civilization have arisen since the Renaissance" with which the modern man must get into full relation in order that he may have "the capacity to understand, appreciate, and react on the resources and problems of modern civilization." With so much said by way of holding up the shield of authority, I respectfully venture upon my own part the declaration that, in the present industrial age with its intense and intricately complex life, with its bristling economic problems enmeshing every one of us, it appears to me utterly absurd to make the boy whose schooling to end with the secondary course laboriously puzzle out the Latin description of the fortifications of a Roman camp or the mechanism of Cæsar's bridge across the Rhine, when he might be learning something about the mechanism of modern trade or the bridging of the chasm between capital and labor; and it appears to me little short of preposterous to make the same boy spend weeks in painfully trying to understand Cicero's arguments in favor of the Manilian Law, instead of studying the law of a depreciated currency or the arguments in favor of and against the ubiquitous trusts.

[ABSTRACT OF PAPER.]

AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION IN SECONDARY
SCHOOLS.

J. F. DUGGER,

Director Alabama Experiment Station, and Professor of Agriculture, Alabama Polytechnic Institute.

THE beginning of the movement to teach agriculture in secondary institutions in the South dates back to 1889, when the State of Alabama establish two agricultural high schools. Now Alabama has a system of nine agricultural high schools, one in each congressional district, and it was the first State in the nation to make provision for State-wide instruction in agriculture in secondary schools.

At the present time special agricultural schols constitute merely a small fraction of the high schools that are teaching agriculture. They are far outnumbered by the ordinary high schools now teaching this subject. Moreover, a large number

of normal schools are giving instruction in agriculture.

The South has led in the establishment of special agricultural schools, Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, and Virginia, each having a number of agricultural schools.

In its best and most successful form the typical agricultural school of today meets the following requirements:

1. It has a course of study closely parallel to that of the ordinary high school, and of equal educational and disciplinary value.

2. Its curriculum provides for much theorectical and prac tical instruction in the underlying principles and practical aspects of crop production, horticulture, and animal production. 3. In its curriculum a larger amount of time is given to the study of the natural sciences, especially chemistry and botany, than in the average high school.

In short, the ideal agricultural school of secondary grade is an institution giving a sound and orthodox educational training, fitting for any life work, but placing especial emphasis on the natural sciences, and supplying also a fair amount of vocational training. It is not a trade school, nor entirely a class

school, and its final product is an intelligent American citizen, supplied also with the information that will make him able, if he so desires, to make farm life more profitable and more attractive than can those who lack this special training. The model of the agricultural school of this country is not the trade schools of agriculture so common in Europe for the training of peasants. Its ideal is distinctively American.

As a concrete example of how these ideals of agricultural education are being attained, I shall refer briefly to the agricultural and science studies required in the uniform curriculum of the nine district agricultural schools in Alabama. The course extends through four years and covers the usual high school grades, namely, the eighth to the eleventh inclusive. In each of the four years every pupil is required to spend two hours per week in practical field work on the school farm or in the gardens or grounds. The first year the textbook study is elementary agriculture, which, for many pupils is a review and amplification of the same subject universally required in public schools of the State. The second year a more advanced course is given in agriculture with special reference to field crops. This occupies half of the year, while botany, five hours per week, is the science study in the second term. In the third year botany is continued, and one term is given to the study of domestic animals, and the second term to the elements of horticulture, two hours per week. In the fourth year chemistry, with laboratory work, extends through both terms. In this year agriculture in the first term may be either soils and fertilizers or dairying; in the second term local and special agricultural topics are studied in the bulletins of the State experiment stations and of the National Department of Agri culture.

In brief, this course requires, besides four years of weekly practice, three and a half years of text book instruction in some branch of agriculture.

Naturally such a full course in agriculture as is demanded in special agricultural schools having a vocational end cannot be given without some omissions from the usual high school course, and this sacrifice has been made in these institutions chiefly at the expense of foreign languages; however, opportunity is afforded for the study of Latin as an elective.

Agriculture has been included in the uniform course of study adopted for all of the county high schools of Alabama. Instances by the score could be cited in all parts of the United States where ordinary high schools have successfully introduced the study of agriculture.

I believe that without sacrificing the educational end to the vocational one, agriculture should be taught in the following classes of institutions, though to a smaller extent than in special agricultural schools.

First, in high schools of county, village or town, or district, or in consolidated country schools-in short, wherever the dominant industry in agriculture.

Second, in the normal schools of all States that require the teaching of agriculture in the public schools.

Agriculture is here used in the widest sense of the word, as inclusive of the production of field crops, vegetables, flowers, fruits and trees, and the care of farm animals. As an educational subject agriculture deals with all applications of the laws of chemistry, botany, and other branches of science to the production of plants and animals. Hence, it has broad educational aspects and may be so taught as to constitute a vehicle for unique mental training.

Agriculture claims a place in the curricula of high schools: (1) Because of the educational value of the subject. (2) Because of the educational needs of the pupils. (3) Because of the industrial or vocational needs of the individual, the community, the State, and the nation.

When agriculture is properly taught the pupil is led to the observation of natural phenomena as revealed by plants and animals and the earth's mantle of soil. A training is given to the faculties of observation and of generation such as is afforded by no other subject. This character of training most nearly parallels that afforded by the study of botany.

The study of agriculture should lead the pupil to make mental record of the familiar happenings, which usually merely flit across the vision without arousing thought or interest. It awakens curiosity, inquiry, interest, and with interest it develops attention.

Normal schools and high schools find a reason for teaching agriculture in the educational needs of their pupils. The