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EDUCATION
FOR EFFICIENCY
A DISCUSSION OF CERTAIN PHASES OF THE
PROBLEM OF UNIVERSAL EDUCATION WITH
SPECIAL REFERENCE TO ACADEMIC
IDEALS AND METHODS
BY
E. DAVENPORT, M.Agr., LL.D.
DEAN OF THE COLLEGE OF AGRICULTURE
AND
DIRECTOR OF THE AGRICULTURAL EXPERIMENT STATION
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS
BOSTON, U.S.A.
D. C. HEATH & CO., PUBLISHERS
1909
X
mmi
Copyright, 1909,
By D. C. Heath & Co.
PREFACE
Our education has become practically universal so far as indi-
viduals are concerned, but it is far from universal with respect '^^"'^
to interests represented in the courses of study.
The inclination of all people of all classes is to be educated. _
The recent and growing demand that the policy of this educa-
tion shall be administered with at least some reference to the
probable occupation of the student, and to the encouragement
and development of the major activities, has raised new and,
fundamental questions as to the real purpose of education^ the*
materials and the methods of instruction/ and the organization
and the administration of the schools to reach and serve a wider
constituency.
These questions are not only new and puzzling, but their
answer evidently involves some radical revisions of our hitherto
educational standards. In any event, we cannot afford to err
seriously at this juncture, for it is a juncture in our educational
evolution, because the results of our decisions will be felt for
all time not only in individual prosperity and happiness, but
throughout the entire economic, social, and political fabric as
well.
Among all the purposes that education may be expected to
serve, it is perfectly clear that individual and community effi-
ciency is paramount ; and, moreover, that this efficiency is gen-
eral, having equal application to the industrial and to the
non-industrial, to the vocational and to the non-vocational.
iii
190597
/o^
?*
&
CONTENTS
PAGB
Introduction i
PART I
MTER
I. Education for Efficiency ii
II. Industrial Education with Special Reference to
THE High School . 37
III. Industrial Education a Phase of the Problem of
Universal Education 60
IV. The Educative Value of Labor .... 78
V. The Culture Aim in Education .... 90
VI. Unity in Education ^ 100
PART II
VII. Agriculture in the High Schools . . • .124
VIII. Agriculture in the Elementary Schools . . 136
IX. Agriculture in the Normal Schools . . . 144
X. The Development of American Agriculture —
What it is and what it Means . . . .147
^ •fthe "*^
UNIVERSITY
OF
EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
INTRODUCTION
THE RISE OF INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION
It was a great thing when the common man first
lifted up his head and said, " I, too, will be educated."
We have entered upon an era of universal education,
which means the education of all sorts of people for all
sorts of purposes. From now on therefore education must
sei:ve not only the exceptional five per cent but the ninety-
five per cent of common men as well; it must not only fit
for the so-called learned professions but it must also train
for common things, else it is not universal, — a new fact
that involves, I imagine, a somewhat radical revision of
our philosophy of education, with a corresponding broad-
ening of ideals as to the purposes, the materials, and the
methods of instruction.
Fifty-seven years ago Professor Jonathan B. Turner
wrote : ^
"All civilized society is, necessarily, divided into two distinct coopera-
tive, not antagonistic, classes : a small class, whose proper business it is
to teach the true principles of religion, law, medicine, science, art, and
literature ; and a much larger class who are engaged in some form of
labor, in agriculture, commerce, and the arts. For the sake of con-
venience, we will designate the former the Professional, and the latter the
Industrial, class, not implying that each may not be equally industrious,
the one in their intellectual, the other in their industrial, pursuits.
yProbably in no case would society ever need more than five men out of
1 From "A Plan for an Industrial University," United States Patent Office Report, 185a.
I
2 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
one hundred in the professional class, leaving ninety-five in every hun-
dred in the industrial ; and, so long as so many of our ordinary teachers
and public men are taken from the industrial class, as there are at present,
and probably will be for generations to come, we do not really need over
one professional man for every hundred, leaving ninety-nine in the
industrial class.
"The vast difference, in the practical means, of an appropriate
liberal education, suited to their wants and their destiny, which these
two classes enjoy, and ever have enjoyed the world over, must have
arrested the attention of every thinking man. True, the same general
abstract science exists in the world for both classes alike, but the means
of bringing this abstract truth into effectual contact with the daily busi-
ness and pursuits of the one class does exist, while in the other case it
does not exist and never can till it is new created.
" The one class have schools, seminaries, colleges, universities, appa-
ratus, professors, and multitudinous appliances for educating and train-
ing them for months and years, for the peculiar profession which is to
be the business of their life ; and they have already created, each class
for its own use, a vast and voluminous literature, that would wellnigh
sink a whole navy of ships.
" But where are the universities, the apparatus, the professors, and the
literature, specifically adapted to any one of the industrial classes ?
Echo answers, Where ? In other words, society has become, long since,
wise enough to know that its teachers need to be educated, but it has
not become wise enough to know that its workers need education just as
much. . . .
" It is said that farmers and mechanics do not and will not read, but
I say, give them the literature and the education suited to their wants,
and see if it does not reform and improve them as it has reformed and
improved their professional brethren. The agricultural classes have no
congenial literature."
In these few words Professor Turner outlined both the
need for education and the character of the education suited
to the natural needs of industrial people. They were written
in the early days of the campaign that led up to the Land
Grant Act of 1862, by which every state has come to have
at least one college wherein are taught the subjects that
INTRODUCTION 3
especially pertain to industrial life, but " without excluding
other scientific and classical studies."
This was the first far-reaching step in this country to-
ward an adequate system of education for industrial people
as such. Hitherto, to be sure, the colleges had been open
to young men from the industrial ranks, but the courses
were adapted to the special needs of Professor Turner's
five per cent and were silent upon those of the ninety-five.
If, therefore, an ambitious young man from the indus-
trial masses perchance entered college to better his con-
dition, the inevitable consequence was that he deserted the
ninety-five and joined the five per cent, whereby the indus-
trial masses remained uneducated and the industries un-
developed and tending downward as the result of universal
education, because educational influences were such as to
abstract from the industries the most ambitious and the
most capable.
This draft was *felt hardest upon the farm, when the
great commercial activity following the Civil War drew by
thousands the best blood out of the country into the city ;
off the land and into the office ; away from independence
into dependent positions with small salary.
The Land Grant Act was the first step in the correcting
of these evil tendencies, in that agricultural and mechani-
cal instruction of some sort was provided in every state in
the Union. It was followed twenty-five years later (1887)
by the Hatch Act, founding at every agricultural college
an Experiment Station for the investigation of problems
peculiarly agricultural and for the publication of the results.
Thus came to be built up, on the agricultural side at
least, the literature of which Professor Turner so clearly
saw the need. This also strengthened the instruction in
the college, and agricultural as well as engineering colleges
4 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
in these land-grant institutions were soon filled with stu-
dents. Thus industrial education became established in
this country, and first of all on college levels. It yet re-
mains to be established for the real masses, and the most
important educational question to-day is how to inaugurate
an adequate scheme of industrial education of secondary
grade and below in order to be within the reach of at least
the greater part of Turner's ninety-five per cent. This
question has not yet been settled, and it is the conviction
of the writer that as yet we have not evolved a philosophy
of education adequate to the task of meeting the logical
demands of a real system of universal education.
Gradually, but slowly, men have learned by experience
that schooling, if it be of a suitable kind, does not neces--
sarily educate away from industry, and further, that the
kind of education which fits for industry not only returns
educated men to industrial life but also and inevitably
develops the industries to a level that is unattainable except
through education.
It was far-sighted educated men like Turner in the
West and McAllister, Gregg, Cameron, and Morrill in the
East that first saw and pointed out the need of industrial edu-
cation. For a long time the people were apathetic or resist-
ant. They desired education; indeed they demanded it,
but it was for the purpose of " rising above " the ordinary
walks of life. They chiefly desired education not as a
source of personal gratification or of added efficiency in
service, but that they " would not have to work so hard
as their fathers did," and for a generation or more educa-
tion was regarded as the avenue out of industry and into
an " easy place " ; out of humble life into elegance and
prominence.
Accordingly, the first attempts at industrial education,
INTRODUCTION 5
even when endowed by federal support, were met by any-
thing but promising results. The only people who sup-
ported the agricultural colleges were the few who really
desired their sons to be educated, but had learned by ob-
servation that the old-line college courses educated away
from the farm.
From the first, the attempt to teach industrial courses was
attended by peculiar difficulties. As Turner had remarked,
there was no literature. There was lacking, therefore,
both material and method, and it would take a book sim-
ply to record the academic blunders and the professional
shortsightedness that characterized the first quarter of a
century of this attempt. Teachers were as lacking as was
appropriate literature, and these have had to be de-
veloped by the slow evolution of internal processes, because
we have beheld the unparalleled prospect of a generation
of self-made teachers evolving with their own experience
both the matter and the methods of an entirely new educa-
tional field.
Quite naturally the first attempts at teaching were little
more than an effort to train in handicraft, developing the
art side of industries in imitation of the obsolete apprentice
system, and it has taken a generation of experience to
teach us that what is needed in industrial education is not
so much the art as the science of the craft ; not so much
the practice as the principle, which only is educative, and
on which only the inc^ustry and the man can be developed
together.
Harassing and full of delay as all these troubles have
been, we have gradually learned two fundamental facts,
viz. first, that the industrial man is the better for being
suitably educated; and second, that industry develops with
that sort of education of industrial people which retains
6 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
them among the industries and does not drive or lead them
out. Agriculture, like engineering, is rapidly becoming
more difficult, and in many of its phases has already passed
beyond the compass of the uneducated.
We are gradually learning, too, that it does not pay to
try to hold individuals either within or without the bonds
of industrial life, but that it is the best public policy to
leave nature alone in this respect and let the individual
decide his own destiny after a fair opportunity for choice
of occupation.
With a feeling of confidence established at these points,
the demand for industrial education as such is strongly
felt and is now becoming surprisingly general, so general
as to amount to a demand that must be reckoned with,
and that at once. This demand takes one or the other of
two forms : either that industrial schools shall be more
generally estabUshed, or else that industrial courses shall
be added to the curricula of existing schools. Which one of
these two demands to recognize is the most difficult of all
questions for educators to solve, because in its solution we
must look, not so much to the present situation as to future
conditions and the ultimate consequences of the plan that
finally shall be adopted.
With the rise of industrial education new meaning has
been given to industry and new dignity to that kind of
labor which is a necessary part of a logical plan looking to the
accomplishment of definite ends, all of which adds to the
significance of this form of education and still further
augments the demand, until our whole scheme of education
is on the point of revision.
Some good people, conservative to a fault, look upon
these educational innovations with extreme disapproval,
marking, as they believe, the passing of old-time high
INTRODUCTION 7
standards of the educated man. Others, noting the im-
mediate and direct value of technical instruction, are ready-
to jettison the ship and cast overboard as useless junk not
only every ancient language because it is " dead," but any
and every other subject that does not clearly and directly
contribute to utilitarian ends, on the ground that it is not
practical. *7Vs the one side pursues its educational ideals, *
oblivious that men are beings of flesh and blood to be fed,
clothed, and housed, so the other forgets that the chief end
of man is not merely to meet his physical necessities.
Both sides are likely to consider only the present good of
the individual and overlook the ultimate effect of an educa-
tional system upon the community as a whole.
Where, now, between these two extremes shall we find
the golden mean, by observing which we shall have a new
philosophy of education adequate to minister to all the
needs of man ? What is the fountain at which all may
drink freely, to the advantage not only of the individual
but of the race ? To answer this question safely will
require the keenest insight into present conditions and the
most prophetic vision as to future consequences of what-
ever policy shall be adopted.
The following pages are offered as some slight contri-
bution to the thought that must be bestowed upon the
matter before the problem of universal education shall be
so solved as to serve fairly and safely both the five and the
ninety-five per cent.
OF THE
UNIVERSITY
OF
PART I
CHAPTER I
EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY i
It is dangerous to attempt to educate a live boy
with no reference to the vocational.
The first general principle to be recognized is this : \
That industrial education cannot be considered by itself \
alone any more than industrial people can live alone. It :
is at best but part of a general scheme of education that
aims at a higher efficiency of all classes of people, and it
is in this light that industrial education should be studied
and its problems solved.
The most significant educational fact to-day is that men
of all classes have come to look, upon education as a thing
that will better their condition ; and they mean by that, first
of all, something to make their labor more effective and
more profitable ; and second, they mean something that
will enable them to live fuller lives. They have no very^
clear idea of the methods for bringing it all about, nor have j
they any very good means of impressing their views and \. ^
desires upon us at educational conventions ; but to better •[
their condition through education is the abiding faith and j
purpose of all men everywhere, and they will persist until y
it is realized.
The ruling passion of the race to-day is for education ;
and colleges and schools of all sorts, both public and private,
* This chapter covers the general line of thought developed by the author in an address at
the dedication of the new agricultural buildiug at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville,
May 28, 1909.
II
12 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
day classes and night classes, winter and summer, are filled
to overflowing. The only educational institution that is
being deserted is the old-time district school, and that is
failing only where it is unable to satisfy the new demands,
and where this occurs its lineal successor is the public high
school, which is everywhere becoming the favorite agency
of modern education of the masses in America.
The training of the young for the duties of life is no
longer left to the charity of the church nor to private endow-
ment, however munificent. We do not ask a man to pay
the expense of his own education, and we no longer require
the parent to pay for the schooling of his child. We have
come to recognize that in the last analysis the child belongs
to the community, and public welfare requires that he be
educated. So we have the policy of universal education^
well established among us and the largest item of public as
well as of private expense is for schools.
Now this is not sentiment, it is business ; it is not charity,
it is statesmanship. We propose to maintain all sorts of
education for all sorts of people, and to keep them in school .
as long as we can — so far have we gone already in this
worship of the idol of our day and time.
Yes, truly the ruling passion of the race is for education. .
Individuals would amass wealth ; individuals would exert •
influence and power ; individuals would live lives of luxury .
and ease, but the common purpose of the masses of men
from all the walks of life is a set determination to acquire
knowledge. Daughters of washerwomen graduate from
the high school, and ditchers' sons go to college — not by
ones and twos, but literally by hundreds and thousands,
and if the ruling passion fails in individual cases, we have a
law that puts the child into school, willy-nilly, on the ground
that to this extent, at least, he is public property.
EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 13
Now what is to be the consequence of all this ? What
will the daughter of the washerwoman do after she has
graduated from the high school ? Will she take her mother's
place at the tub ? What think you ? If not, how will
the washing be done ? and was her schooling a blessing or
a curse to the community ? — because the tub must stay ; and
if she does take her place at the tub, was her schooling a
blessing or a curse to her ? Will the ditcher's son inherit
the father's spade ? and if not, how will ditches be dug if all
men are to be educated ? How will the world's work get
done if education takes men and women out of useful and
needful occupations and makes them over mto pseudo ladies
and gentlemen of leisure ? How, too, will their own bills
be paid except they labor as men have always labored?
It is idle to_say that a portion of the race should be left
ignorant that they may perform the undesirable though
necessary labor. The "portion" objects, and what are we
going to do about it? Now these are disagreeable ques-
tions, and we would rather not be forced to answer them ;
but they are fundamental, and will soon begin to answer
themselves in some fashion under our system of education,
which is rapidly becoming universal.
r^. We are now engaged in the most stupendous educational,
social, and economic experiment the world has ever under-
taken — the experiment of universal education ;^and whether
in the end universal education shall prove a blessing or a
curse to us will depend entirely upon our skill in handling
the issues it has raised for our solution. We have entered
too far upon this experiment ever to retire from it, even if
we desired to do so, which we do not ; and if the outcome
is to be safety and not anarchy, and if it is all to result in
further development of the race and not in retrogression,
then a few fundamentals must soon be clearly recognized
14 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
and brought into and made a part of our educational ideals,
policies, and methods.
Firsty if we are to have universal education, it must
contain a large element of the vocational, because all the
needful activities must be maintained in the educated state
as heretofore. The race cannot progress any more in the
future than in the past except by the expenditure of large
amounts of human energy. This being so, education can-
not be looked upon as an avenue to a life of ease, or as a
means of giving one man an advantage over another,
whereby he may exist upon the fruit of that other's labor
and the sweat of that other's brow. It might do for a
few ; it cannot do for the mass, whose efficiency must be
increased and not decreased by education ; because in the
last analysis education is a public as well as a personal
matter, and the interests of the state require that the ratio
of individual efficiency in all lines shall be constantly
increased.
Second^ within the limits of needful activities one occu-
pation is as important as another, and a system of uni-
versal education must enrich them all, or the end will be
disastrous. We need to change our views concerning
what have been regarded as menial employments. In the
millennium no woman will make her living over the wash-
tub, nor will she sing the song of the shirt day and night
forever ; but neither will education and elevation free her,
or any one else, from a fair share of the drudgery of life,
because the needful things must still be done. Nor must
we fail to remind ourselves that not all the labor of the
worM is at the washtub, or at the bottom of the ditch,
because success in any calling is the price of unremitting
and exhausting toil, against which education is no insur-
ance whatever. It can only promise that faithful labor
EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 15
shall have its adequate and sure reward. And that is
enough, for no man has a right to ask that he be freed
from labor on this earth ; he can only pray to be relieved
from the burden of aimless and fruitless drudgery — which
is the blessed assurance of education.
While education is no relief from labor, or even drudg-
ery, it ought, however, to lessen the totality of drudgery by
the further utilization of mechanical energy and the more
economic and intelHgent direction of human effort. Edu-
cation will never fully justify itself until this shall have
been accomplished and the human machine be liberated
from the last form of slavery — the drudgery that is born
of ignorance.
No man, then, educated or uneducated, has a right to be
useless. Most men will continue to earn and ought to
earn, in one way or another, the funds to pay their bills,
and in this natural way will the world's work get done in
the future as in the past. The education of all men, there-
fore, is, or should be, in a broad sense vocational, and the
so-called learned professions are but other names for devel-
oped industries. In this broad sense every useful activity
is included, from farming to music and painting, poetry
and sculpture ; from engineering to medicine and law,
philosophy and theology ; as wide and as varied as the ac-
tivities and capacities of the human race — so wide and so
varied must our education be if it is to be universal and be
safe.
Measured by this standard, farming has the same claims \
upon education as have language and literature, but no\J.
more ; for both are useful, or jnay be, though in different^ ^^
ways. Which is more useful we cannot tell any more than"^"*"'^
we can tell whether food or religion is the more essential
to human life ; or whether ar^ or industry contributes most
1 6 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
to its fullest development. We only know that all things
within the range of human capacity are useful, and that
education may, if it will, enrich them all.
Now this demand is right, for, unless universal education
can be so administered as not greatly to disturb the rela-
tions of needful activities, it will prove in the end a curse
instead of a blessing, and it is the business of educators
now soberly to consider the consequences of headlong poli-
cies, however promising in direct results, if they do not
reckon with the inevitable outcome.
Thirdy in the working out of these plans such policies
and methods must be observed as shall prevent social
cleavage along vocational lines. Unless we can do this,
democracy will, in the end, fail. We cannot go on with
one half of the people educated and the other half igno-
rant, any more than we could live with one half free and
the other half slave. No more can we live with one half
educated to one set of ideals and the other half to an-
other. If we attempt it, we shall have, in due time, not
civilization — but a tug of war between highly educated
but mutually destructive human energies. I The only safety
for us now is in the education of all classes to common
ideals of individual efficiency and public service along
needful Hnes and with common standards of citizenship.
To this end the individual must have training, both voca-
tional and humanistic, and it is better if he does not know
just when or how he is getting either the one or the other.
Fourth, remembering that what is one man's vocation is
another's avocation, and that what is technical and profes-
sional to one is humanistic to another ; remembering that
all study is educational and that utility does not lessen its
value ; remembering, too, that much of our education comes
from association and that the best of it comes in no other
EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 17
way — remembering all these and many other considera-
tions well known to the thinking man, we must agree that
in a system of universal education the best results will al-
ways follow when as many subjects as possible and as many
vocations as may be are taught together in the same school^
under the same management and to the same body of men.
In no other way can a perfectly homogeneous population
be secured. In no other way can universal efficiency be so
closely combined with good citizenship. In no other way
can activity and learning be so intimately united. In no
other way can morals and good government be so safely
intrusted to a free people.
As I see it, the greatest hindrance to the natural evolu-
tion of a single system of schools adapted to the education
of all classes of our people is academic tradition which
needs substantial modification in a number of important
particulars.
The truth is, there is no such thing as a '* general edu-
"cation^ except one that fits for nothing in particular, leav-
mg the possessor stranded without occupation or other \/
field for the exercise of his trained activities. In so far as ^
this type of general education exists among us, the quicker
we abolish it the better. For example, it has been fash-
ionable to speak of the courses in the arts and sciences as
"general," "non-technical," or "liberal," using the terms
synonymously, and as opposed to the technical or profes-
sional.
Now this is inaccurate and leads to much confusion of
mind. Courses in the arts and sciences are not by nature
general and non-technical, because an examination of the
facts will discover that most of the students taking those
courses in colleges are taking them for professional
purposes in preparation for definite careers, generally
0
i8 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
teaching ; possibly banking, railroad administration, or the
business of an analytical or manufacturing chemist or some
other gainful occupation. That is to say, the courses in
the arts and sciences are mostly taken as professional or
vocational courses the same as are those in engineering
.and agriculture.
The best evidence of this erroneous use of terms is that
those who make most of the distinction between the tech-
nical and the non-technical courses ; those who talk most
about the latter being liberal as distinct from the former;
those who outcry loudest against commercializing educa-
tion are teachers themselves, who are earning money
like farmers. Now by what rule do we adjudge that farm-
ing is a calling and teaching a profession } that engineer-
ing is industrial and journalism liberal ? that courses fitting
for farming are technical and narrow, and those fitting for
teaching or making chemical determinations are general
and liberal.? The truth is they are all alike vocational;
they are all professional ; they all open avenues whereby
men and women earn money to pay their bills, and ninety-
nine out of a hundred of those who are good for anything
in any and all these courses are taking them for the
same purpose, viz. to afford a congenial field of activity
whereby the individual may become a worthy and self-sus-
taining member of society.
The truth is that the distinction between the technical
and the non-technical, the professional and the non -pro-
fessional, the narrow and the liberal, does not inhere in
courses of study leading to graduation, for the same sub-
ject may be either the one or the other according to the
point of view of the student %nd the purpose for which it
is taken. For example, chemistry /^rj^ is neither techni-
cal nor non-technical, narrow nor liberal. It is a great
EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 19
field of science. As explored and studied by an_agriculr
tural student, or by one who proposes to make his living
"as an analytical or a manufacturing chemist — to them it
is a technical subject, while to the student of literature
it becomes a non-technical and therefore a liberal subject,
because it liberalizes him and broadens his outlook upon
the world and helps to connect him with the farmer and
manufacturing chemist. To the prospective teacher it
becomes technical or non-technical ; vocational or non-
vocational, according as he proposes or does not propose
to teach it. To the farmer, chemistry is a technical sub-
ject, and literature and history non-technical, and therefore
liberal. To the teacher of history, conditions would be
reversed.
Another academic reform is to get over our horror of
the^ vocational. The old-line courses were as distinctly
vocational to the learned professions as are the newer
courses to the industrial occupations. The services of
education to the industries of life and the ordinary oc-
cupations of men have been so recent that final adjust-
ments are not yet made. We are only gradually beginning
to learn that every useful man, educated or uneducated, /^
has a calling and that the line between the technical and
the non-technical, between the narrow and the.liberaUxuns
across indivjdualSjjjiot between them. Every properly ediil^yl
cated man is trained both vocationally and liberally, but one \ -
vocation is not necessarily more liberal than another £x- ;'
cept as the practitioner makes it so. To succeed in any
calling requires the possession of a body of specific knowl-
edge relating directly to that calling, mostly useless profes-
sionally to one of another calling, but far from useless as a
liberalizer.
Every man, to be efficient, needs the vocational ; to be
®
20 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
happy and safe he needs the other. John Bessmer was a
barber and made his living by his scissors, but meteorology
was his avocation. He was the best barber I ever knew,
but he talked most about meteorology. The ditcher will
not ditch all his waking hours. What will he think about
when he is awake and not in the ditch ? Then is when his
avocation, the liberal part of his education, is his comfort
and our safety, for the mind is an unruly member, and if
the man has no training beyond his vocation, his intellect
is at sea, without chart, compass, or rudder, and the human
mind adrift is a dangerous engine of destruction.
It is well that we who are bent most upon industrial
training and development do not forget these considera-
tions, and in our enthusiasm for technical instruction we
see to it also that every individual has a fair share of the
liberal as well, for the; chief distinction of the educated
man is, after all, his ability to view the world froin_a_stand-
point broader than his own surroundings.
Another relic of academic ancient history that ought to
be eliminated is that habit of thought which runs in the
form of set courses of study four years long. This habit
of thought has stood in the way of the proper and ade-
quate development of agriculture in our colleges, and it is
now standing in the way of high-school differentiation and
the development of industrial courses therein.
For example, it has been assumed without discussion
that a student desiring instruction in agriculture must enter
upon a set course for four years, and that unless he gradu-
ated he had somehow failed, or the course was too long.
It never seemed to occur to our educational fathers and
grandfathers that perhaps the course was not adapted to
his needs any more than it seems to occur to some of our
contemporaries that men go to school to study subjects, not
EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 21
set courseSy and that the benefits of our instruction are by-
no means confined to those who graduate.
There is nothing sacred about four years, or about a
particular association of subjects. We must get over our
fetish worship of what we call a " course of study " and
bestow our attention upon " courses of instruction." Our
somewhat uniform failure to do this has been responsible
for much special and unnecessary limitation in the subject
of agriculture. Let me illustrate : A good friend some
months ago asked me this question : *' Why do you not
have a two-years course in agriculture in the University
of Illinois } " I replied by asking, " Tell me first why do
you have one in your university } " He replied, " Because
many young men cannot, or will not stay, for a four-years
course." And I said, " Then of course you have also two-
year courses in the arts and sciences, and in engineering ? "
And he said with an elevation of the eyebrows, very signifi-
cant, " No, of course not." Then I said, " Why not } Do
all or most of your students in the other colleges remain
and complete four-year courses } " He had to answer,
" No, not a third of them." I think I had answered his
question, but to make sure I said, "When the other col-
leges of the University of Illinois find it necessary or desir-
able to put in two-year courses because not more than one
student in three or four stays to graduate, then I suppose
we shall do the same; but until then I think we shall
continue to teach subjects to those who come, and bestow
honors on those who have earned the usual amount of
credit." Here is a good illustration of our futile efforts
to hammer a new subject into line with ancient academic
custom, as if graduation from something, even a two-years
course, were the chief end of the schooling process.
This same old habit of thought is the bane of the high
22 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
schools to-day in their effort to serve the people. Many
of them consider the limit reached when a four-years
course is offered, made up largely out of old-line subjects
with little or no reference to local needs, and when we talk
about instruction in vocational subjects they remind us that
the " course is full." This mistaken attitude on the part
of too many high school men will do more than all other
causes combined to force upon us a multitude of separate
technical schools and destroy the opportunity of the high
schools forever, because men are as firmly bent on voca-
tional education of a secondary grade to-day as their fathers
were bent on industrial education of collegiate grade half
a century ago. The same forces are at work in high
schools now as were at work among colleges then, and the
issue will be the same. Either the high schools will ex-
pand and teach the vocational, or other schools will be
estabUshed that will do it.
One good friend whom I greatly honor, because he is many
years my senior, and many degrees my superior in every
sense, writing me on this point, said in substance: "Your
idea that all subjects needful to the life of the community
should be taught in tn ' ^-^me school is fine in theory, but
how are you going to gei it all into the course, and what
shall be left out? " Aye, there's the rub ! How get it into
the course and what shall be left out f How this instinctive
attitude of mind clings to us academic people ! It is not
much found except among professional educators, and with
them it is one of the relics of academic ancient history,
dating back to the time when the college provided a set
course for all students and which, when full, wdiSfull in the
same sense that the jug is full.
Recently the colleges have learned the lesson of the tre-
mendous complexity of modern demands, and they are be-
EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 23
ginning to realize something of the depth and breadth of the
meaning of universal education ; at least that it means the
education of many men for many things and by means of
various materials and methods. This involves many courses
in one school. It requires that colleges teach subjects rather
than set courses ; and nothing is full so long as any branch
of knowledge and activity remains undeveloped and men
and money hold out. The colleges have learned this ; it
is also the lesson for the secondary schools ; indeed, in a
very large sense the land-grant uniyersity is the model for
the pvi^lic high schpol. - ^^\A,, . ,'. Cc-.J - ^ >,
Our children look to the ^hools to fit them for the
many duties of life. Let them not be disappointed. To
this end we must construct such educational policies and
employ such materials and methods as shall make the
school a true picture of life outside in all its essential ac-
tivities. Xaaccomplish this we must introduce vocational
studies freely, not for their pedagogic influence but for
their own sake and for the professional skill and creative
energy they will give the learner. We must do this, too,
without excluding the non-professional either from the
school or from the individual^ - ^v'
Take a specific instance outside" of agriculture, but one
which is typical of thousands of cases. There are many
good families whose daughters feel the need of earning some
little money during years of young womanhood between
the school age and matrimony. They are good typical
American girls, worthy the love and the service of any man,
and sometime the hero will come. In the meantime, what }
We will suppose that the girl in queistion looks with
favor upon stenography and typewriting as a congenial
employment. Now I put the question flatly, remembering
there are many like her in the same community, — shall
24 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
the high school put in courses of typewriting and stenogra-
phy which she may take in connection with her humanistic
studies and her domestic science which she will one day
need ? — for this typical girl is, or should be, a prospective
wife and mother. Will the school do this ? or will it force
her to leave her high school in order to get elsewhere
this vocational training which she thinks she must have,
because of temporary needs, and which the high school
will not give her lest it should be suspected of commercial-
izing education ?
I am thankful that many high schools are already put-
ting in vocational courses. May their numbers increase.
It is far better to hold this girl in the high school and teach
her also the things she will one day need much more than
she will then need her stenography and typewriting, — it is
better for her and it is better for the community than it is
to force her, in early years and under the exigency of im-
mediate needs, to abandon the greater for the less. Yes, it
is better to take stenography and typewriting, telegraphy
and bookkeeping into the high school than it is to drive
our girls out of it even into the night schools. A proper
policy at this- point will save to American wifehood and
American homes thousands of bachelor maids and factory
girls, and do more to reduce the ratio of divorce than any
other civilizing force with which we hold acquaintance.
What is true of many girls is doubly true of most boys.
If they are good for anything, the impulse to be doing
something definite takes hold of them early, and the only
way to keep a live boy in school or to make him good for
anything after he leaves it is to be certain that some portion
of his curriculum relates directly to some form of business
activity outside. // is dangerous to attempt to educate a live
boy with no reference to the vocational.
EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 25
The trouble has been in the past, and is yet, that our
courses of instruction have been too few. We have not
sufficiently distinguished between what a single individual
could take and what the community as a whole ought to
know. Accordingly, men seeking education have found
much of the subject-matter and of the method grossly un-
suited to the uses they hoped to make of it, and have either
left the school, sacrificing their broader opportunity, or
have stayed to the sacrifice of their efficiency.
The universities have been first to recognize this fact and
to meet it. With the best of them there is no thought of
a set course which every individual must take, but rather
the aim is to offer instruction in as many as possible of
the branches of knowledge that interest and profit men.
The result is that in these institutions few men are taking
courses with a fixed sequence, but each is after the instruc-
tion which will best fit his needs, and often two men take
the same subject side by side with a very different purpose
and from a very different point of view.
Now the efficiency of modern university education, espe-
cially along new lines, is becoming notable, and institutions
conducted upon this plan are overrun with students seeking
definite instruction for definite purposes, all of which indi-
cates the educational policy that best meets the needs of
the people. Here is the cue to the general plan that
should characterize the high schools, upon which educators
ought to bestow some degree of special attention, because
it is in the secondary schools and not in the colleges that
the American people will mostly be educated.
A third particular in which we need academic reforma-
tion is this: Not only college courses, but high school
courses, as well, are planned and conducted almost solely
in the interest of the few who graduate, with but little ref-
26 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
erence to the masses who drop Jby^ the wayside. If our
system of education is to achieve the highest results, it
must recognize the natural difference in men, both qualita-
tively and quantitatively, and while it trains the brightest
and best for the positions of most responsibility and there-
fore of honor, it must so shape its policy that those who
for any reason cannot, or do not, remain to the limit of time,
or whose academic ability is mediocre shall drop naturally
into useful places for which their little schooling has some-
what definitely prepared them. Thus will our human
flotsam and jetsam be lessened, and thus shall we become
more homogeneous as a people. Thus too shall we be
consistent, for does not our education aim to be universal?.
Our high schools, or rather their constituency, are suf-
fering cruelly at this point to-day. The chief object in too.
many ambitious schools is to get on the accredited list of.
as many universities as possible, graduate as many students
as may be, and get them into college. So intense is this,
purpose that in too many instances the course of study and.
the methods of work are inadvertently but largely shaped
in the interest of those who are to graduate, though we
know only too well that their ratio is small, and that of
those who go to college it is still smaller.
It is time the high schools served the interests of their
community first of all ; and if they will do that thoroughly,
the colleges will manage to connect with them on some
terms mutually satisfactory. If that is impossible, then let
the high school faithfully discharge its natural functions to
the community that gives it life and support, and leave
adjustments to the universities. The few who go beyond
the high school will be abundantly able to take care of
themselves if only their training has been thorough^ and
they have learned habits of efficiency. I protest against
EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 27
the reduction of the American high school to the basis of
a college preparatory school, unless it is first built upon
what is a rational education for the masses of men. We
have no right to reduce, impoverish, or distort the educa-
tional opportunity of the great mass of people who depend,
upon the high school for their only education, in the
interest of the few who go to college.
We are nearing the time when for various reasons we shall
revolutionize our secondary education as we have already
revolutionized our college standards^^^MVe shall offer many
courses of instruction in many subjeCTs, some vocational,
others not; some vocational to certain students, not so to
others, and all in the same school. We shall not be on
sound ground in this matter until things are so fixed that
when a boy or a girl comes into contact with our school
system at any point, even for a short time, he or she will
at once and of necessity strike something vocational and
also something not vocational; to the end that, however
soon the student leaves the system, he will carry out into
life at least something which will make him more efficient
at some point, and also more cultivated, because the schools
have taught him something of actual life, not only in the
abstract but in its applicatioij.
The greatest trouble with our educational system to-day .
is that it is laid out too much on the plan of a trunk line \ L
railroad without side switches or way stations, but with
splendid terminal facilities, so that we send the educational
trains thundering over the country, quite oblivious of the
population except to take on passengers, and these we take
on much as the fast train takes mail bags from the hook.
We do our utmost to keep them aboard, to the end, and we .
.work so exclusively for this purpose that those who leave u^'
i^re fitted for no special calling, and drop out for no special
Tf
28 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
purpose, but roll off like chunks of coal by the wayside —
largely a matter of luck as to what becomes of them.
I would reconstruct the policy of the system by making all
trains local, both to take on and leave off passengers ; and
I would pay much attention to the sidings, and the depots, •
and their surroundings at the way stations, to the end that
those who do not complete the journey may find congenial
surroundings and useful employment in some calling along ^
the line. I mean by this that while vocation should be .
neither the end nor the means of the educational process,
yet it should be its inseparable concomitant. This is ^
education for efficiency and service, whether it ever earns
an academic degree or not.
We need not fear real education for real efficiency, but we
may well tremble when we see a whole people gorging
themselves with a mass of knowledge that has no applica-
tion to the lives they are to live, for this will breed in the
end dissatisfaction and anarchy. The best illustration of
this educational short-sightedness is the fondness of many
a classically educated colored brother for Latin, Greek, and
Hebrew, not so much for what they can do for him, or help
to do for himself or others, as because the acquisition of
language is a pleasant exercise and its possession a satisfy-
ing novelty. Fortunately Booker Washington and Tus-
keegee are in the land, but unfortunately our educational
blunders are not limited to the colored race. It is a notable
and perhaps significant fact that a very large proportion
of the tramps of the country have had the advantages
of our schools.
Another point at which our minds are in danger of wan-
dering far afield is in regard to the natural function of the
secondary school. The American high school is a new
institution, and like all new institutions it lacks ideals and
EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 29
methods. It has displaced, in the West at least, the old-
time academy whose function it was to fit for college,
The high school, lacking models, has followed very largely
and quite naturally the plan of the academy whose mantle
it has inherited. In this it has erred. The modern high
school is not the lineal descendant of the old-time academy y
and its primary function is not to fit for college. It is a
new institution^ and its function is to educate its natural
and local constituency for the duties of life. It is as thor-
oughly a public institution as is the state university ^ and it
should serve its community in the same way and with the
same spirit that the university serves the larger and more
complex unit.
It is the first business of the high schools to serve the
public needs directly through the masses of men and
women who constitute their natural constituency, not in-
directly through the colleges. Their service to education
and to civilization is primary, fundamental, and direct, not
secondary and preparatory. Nor in saying this do I re-
flect upon the great work of our institutions of highest
learning ; far from it. No man can exceed me in admira-
tion of the supreme service of the colleges and the uni-
versities of the country, but that supreme service must
be rendered without overshadowing, distorting, or injuring
that other service, which, after all, is more direct, reaches
a larger number, and without which the influences of the
colleges and universities will be largely dissipated and lost.
If the existing high schools will earnestly address them-
selves to this great duty, they will become, next to the
church, the most powerful educating and elevating agen-
cies of our civilization; but if they do not, then as sure as
time passes another system of schools will arise that will
do it, and the time will not be long hence until they will
30 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
divide the field with technical schools and play a losing
game of chance with them. The first independent schools
will be trade schools in the cities and agricultural schools
in the country, and this lead will be followed by others
until we shall have a whole system of vocational schools
of all conceivable sorts; and the high schools will be
stripped, first of one opportunity to serve their constitu-
ency and then of another, until their usefulness will be
lessened, if not entirely destroyed in the eyes of the peo-
ple, who alone can support them, and they will be rele-
gated to girls' schools and training schools for college
admission.
This is no fanciful picture, and I am convinced that
unless we are quick to read and heed the handwriting on
the wall to-day the next decade or two will witness the
permanent decline of the high school under the onslaught
of the multitude of independent vocational schools that
will spring up everywhere and which will seem to serve
well because the service is direct and plainly useful. The
only great future for the high school is to add vocational
work, making the separate technical school unnecessary,
if not impossible. If they will do this, their future and their
service are assured ; but if the people find it necessary to
estabHsh another system of secondary education as they did a
new system of collegiate grade, then they will do it ; but if
they do, they will certainly insist upon a fair division of the
revenues, because modern high schools are not private
institutions as were the old-time colleges; they are in
every sense of the term public institutions.
Experience in university circles has shown that the
separate professional college was necessary in the past
only because of the indifference to new demands of the
institutions then existing. As soon however as the universi-
EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 31
ties seriously set about studying the new problem froru
their own standpoint it was found that there was really
nothing incompatible between the old and the new ideals,
but rather that it took the two together to make a com-
plete system of education, and where the two have been
already joined, — the professional and the cultural, the in-
dustrial and the humanistic, — there has education flourished
best in the last decade ; there is the educational impulse
strongest to-day, and there, if wise counsels prevail, will
develop in good time the greatest educational strength
and creative power of this most virile of people ; not only
along industrial lines, but along artistic and humanistic
lines as well. ^
If the high schools make the most of their opportunity,
they will develop into a great system capable of training
the masses of our pejople not only industrially but for all
the duties of life, and in a way that can never be equaled
by any multiple- system of separate vocational schools,
however well established and conducted. One school
with many courses, not many schools with different
courses — that is the plan for American secondary educa-
tion. Such a school would be large enough and strong
enough to afford an excellent education within walking or
driving distance of every young person — an ideal not
attainable by any system of separate schools that can
ever be established. I have unlimited faith in the final
development of the high school, and cannot condemn in
terms too strong a pessimistic or a carping spirit toward
this new and remarkable system of education at the very
doors of the people ; and I cannot oppose too strongly any
and all influences that tend to make its proper evolution
either impossible or more difficult.
We must not underrate the importance of the average
32 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
citizen, either to himself or to the community, for the com-
mon man with an opportunity is a common man no longer.
If we would know what a community of common people
can do when it addresses itself seriously and en masse to a
single purpose, consider the success of that little German
village in breeding canaries, marvel upon the achievements
in the Passion Play at Oberammergau, or even the singing
of the Messiah in that little Swedish village of Kansas, as
described in a recent Outlook.)
Remembering what the common man may do, with
proper ideals and advantages, there is no higher duty now
resting upon all of us, and especially upon educators, than
to unite education and activity by the closest possible
bonds, to prevent on the one hand the acquirement of
knowledge to no purpose, and on the other the develop-
ment of operative skill with little knowledge of the true
relations of things ; to see to it that no individual shall be
compelled to choose between an education without a voca-
tion, and a vocation without an education. This supreme
responsibility rests heavily upon every American commu-
nity just now, and in our enthusiasm for education that is
useful it is well if we temper our enthusiasm with judg-
ment and keep always in mind the fundamentals on which
all real education must rest. If this be true, it is impera-
tive that the high school as an educational institution
should take hold of and care for all the essential activities
of its community ; and if the clay working or some other
interest develop into a separate organization with a sepa-
rate plant, that it still be under the control of the high
school, as the different colleges of a university are under
one control, and their policies and aims, though different,
are yet harmonized into a common purpose of training for
actual, not apparent, efficiency.
EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 33
To teach all subjects to all men in the same school — this
is the great educational, social, and economic opportunity
of America, where both collegiate and secondary education
are in the hands of the general public and not of any sect,
class, or faction. If we throw away this natural advan-
tage, bought with blood and treasure, or if we neglect to
make the most of it, we are guilty before the nation and
the race of a breach of trust second only to the sin of
treason.
If we follow precedent blindly and transport that alien
institution, the European trade school, and transplant it
into the free soil of America simply because it is tempo-
rarily easier than to complete the system we have so splen-
didly begun, then shall we commit an educational blunder
that is inexcusable, and we shall richly deserve the anathe-
mas that will be ours from generations yet unborn when
they come to see the handicap we have laid upon them and
the natural advantages we have sacrificed.
I would have it so that the 'occupation of an American
citizen may not be known by his dress, his manner, his
speech, or his prejudices. If we can realize this ideal, it
will be to our perpetual advantage, for it will insure not
only our economic independence but our social comfort,
our racial progress, and our national safety. If all this is
to come about, we have some thinking to do now, for, as I
have remarked elsewhere, more depends on what we do
now, than can depend upon what we or others think and
say and try to do twenty-five or fifty years from now.
When the materials for American educational history
are all gathered, and when time enough has elapsed for its
various elements to assume their true proportions and per-
spective, it will be found that the most significant fact in
the educational movement of our day and time was the
34 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
agitation that led up to the establishment of the state uni-
versity.
In a very large sense the founding of that unique in-
stitution of learning introduced two new and distinctive
elements into our philosophy of education, both of which
bid fair to be permanent, and to control even to the extent
of revolutionizing our educational ideals.
The first of these fundamental doctrines was this — that
no single class of men and no single class of subjects
should dominate the educational policies of this people ;
and the second was that in the last analysis higher educa-
tion is a public and not a personal matter.
The state university was in some sense a protest against
the order of things then existing. Colleges were giving
their exclusive attention to an exceedingly narrow range
of human knowledge, and conducting courses of study
that fitted well for theology, medicine, and law, but were
calculated to unfit for other activities of men that were also
essential ; so that education served a few occupations at
the expense of all others ; for no man could find anywhere
on earth courses of study to fit himself for usefulness out-
side the so-called learned professions, good and useful in
themselves, but insufficient for all the needs of a high civi-
lized people. This being true, the effect of education was not
to enrich the lives of men generally and to advance civiliza-
tion uniformly, but rather to draw from all walks of life
into a few favored occupations, and leave the great outside
mass of human knowledge undeveloped, neglected, and
largely inaccessible, and most of the activities of men un-
touched by the vitalizing energy of learning.
The protest arose because all classes were not given
equal opportunity and all activities were not equally bene-
fited, in which case the public was not well served. Under
EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 35
i
the old regime agriculture remained undeveloped, and farm-
ing was common labor. Building and mechanics gener-
ally were craftsmanship executed mostly by unskilled labor,
which was bad for the men and the industry, and worse
for the public whom they served.
The state universities were established primarily to teach
the branches of knowledge especially related to the indus-
tries of life ; but their field has broadened in the doing,
and their success has shown not only that learning may
be useful without losing its educative value, but that all
branches of learning are both useful and educative, and
thereby worthy of being taught to somebody ; that in the
interest of the public it is the business of a school as of a
university to teach more things than any single man may
desire to know, and that it is the business of our institu-
tions of learning to reflect in their laboratories and in their
class rooms the life and essential activities of our civilization
at least in all its major aspects.
The other new idea introduced through the state univer-
sity is that education is first of all a public rather than a
personal matter. Colleges had long been maintained for
the convenience of those who desired and were able to pay
for an education, and those who took these courses did so
with a view to bettering their condition personally. While
the campaign for industrial education savored largely of
personal needs and class equality in educational opportu-
nity, yet in its working out we have discovered the deeper
principle ; viz. that the pubHc is not well served until we
educate freely for all useful activities, to the end that these
activities shall be in the hands of educated men, under
whom only will they develop and by which development
only will our civilization as a whole prosper and progress.
The ultimate purpose of a great system of education is and
36 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
must be the development of human activities, both indus-
trial and non-industrial, and our great demand upon the
individuals that have enjoyed its advantages is service —
service in something, somewhere ; anything, anywhere.
The great mass of human happiness will always arise
out of doing well the common things of life^ and the
happiness of the individual will lie in that creative genius
which does to-day the same thing it did yesterday, but does
it better. All else is spice and seasoning to life, and as we
cannot live on cakes and spices, so the enduring things
will always be the useful things. There will be no edu-
cated aristocracy, for education will have a higher purpose
than to give one man an advantage over another.
Every man's life is a comedy, a tragedy, or a symphony,
i according as he is educated. It was a great thing when
the common man first lifted up his head, looked about him
and said, " I, too, will be educated." It is our business to see
to it that that high resolve shall not destroy the race, but
shall still further bless it
CHAPTER II
INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE
TO THE HIGH SCHOOL i
" We have learned to look to our schools and to ask, in the
name of charity as well as of education, whether they are training
for that efficiency which will prevent poverty." — Edward T. Devine,
in ihQ Atlantic Monthly^ December, 1908.
The subject of industrial education is so broad and the
interests concerned are so vast and so varied that no single
writer can hope to bring to its discussion that complete
knowledge which is necessary to the rational and final so-
lution of a difficult problem.
I cannot and do not pretend, therefore, to speak with
authority, so that what I shall say is to be regarded as a
contribution to our deliberations, arising out of a some-
what intimate association with a particular class of people
in their attempt to supply their educational needs in such
a way as to contribute to, and not detract from, the general
welfare.
Again, of the many things that might be said and of the
many considerations that might be advanced as bearing
upon so important a subject, it is manifestly impossible to
do more than to select here a thought and there an illus-
tration, depending largely upon the happy circumstance
of accident if the picture drawn be true to life or even
the reader be enabled to see clearly any picture at all
1 The substance of an address delivered at the high school conference, University of
Illinois, November 20, 1908.
37
38 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
from the meager outlines that must of necessity be hastily
drawn.
It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to define indus-
y^ trial education, but we all know very well what it means.
For example, it means education in and for agriculture,
the mechanic arts, household affairs, and the major indus-
tries generally, as distinct from education in and for the
y so-called learned professions. It means specialized educa^
tion in and for the ordinary occupations of men, as distinct
from the purely mental occupations, and as distinct also
from mere mental acquisition and training without regarc
to occupation.
The first step in the solution of this question has been
taken already in the educational world quite outside of our
field, and we are greatly relieved and advanced thereby in
our present considerations. The time has passed when
the so-called general education is held to be ample for all
purposes, and even quite outside of industries we have
highly specialized courses — courses in journalism, courses^
in diplomacy, courses in banking, in accounting, in music,
in painting — all professional, but all, in the strictest sense,
non-industrial.
The need of specialized courses looking to occupations
outside of the original triumvirate of law, medicine, and
theology, is, therefore, already well recognized, and it re-
lieves us mightily, for we can begin at this point and
confine our discussion to the need for courses looking to
industrial careers and to the question of how and where
these courses should be offered.
This matter of industrial education has been before the
public a generation and more until now, like a poor rela-
tion, it is ever with us. Feeble at first but always insistent,
like Banquo's ghost, it would not down, but it has gathered
INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION IN HIGH SCHOOLS 39
force and finish with the years, until to-day it is about the
most robust educational problem before us as well as one
of the most impqrtant, because of the far-reaching conse-
quences of whatever policies may be adopted for its solution.
Some of the methods that have been proposed are so
grossly inadequate on the one hand and so oblivious of
racial integrity and the highest public good upon the other
, as to force us to the conclusion that the advocates are not
fully advised of all the forces that have brought this ques-
tion to the front, and consequently their solutions are not
plutions, but only temporizing substitutes. Let us not err
it least in this direction. Let us, therefore, at the outset
inquire somewhat carefully into the conditions that have
brought the problem before us.
Now the demand for industrial education is not a piece
of academic evolution ; that is to say, it did not originate
in the schools. It arose as one of the demands of the
masses of men for better life and opportunity. Its nature,
IS well as its relation to other forms of education, can best
De understood in connection with the conditions of its evo-
lution. Therefore, at the risk of seeming to wander far
afield, let us at this point refresh our memories a bit upon
our social and educational history and development.
Our modern educational system is the product of com-
paratively recent conditions. It is not the lineal descend-
ant of Greece or of Rome, of Egypt or of Babylonia. It
iwas born in the Middle Ages, nourished in the cloister,
grew with Magna Charta, and is coming to its fruitage
now.
In those dark days, when might was right, the common
man was counted with his cattle as part of the spoil and
the property of the latest conqueror. When war blotted
out industry, no man could succeed except upon the king's
40 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
favor, and when the king declared, " The state, it is I," it
was only the monk in the cloister that dared dispute him.
It is exceedingly significant for our purpose that it was in
these days — not so very long ago as time is measured by
racial history — when kings could neither read nor write
but counted learning as foolishness, — it was in these days
that Magna Charta granted to monk and to freeman alike
the blessings of legal rights and civil liberty.
This was the first recognition of the rights of the com-
mon man since the days of Greece and Rome. It made
the evolution of a people possible, nay inevitable, and there
and then was laid the foundation for the conditions that
'have given rise to the problems of industrial education in
; our own day.
It was then that the lamp of learning, like the lamp
of liberty, flickered only in the cloister, and education, like
religion, meant separation from the world, which was re-
garded, properly I am convinced, as wholly given over to
the flesh and the devil. Under conditions such as these,
meditation was the only occupation of the thoughtful man,
religion was his only consolation, and the only use for
learning was in the reading of the Scriptures. What won-
der that it has taken all these years afterward to make our
religion really useful ; what wonder, too, that in our own
day we are having the trouble of our lives in the endeavor
to make of learning not only a consolation and an inspira-
tion, but a useful thing as well !
With the revival of learning, humanity flourished. The
learned professions developed, and men prospered and
grew happy. Property became secure, and the fruits of
industry belonged to the one who earned them. For the
first time in the modern world, life to the common man
promised to be worth the living.
INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION IN HIGH SCHOOLS 41
It was inevitable now that this common man should
begin to think, and as he thought, become ambitious. The
rise of individuals had proved him to be made of the same
stuff as other men, and he was conscious of his possibilities.
He determined to avail himself of the opportunities of
life and, noting the advantages of education to other men
and their conditions, he resolved to become educated
himself.
Very natural was all this. The common man, like others,
would better his conditions if he could, and he came rightly
to conclude that the place and the way of beginning was
to possess himself of a fair share of the world's knowl-
edge, at least so far as it applied to his condition. His
resolve, therefore, to be educated, was as natural as life ,*\
indeed, it was the inevitable consequence of liberty to a
capable race.
The resolve of the common man to secure the blessings
and the graces of learning was not announced formally at
any great national or international gathering. It was not
the result of the labors of any committee on resolutions.
It was the result of a deep-seated conviction, born silently
but simultaneously in the hearts of thousands upon thou-
sands of a free and capable people. And it has come on
silently, but relentlessly as the tide, till now it is well upon
us ; and here lies our problem.
This resolve of the common man to be educated — what
was it ? What did it mean ? Whatever else it meant and
is meaning, it means universal education. If the common
man had been contented to do without learning, and we
had all been willing to let him, our educational problems
in these days would have been comparatively simple.
We should have gone on as before, fitting men for the
learned professions only. I imagine, however, even then,
V
42 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
as learning grew and the world's stock of knowledge ac-
cumulated, we should still have seen substantial additions
to these so-called learned professions, and that by this road,
if by no other, through the very exigency of pubUc need,
we should one day come to develop a scientific agricul-
ture, a scientific engineering, a scientific system of house-
hold management, and so would the number and the
range of learned occupations develop in good time as
the very reflex of the wealth of human knowledge.
But this common man of ours has va&tly hastened matters
by his hitherto unheard-of and rather sudden resolve to be
educated, thus forcing upon us without much warning and
with little to guide us, the stupendous problem of universal
I education, for that is what our problem really is.
Now, universal education is something more than admit-
ting everybody to the privileges of the schools. It did not
take this common man long to find out that the learning of
the cloister was not fitted to his necessities, and he learned,
also, in good time, that the subject-matter and the spirit of
I the courses designed for theology, law, and medicine,
J though admirably adapted to the needs of the people they
j were designed to serve, failed utterly to serve the common
I man and his needs, save only when he desired to escape
into one of the learned professions.
This for a time worked well, and many men did better
their condition by escaping to these professions. But
presently was discovered what we should all along have
known ; viz. that a course of study has a powerful influence
not only over the future career of a boy, but ultimately
over the destiny of occupations.
Thus it came about that individuals that went to the
schools out of the common walks of life did not return.
And thus it came about that the learned professions .were
INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION IN HIGH SCHOOLS 43
overloaded with much material unsuited to their needs ; that
many educated men failed in lines of business to which by
nature they were not adapted ; that many products of the
schools halted at the threshold and did nothing in particular.
Thus it came about that reproach was laid upon education,
and, what was worse than all else, the common occupations
were not themselves touched by the advantages of learning.
Thus it came about that our first attempts at universalj
education were gigantic failures, because we ignorantly
assumed that a form of education that was good for one
man and his peculiar needs was good enough for all men,
and if not directly adapted to their needs, they themselves^
could make the application later on.
It is not strange, with this experience running over many
years and affecting and disappointing thousands of people, /
that many good men held universal education to be a failure
and wholly undesirable in theory, as tending to industrial
disturbance and to general social unrest. But here again r^
the common man — common only because there are so
many of him, and uncommon because it is his to meet and
reckon with the everyday issues of life — here again the
common man saw with a clearer vision than others what
was the occasion of the failure. He noted not only that
when a boy went from industrial life into the schools he
seldom if ever returned, but he noted also that when he did
return his education was ill adapted to his needs. He noted,
too, this common man, that this policy was stripping the
major industries of their brightest and naturally most ambi-
tious men only, to pile them up where they were not wanted
or to turn them into cheap clerks, to lead dependent and
unproductive lives. *
Nor was this the worst. The industries themselves were
not developing under this regime. When the best men
44 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
went out and did not return, or if they did return, failed
to bring into the industry that information and training that
would still further improve it, then for that industry, knowl-
edge was unutilized, and education might as well, even
better, not exist. To this extent, therefore, and for this
industry universal education was a failure, and more than a
failure, for it attracted away the ablest and most progressive
of the young men, leaving only the least ambitious and the
least capable behind.
The common man with his practical vision saw all this,
and with his characteristic directness went straight to the
root of the difficulty, suggesting a remedy that was at once
concrete and effective. He said, "As the older courses
are adapted to the learned profession, so will we have other
courses where matter and method are adapted to the needs
of the industries and the industrial people," all of which
was and is yet not only good sense, but good educational,
social, and economic philosophy.
This, in its day, was regarded as heresy. As we all
know, the old-time schools for the most part refused to
establish such courses, and the establishment of separate
schools was, under these conditions, a necessity. Now the
common experience has been that when courses suitable to
the needs of the special industries have been properly
formed and properly taught, whether in separate schools
or in company with other courses, young men have taken
them in increasing numbers. Moreover, they have returned
to the industries afterward and succeeded, because they
have taken back with them not only new and useful knowl-
edge, whereby the industry is better developed, but besides
they have taken with them many of the graces of education,
whereby the people are benefited as well as their industries.
In this way we have seen a new meaning in universal edu-
INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION IN HIGH SCHOOLS 45
cation and have taken some advanced lessons in its admin-
istration through its introduction into the institutions of
highest learning.
In this way we have learned that education must be
somewhat adapted to the ends in view ;| that as civilization
advances and knowledge accumulates there must be many
courses for many men, and we have learned, too, that there
is by nature nothing incompatible between them because
higher industrial education flourishes nowhere else so well
as when associated with the old-time courses in the state
university, that unique and modern association of teaching
and investigation that is designed to minister to all the
needs, industrial, social, economic, and artistic, of a rapidly
advancing civilization. As a result of this experience we
are all now in favor of industrial education without know-
ing or caring exactly what it is or precisely how it is to
be administered. Nobody derides it any longer. The old
" issues " are dead issues. There is no conflict between
the classics and the industries, but all thinking men see
clearly now that whether the education be classical or in-
dustrial, it is alike a part, and an essential part, of the suc-
cessful development of a young, strong, and virile race.
The question now is as to practical methods of pro-
cedure. There is little dispute as to the nature of courses
best adapted to industrial ends, though much improvement
will be made as time passes. Academic standards and
educational values are being set, and the future of indus-
trial education is assured, whether regarded from the
standpoint of the individual or that of 'the industry. The
only real question — and it is gigantic — is whether and
to what extent industrial courses should be added to our
existing schools, or whether they should be relegated to
separate institutions. Upon this point, which is vital to the
46 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
interests we all represent, and which is after all the only
present issue, I venture somewhat extended discussion.
Of one large fact we may rest well assured at the outset ;
viz. that industrial education is with us to stay. The in-
dustrial people insist upon it and public needs demand it
for reasons already mentioned and evident to every keen
observer. We can, therefore, find a place for it in our
schools, making it an integral part of our system of uni-
versal education, or it will make a place for itself and a
system of its own, which will be the worse for all of us, as
I have endeavored elsewhere to point out.^
Moreover, the crux of the situation lies not with indus-
trial education, but far back of it in that general realm of
education for efficiency which is a natural corollary of a
logical system of universal education. We already have
abundant proof of the fact that all people cannot be edu-
cated upon one model, and that to attempt it not only
greatly disturbs the social and industrial balance, but also
produces too many failures.
There is one thing worse and more to be dreaded than
illiteracy, and that is incompetence, and if there is one
form of incompetence more hopeless than all others, it is
that form which arises from bad schooling. All consider-
ations of public welfare lead to the conclusion that we
must have a philosophy of education and a method of pro-
cedure that will meet, not a portion merely, but all the
needs of a highly civilized race.
Education is vastly more than a personal matter. We
have often erred in the past by forgetting this, and we
have proceeded as if no question were involved beyond
helping the individuals in our schools to improve their
personal condition. That is why in the past our school
1 See chapter on Unity in Education.
INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION IN HIGH SCHOOLS 47
system has greatly disturbed our industrial equilibrium
and threatened permanently to injure the social state'.
If, as formerly, only a few people and interests were af-
fected by our system of education, it would matter little to
the general public what is taught, or how it is taught ; but
when we embark upon a scheme of universal education as
we have done, we must have a philosophy of education as
broad as the activities and the capabilities of the race,
or else we shall be injured instead of advanced at certain
points and, to that extent, at least, education prove a curse
instead of a blessing.
And so it is that there is a business, a social, a com-
munity, a racial side as well as a personal side to educa-
tion, and if we are to have anything like a system of uni-
versal education, then it must touch and uplift and develop
all the major activities of the race, as well as train and
elevate the people in all the walks of life.
I have in succeeding chapters gone somewhat at length
into the reasons for preferring that we retain the unity
and integrity of our educational system by taking into our
schools not only industrial education, but all other forms
of educational necessity that are now felt or that may in the
future arise, to the end that all interests may be well served
and that, too, in a way not involving influences that tend to
break up the homogeneity of our people, but above all
preventing the evolution of an American peasant class.
This matter has been fully settled in the colleges and the
universities; it awaits solution only in the secondary schools.
The institutions of highest learning are freely introducing
the most highly specialized courses, both vocational and
non-vocational, industrial and non -industrial, nor do they
feel that their educational standards suffer thereby.
MoreoverttGe strictly vocational courses succeed nowhere
48 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
rV
else so well as when intimately associated with the non-vo-
cational. This association is good for all parties. It not
only adds culture and refinement to the vocational, but it
adds directness and initiative to the cultural, thus turning
back to the community a product whose individuals are
highly schooled in speciaHzed activities and therefore
likely to succeed, yet by association have learned to be
broadly sympathetic with all activities and with all classes
of effective people^
" We-feaAze-thtlslearned that it is not only unnecessary but
unwise to segregate an interest from its associations, and
the state universities, which attempt to reflect in their cur-
ricula and their atmosphere the whole life of the people,
are gradually coming to be regarded as the highest expres-
sion of the truest philosophy of universal education. In a
word, I would see their poUcy transferred to the American
high school, to the end that this most representative of all
schools may do for the masses what the university is doing
for the few.
A privately endowed institution may of course teach what
it pleases, and one supported by tuition must teach what the
students come to learn, but institutions of learning of all
grades supported by public funds are morally bound to
truly reflect the life of the people, and it is for this reason
that I invite the American high school — which is not a
preparatory school — to study and to imitate the policy
of the state universities.
I do not propose industrial education in the high school as
the easiest way of meeting the demand, but as, all things
considered, the best way. Far from being the easiest way,
I am convinced that so far as present comfort is concerned,
it is the most difficult. It is the results that mightily
justify our labors, however, and make it wise to expend
INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION IN HIGH SCHOOLS 49
some special energy in meeting this as we shall need to
meet other and future new demands as they arise from
time to time.
So it will be worth the trouble for the high schools to take
in and take care of this latest demand of our people, never
fearing but that the funds will be forthcoming as its use-
fulness is proved, and resting well assured that other and
still other similar opportunities will arise in the future as
they attempt to meet and serve the needs of this rapidly
developing people with its complex life and its progressive
activities.
What then is involved in this great duty which includes,
but does not end with, industrial education ?
First of all, and in all, and above all, this is involved —
that the American high school must study and teach
'American life as a whole. The glory of Greece! How
was it evolved, mostly within the short space of one hun-
dred and fifty years ? Not alone or mainly by the medi-
tative study of Babylonian antiquities, but by the universal
belief in and study of Greece, her people, her institutions,
her interests, and her activities. Now, I would be the last
to decry the study of ancient languages, literatures, and
institutions, but I would be the first to insist that it should
be done for a purpose beyond mere personal gratification,
and that its high purpose be the upbuilding here among
j ourselves of the most complete development of which our
^ race is capable. To this exalted end I invite all schools of
all grades everywhere, but first of all, and more than all, the
American secondary school, because it has its roots in the
very lives and hearts of the people ; and so I would put
industrial education into the schools, not altogether be-
cause it is demanded, but because it is an essential part of
a system of education that aims at racial development.
50 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
More specifically, what details are involved if we take this
matter of industrial education into the high school ? So
far as agriculture is concerned, and the present movement
has come largely from that side, I am comparatively clear.
I doubt much whether the high school in the heart of a
great city has a function in and for agriculture as we of
the country understand the term. It may teach it, or
certain phases of it, for pedagogical reasons, and upon
that point educators who have had experience are most com-
petent to judge ; but when we of the farm are talking about
agriculture in the high school, we do not mean nature
study, nor do we mean a slight incHnation of science and
mathematics to country affairs for illustrative purposes.
That doubtless is good pedagogy in itself, but when we
talk about agriculture in these schools, we mean a real
study of and real instruction in those things that are in-
volved in the business of farming and in the affairs of
country life.
We do not, therefore, ask the city high school to teach
agriculture unless it finds it advantageous to its general in-
terests to do so, but of the country high school and of the |
village high school with a large country constituency, we
do ask it.
And what is it that we ask ? Not that the whole art
and business of agriculture should be taught, and above
all, we do not ask that the school become an agricultural
institute. But we do ask that certain characteristic
phases of the farming business and of country life be
.carefully studied and taught along with other things, upon
the ground that it is the business of the high school to take
note of and to reflect as far as possible the major activities
and the conditions of life of the people whose children are
to be educated, and on the further ground that, whatever the
INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION IN HIGH SCHOOLS 51
future career, the education of the young should begin at
and be at least partly concerned with the life activities into
which the child was born, and with which only he holds
living acquaintance.
Nor is this so difficult of accomplishment as it may seem.
To study the lives of the people — of our people in these
days — is the fundamental business of the schools, and to
add to this something of vocational technique is not an in-
surmountable task. It is not the art of agriculture — that
is, its handicraft — that needs most to be taught. That is
long and difficult of accomplishment. Moreover, it is more
a matter of practice than of instruction, and therefore of
questionable educational value. It is the science of agri-
culture and the economic and social conditions of country
life that need teaching most, and that is what the schools
are best fitted to undertake.
The farmer understands the art of agriculture fairly well.
Handicraft is his long suit, and to teach him much in that
direction would require the trade school. This may come
in time for certain branches, as, for example, dairying, but
what is most needed now is such scientific study and moral
support of agriculture as only the well-established high
schools can give — and when I say agriculture I mean not
only the business of farming but the affairs of country living,
for agriculture is not only an occupation but a mode of
life as well.
Farmers understand the art of agriculture fairly well,
but they do not understand the science of agriculture, or,
in other words, they do not understand either the sciences
that underlie agriculture or their application to its affairs.
This information, so far at least as it applies to such fun-
damental facts as soil fertility, plant and animal improve-
ment, animal nutrition, home equipment and sanitation.
52 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
any good high school can, if it will, within the limits of
stock knowledge, arrange to supply ; and if it is a high school
undertaking to educate country youth, then this informa-
tion and help is not only its rarest privilege but its most
sacred duty.
What is needed to start with is for the high schools to
put in one or two elective courses in agriculture, and to
teach these courses the best they can. An honest attempt
will, here as elsewhere, produce substantial results. The
teacher of science is the natural one to begin it, but as soon
as possible a teacher should be provided who has special
training in the science of agriculture. Do you say that
such teachers are not available ? They are coming along,
and the demand will be answered in good time liy a
supply. Only show the teacher how he can better his
condition and, like other men, he will jump at the chance.
Text-books, too, are now available, others are in prepara-
tion, and matters are moving rapidly ; indeed more of real
value has been accomplished in this direction in the last
two years than was accomplished during the first thirty
years of the attempt to establish agricultural colleges.
The materials for this work are now well at hand, as will
be shown in a succeeding chapter.
Again, no school has a rarer chance to study, to teach,
and to impress the great fundamentals of human living and
social and economic relations than has the high school
within reach of a country community. Here life is un-
adulterated with much that disturbs elsewhere, and here a
miracle awaits the hand of the teacher who fully realizes
his opportunity to influence the life of his people in his own
day and time.
What I have said of agriculture I am convinced applies
equally well to household affairs, only at this point all high
INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION IN HIGH SCHOOLS 53
schools are certainly involved. By the division of labor
anciently established and for which both custom and nature
are responsible, the care o'f the house is woman's work, and
whatever the choice of individuals, we as educators have
no right to take possession of young girls and keep them
in the schools till they are young women of marriageable
age, without turning them back to the community at least
somewhat better prepared than they would otherwise have
been to meet the responsibilities and the work of woman.
If the influence of our schools is mainly or strongly to turn
our women into clerks, or even teachers, then, useful as
these callings are, the quicker we amend our system of
education, the better. The business of the schools is to
train the great mass of the people for normal lives and to
preserve, not to destroy, what may be called, for want of a
better term, the eternal balance of things.
Schools have much to do to compensate for the fact that
they take the children out of real life for a period of years
into an artificial world that we call the schoolhouse. They
come out of it with stores of information, to be sure, but
they have lost a subtle something that comes only from
personal experience in real life during the days of develop-
ment. We are coming at last to realize that there is more
than one avenue to a successful life, that the way by the school-
house may not be the best for all people, and that whether
it is the best will depend upon whether the school gives a
true or a distorted picture of life. Is the mirror of life
which the schools hold up a true one ? Is it badly concave
or convex at any point .•* If so, that concavity or convexity
needs correction.
The farm and the shop and the work of the household
have a marked influence in developing executive ability and
the power of initiative quite independent of the acquisition
54 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
of knowledge, and if we make the mistake of substituting
mere accumulation of facts for this sort of development,
and sacrifice the one for the other, it is more than an open
question if on the whole we have not lost more than we
have gained. It is the business of the schools to impart
the one without the loss of the others, an additional reason
for saying that much lies back of our problem besides the
mere need for industrial training.
In a discussion like this I feel bound to say something
about the mechanical industries which, like agriculture, are
fundamental, not only because they concern vast masses
of men but because the industries themselves lie at the basis
of our further development.
What I can say on this point, however, is more by infer-
ence than from intimate knowledge. I certainly hold most
strenuously that training in the use of certain tools is funda-
mental to all education. The square, the saw, the plane,
the hammer, the needle, and the scissors, like the alphabet,
lie at the bottom of civilization. They also afford the most
direct, convenient, and rapid means for teaching not only
that cooperation of eye and hand but also that rapid and
ready execution of plans which marks the truly educated
man or woman. All this is already recognized for peda-
gogic reasons alone, and we have both sewing and manual
training in our schools everywhere.
But this is quite aside from the other question — shall
these things be taught for the sake of the mechanic indus-
tries and as avenues to an occupation ? I cannot escape
the conviction that they should. If the schools of a great
city do not reflect the life of that city, industrial as well as
otherwise, then will the best children leave the schools or
else, what is worse, the schools will distort the social and
economic conditions of that city. I repeat in this connec-
INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION IN HIGH SCHOOLS 55
tion what I have said too often already — if we are to have
a system of universal education, then it must universally
educate, or we shall be the worse for it, and will one day
reckon with the consequences.
These boys on the school seats in the grades ! Their
fathers are in the counting house, the store, the factory,
the rolling mill, the foundry, and in the street-cleaning de-
partment. What of the boys? Side by side they sit to
imbibe together a conception of the world and form some
sort of plan for their own careers. It is the business of the
school to help them. It cannot do that by advising them
all to become merchants, because all the occupations must
go on in the future as in the past and, in general, these
boys will be doing in a decade about what their fathers
are doing now. It cannot be predicted of any particular
boy that he will follow his father's occupation and he
ought not, but it can be said with confidence of a room-
ful that they will be doing the same things their fathers
are doing, because we are talking about a system of edu-
cation for all the people.
After the schools have done their best, much will be left
over for the minor industries, and here is the undoubted
function of the trade school, but if we cannot and do not
reflect the major industries in our school system, then we
do not make them highly useful. We do wrong to absorb
several years of a child's life without turning him out
better able to support himself than if he had not attended
school.
Just whereto draw the line between the ordinary schools
and the trade schools is not easy ; indeed, I think it is im-
possible now to say, but I propose as a matter of safety
and to facilitate the drawing of that line later — if ever —
that the trade schools be also a part of the system and
56 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
under the same management as our other schools. Nobody
holds any longer to the three learned professions. The
list of honorable occupations touched and uplifted by edu-
cation is being rapidly lengthened to the substantial benefit
of all concerned and the hst of so-called trades correspond-
ingly shortened. Some time these Umits will be better
defined than now, but in the meantime let us so adminis-
ter our education that an occupation may take its place in
respectable society as soon and as rapidly as it accumulates
a sufficient body of knowledge of a high order.
It is within my own lifetime that agriculture has fought
for and won a place as a dignified calling and shown that
for the common good the lands ought to be in the hands
of enlightened people. In the same way many other call-
ings will be elevated by the advantages of education if only
favorable opportunity is afforded, and we will all agree that/
the gauge of our civiHzation will in the end be fixed by the^
status acquired by our leading necessary occupations.
To facilitate the rapid passing of these occupations to
the highest state and to hold the situation together, I ear-
nestly advocate the ownership and management of all trade
schools and all other schools possible by the same boards of
education and the same superintendents that fix the policy
of the public school system.
If we can do this, then much of the vocational can be
introduced into high schools without detriment but to infi-
nite advantage, each school emphasizing the major indus-
tries of its own constituency. If we cannot do this, there
is the greatest danger that our delinquent children may be
turned out of our semi-reformatory industrial schools really
better fitted for useful lives than are most of the children
of normal citizens. There is evidence that the public
already has its attention upon this point.
INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION IN HIGH SCHOOLS 57
I have a vision of a system of secondary education so
correlated with the grades upon the one hand and with the
activities of life upon the other that the children need not
declare in advance what their occupation is to be. The
man who enters college ought to know definitely what he
purposes to do, but the secondary school should be a place
wherein the boy can find himself and pick his place in the
world of active affairs. I would have not one but many
courses out of this school leading into life — some into the
trades, some into business, some into the professions, and
some into college for those who know what they want of
higher education, why they need it, and, moreover, who
have the ambition to get it. There are too many young
men to-day who leave the high school because it does not
seem to be fitting them for the Hfe they have the itching
ambition to begin; and there are too many other young
men in the universities who are shot there out of the high
school much as the wind stacker delivers straw. "^
This is because we have not yet fully realized the com-
plexity of the educational process, and it is because we
have not yet sufficiently provided in our system for all the
needs of all the people.
Now the secondary schools, if they exist for anything,
are to administer universal education and make it apply to
as many individuals as possible. They reach and touch
the boy and the girl while yet members of the father's
household, and I protest with all the earnestness of which
I am capable that their business is to teach these people
to get ready to live, and that without reference to college
admission. It is a mistake to assume that the matter and
sequence that best fit for college also constitute the best-
preparation for life without a college course, and that high
school which allows the requirements of the accredited Ust
58 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
to dominate its policy is headed wrong in its philosophy of
universal education.
It is for the secondary schools and the grades that lead
up to them to serve the people in their needs — all the
people in all their needs for everyday life. Anything less
than this is that much short of universal education. The
exceptional man is well served already, and his way is likely
to be paved with all the helps that are good for him. In
any event, the spirit of the times is not to overlook the
common man whom also the Lord loveth.
Can the high schools turn their backs upon vocational
training of any major kind and say, " Let the trade schools
do that " .'* Dare they do it } If they do, as sure as time
goes on, the people will establish industrial schools of their
own that meet their needs directly, and we have lost our
hold forever upon the industrial class which represents the
mass ; we have lost forever the opportunity to hold to-
gether productive industry and the higher mental life, and
when our high schools have lost this opportunity, they are
public schools no longer ; the masses will withdraw their
money as well as their attendance, our boasted pubHc
school system will exist only for the few, and our people
will have broken into two classes, the leisure and the
industrial, each schooled in its own fashion, the two inevi-
tably drifting farther and farther apart, generation by gen-
eration.
Within a year two famous British educators on two
separate occasions said to me in substance in my office •
** Does America fully understand her two stupendous
advantages ? " I asked, " What are they } " and they said,
"Your people are yet a homogeneous people, and your
secondary schools are public schools."
What they meant was that we have yet no peasant class,
INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION IN HIGH SCHOOLS 59
but are one people, and our secondary schools, being
creatures of the public and not of a church or of any other
class, could minister fully and freely to the public need as
they saw fit.
This great problem goes far back and beyond the definite
question of industrial education. If we are to make the
most of our opportunity, we must truly educate all the
people in ways that they will regard as useful to themselves
and that experience will prove to be beneficial to the race
as a whole. If we cannot do this, we shall break in two at
some point, and once apart we shall never reunite. It is
not easy, because the problem is complicated and there
are few precedents. But it is worth the while.
Fortunately the precedents are all encouraging. The
state universities have shown that no natural antagonism
exists between the different interests of men as represented
on higher educational levels. The high school is yet nearer
to the people, and all attempts that have been made there
to meet real and living needs have met with instant suc-
cess, and that, too, without injury to the higher educational
spirit and ideals but vastly to their betterment.
There are great times just ahead if we are wise. The
people will give of their substance freely if the education
of their young can be made useful. If we can do this, then
can we add to industry both culture and refinement ; then
will great souls arise from all the walks of life and we shall
be one people. I beg you, my fellow-teachers, to study
this problem as your religion. The fates have put it upon
you to settle. A generation or two and it will be too late.
And as you settle it do not shirk labor, do not fly to the
separate school because it is easier, but treasure as your Hfe,
I beg of you, the universaUty, the integrity, and the unity
of the American educational system.
CHAPTER III
INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION A PHASE OF THE PROBLEM
OF UNIVERSAL EDUCATION i
To see to it that no individual shall be obliged to choose between
an education without a vocation and a vocation without an education.
No system of education, however good in itself, can
claim to be or hope to become universal if it does not
touch and benefit all classes of men and all legitimate
branches of their activity, both industrial and non-indus-
trial, vocational and non-vocational. I take it that univer-
sal education means exactly what it says — the education
of all sorts of men for all sorts of purposes and in all sorts
of subjects that can contribute to the efficiency of the
individual in a professional way or awake and develop the
best that was born into him as a human being.
Looked at in this broad way, industrial education does
not differ logically from any other form of professional
training that requires a large body of highly specialized
knowledge. Nor do industrial people as such necessarily
constitute a class by themselves, but are men like other
men who love and hate, who earn and spend, who read
and think, and act and vote, and do any and all other acts
which may be performed by any other citizen. Now all of
this leads me to maintain the thesis that industrial educa-
tion is not a thing apart, but is only a phase, albeit an im-
portant phase, of our general system of universal education,
1 See also address at the superintendents' section of the N. E. A. at Chicago, February
as, 1909.
60
:/
THE PROBLEM OF UNIVERSAL EDUCATION 6i
a thesis that is more plausible when we remember that
every man needs two educations, one that is vocational and
one that is not — one that will fit him to work and one '^
that will fit him to live. When we remember that there is t.
less difference between industry and occupation than we
once assumed; when we remember that ninety per cent
of the people follow industrial pursuits and will continue
to do so ; when we remember that all major industries, like
other essential activities, must go on in the future as in
the past, even though every man in the community were a
college graduate, and when we remember that it is for the
public good that thesejnajpMndus^ developed and
occupied by educated menj surely this position is not un
reasonable.
All parties are agreed that in o^der to secure a fair de-
gree of efficiency some sort of specialized instruction should
be given in industrial pursuits. The old apprentice sys-
tem has passed away, and the work of instruction for indus-
trial efficiency seems to be thrown upon the schools. It is
a new problem, and they appear not to know quite what to
do with it. It is perfectly clear that industrial education
calls for new and different courses of instruction from
those designed to fit for non-industrial pursuits. The only
question is whether these specialized courses of instruction
constitute a part of our public school duty or whether the
peculiar educational needs of industry and of industrial
people may be left to take care of themselves. In dis-
cussing industrial education, as with all other forms of
education, it must always be remembered that we are
dealing with the man as well as with the craftsman, and
I use the term craftsman in its broadest sense to cover the
work of the lawyer as well as that of the farmer.
And this man ; what of him ? Surely he is a factor in the
62 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
case. He is something more than a farmer or a doctor or
a lawyer, or else he is something less than a man. His
education is not to be limited by the demands of his voca-
tion. We have too many of that kind already in all pro-
fessions constituting a kind of museum of educated parrojts
that go through their daily stunts, each considering himself
highly educated and all other men at best merely trained.
Yes, the man himself, the human element in the case,
must be educated. And if he be truly educated he will
be trained in some profession — no matter what — and he
will also be trained outside of his profession so that he will
be bigger than the means whereby he earns his bread and
butter ; and this applies to all men of all vocations, for
there is no such thing as a learned profession except in the
sense that all the major activities are learned.
So I lay down the proposition that whether the educa-
tion be industrial or otherwise vocational, it is but a part,
though an essential part, of the education of a man, and
that all these specialized forms of vocational instruction
are but different phases of our problem of universal
education, to which we as a people are committed.
Like all great purposes actuating the masses of men, the
development of this idea of universal education has been a
growth. It began with the conviction that in justice to the
individual and for the safety of the state, all men of all
classes should possess at least the rudiments of learning,
and the first step toward a complete system of universal
education was the free public school wherein the child of the
rich and of the poor alike, whether genius or dullard, may
learn to read and to write and to reason, which after all are
fundamental to all education. Our elementary education
' is universal in the sense that it applies to all the children
of all classes of people and without discrimination.
THE PROBLEM OF UNIVERSAL EDUCATION 63
This marked a new epoch in the life of industrial people,
because hitherto the policy of the world had been to keep
working folk ignorant, apparently in order that they might
remain contented with the hard lot to which Providence had
presumably assigned them; because, forsooth, must there
not be hewers of wood and drawers of water ? So were laid
the foundations for a system of universal education — uni-
versal in the sense that it applied to all men — affording
not only the rudiments of learning but opening a highway
even to the college and the learned professions, and
many escaped thereby from a hard life of toil.
But no scheme of education is truly universal or can hope ^
to become so until it not only touches and uplifts all classes
of men but also touches and uplifts their industries as
well ; for it is not expedient that men should desert indus-
try as soon as they are educated, but rather that they should
remain and apply their education to the development of the
industries, that the public may be better served and the
economic balance of things be not disturbed by the evolution
of an educational system aiming to become universal.
The need of attention at this point became evident, es-
pecially to industrial people, and on July 2, 1862, Abraham
Lincoln affixed his signature to the most far-reaching bit
of federal legislation ever enacted. I refer to the Land
Grant Act, whereby there was provided for each state of the
Union " at least one college whose leading object shall be,
without excluding other scientific and classical studies . . .
to teach such branches of learning as are related to agri-
culture and the mechanic arts ... in order to promote
the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes
in the several pursuits and professions of life." Here we
•^ nave the whole scheme not only of industrial but of uni-
versal education in a nutshell — a liberal and practical ed-
64 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
ucation without excluding scientific and classical studies :
what a text for an educational discourse !
Building on this broadest of educational foundations,
most of the states have established industrial education on
a new basis, and some of them have so combined and in-
terwoven it with other forms of education that none can
tell where the one leaves off and the other begins. These
are the state universities whose lead in this respect is be-
ing rapidly followed by institutions not on the land grant
foundation, until now we can truly say that on college levels
to-day industrial education is not a thing apart, but is an
integral portion of the great educational effort by which
the people of a commonwealth seek to so educate all classes
of men as to develop at the same time not only their intel-
lect, their literature, and their art, but their industries, their
occupations, and their activities generally. This is univer-
sal education in its fullest sense.
Our elementary education, therefore, is universal in a
sufficient sense for its purpose, and our university education
is rapidly becoming universal in its broadest sense, because
here all subjects are studied and taught and all occupations
and industries are represented and made to flourish in a
common atmosphere of higher education.
But as yet we have no system of secondary education
that can be called universal, and until the matter is settled
at this point and settled right our system is weak at its
most important level, because it is our secondary education
that touches our people during their formative period and
that really reaches the masses in such a way as to be truly
universal in extent.
I say that our secondary education is not yet universal.
True, the high schools are open to all who have finished
the grades, but they do not offer to most classes of people
THE PROBLEM OF UNIVERSAL EDUCATION 65
that instruction which is a preparation for their lives and
which the needs of the times and the impulse of the
people demand.
The high schools took their cue originally from the old-
time academies, which were training schools for classical
colleges. Since then primary education has become uni-
versal because it involved nothing but opening the schools
to all the people free of tuition. The education of the
colleges has become or is rapidly becoming universal be-
cause the people demand that the benefits of higher edu-
cation shall not be limited to a few favored occupations
and those who follow them — all upon the ground that
such a course would be pernicious, because against the
public welfare.
The same influences are beginning to work in our
high schools, which are moving in the wake of the
colleges, it seems to me, in a way that is wholly com-
mendable and that needs only to be accelerated and not
retarded.
The high schools are schools of the people, and in re-
sponse to their demand they have added to the old-time
classical courses those in modern science, in manual train-
ing, in household science and, indeed, many are now adding
agriculture, stenography, telegraphy, bookkeeping, type
setting and a list of vocational courses almost too long to
be mentioned, all without prejudice but vastly to the en-
richment of the old-time courses of study.
So the high schools are rapidly following in the lead of
the colleges, and if matters go on as they are now drifting
in some of our best schools, it will not be long until, in re-
sponse to public demand and common sense, we shall have
a complete system of universal education in the largest
sense of the term and of all grades, from the elementary
66 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
schools upward, in which men and women of all kinds and
preferences will be able to get that education which will
not only fit them for life but fit them to live. In the name
of progress let this good work go on.
There are but three influences, it seems to me, that can
interfere with the proper evolution of the high school. They
may be outlined as follows : —
1. The movement in certain quarters for separate indus-
trial schools — agricultural schools in the country and
trade schools in the city — quite independent of the high
school system, which is assumed to be indifferent if not an-
tagonistic to industrial life.
2. The attitude of a few remaining exponents of the old
idea that schools should teach nothing that by any possi-
bility could be put to any manner of use.
3. The difficulty involved on the part of the high schools
in adding not only to their educational purpose but to their
courses of study, their equipment, and their teaching force,
with sufficient rapidity to meet the new demands and mold
the whole into an educational unity without such delay as
shall make the claim seem true that after all the high
schools have no real desire to serve the people in their in-
dustrial activities and will do no more than is necessary to
half satisfy what they regard as an irrational public demand.
Thus the high schools are put at a disadvantage at this
most difficult period in their evolution, particularly as
teachers are yet to be made, even while these new ideals
are to be fitted into and made a part of our permanent edu-
cational policies.
These considerations are worth reviewing at the present
juncture, because what the high schools need is time, and
this is the element in the case least likely to be afforded.
The activity of certain educators in favor of separate agri-
THE PROBLEM OF UNIVERSAL EDUCATION 67
cultural schools of one kind or another, and what I am
bound to call the selfish influence of certain commercial in-
terests demanding city trade schools to teach the sort of
handicraft which will produce skilled workmen in the
shortest possible time and best enable us to meet foreign
or other competition in manufactured articles — this activity
and this influence seem ready to sacrifice almost anything
for immediate results. This American edition of the Ger-
man peasant school idea is a most dangerous because a
most insidious and powerful menace to the right develop-
ment of the American high school, which is or may be the
most unique educational institution on earth, and which
will constitute, if it can rightly develop, the key to the ad-
vantageous position which America ought to occupy both
socially, politically, and economically, aad which she can
occupy if she is farsighted enough at this point and at
this time^
If present tendencies can go on unhampered it will not
be long until every community can have its high school
which will reflect with a fair degree of accuracy its major
industries and do it in the light of the world's knowledge
and of the world's ideals. Such schools will turn out men
and women ready to do the world's work and to think the
world's thoughts as well as to dream the world's dreams and
share in its ambitions. If we combine our energies, we can
have such schools in America wherein every young man and
every young woman can secure an education that is at once
useful and cultural, and that, too, within driving distance of
the father's door. If we unite our educational energies,
we can do this, but we cannot do it in separate schools.
We can combine the vocational and the non-vocational
in our high schools if we will, and each be better for the
other, and all things considered, I must earnestly advocate
68 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
the taking over of our industrial education in all its forms
into the existing system of secondary schools, seeing to it
that one fourth the time of every pupil is devoted to some-
thing vocational, something industrial, if you please, and
no industry is too common to use for this purpose. It is
the common things of life that are fundamental, and it is
through them that we teach life itself.
It is not necessary to bring all occupations and industries
into our schools ; some are not well adapted to academic
conditions, but it is necessary that we bring in a goodly va-
riety of what may be called the major activities, industrial
and non-industrial, in order that life shall be taught in a va-
riety of its forms and that the boy shall have a reasonable
chance for choice.
Trade schools — would you have them.? By all means,
but I would have them as a part of the secondary school
system. Agricultural schools ? Yes, but as departments of
the high school. Cooking schools ? Yes, and more : I would
have schools of household affairs, but I would have them
as integral parts of the high school. Schools of stenography
and typewriting ? Yes, but I would not disconnect them
from the high school any more than I would cut off from
womankind the girl who needs perhaps for a time, perhaps
always, to earn her own money.
In brief, there is no class of occupation that is followed
by large masses of people that I would not bring into the
high school and teach as fully as circumstances would per-
mit, and I would compel every student to devote not less
than one fourth and not more than one half of his time to
these occupational lines.
I have said that a second influence operating to restrain
the high schools from moving in this matter as fast as con-
ditions require is the remnant of an old academic belief
THE PROBLEM OF UNIVERSAL EDUCATION 69
that the purpose of schools is to "make men," whatever,
that may be, as distinct from making men ready for life.
These are they who would teach nothing that could by any t^
means be put to any sort of use. With them education is
a luxury, not a necessity ; a kind 6f holy thing that evapo-
rates or in some way loses its essence when put to common
uses or into the hands of the masses of men.
These are they who are always careful to speak of in-
dustrial education as "training," using a term whose
meaning is understood from its frequent application to
horses and dogs.
To such let me say that the thing which all men every-
where now demand, whatever their vocation or means of
livelihood, is not training merely, but education^ and they ^
mean by that such contact and intimacy with the world's
stock of knowledge as shall first of all develop the indus-
try, and second, but not secondarily, develop also the man.
Thinking men now know that, education or no education,
culture or no culture, whatever the grade of civilization we
may evolve, certain fundamental industries must still go on.
Moreover, they know that if these fundamental industries
are to be well conducted and our natural resources devel-
oped, these activities must be in the hands of capable
men ; yes, of educated men, for industry, like every other
activity of man, is capable of development by means of
orderly knowledge and trained minds.
These thinking people know, too, that men of capacity
cannot be found to develop these fundamentals except they
may also themselves partake of the blessings of life and
the full fruits of our civilization. They know that the days
of hewers of wood and drawers of water, as such — con-
demned to a life of drudgery — are over on this earth
wherever civilization exists, and that education, like reli-
ij
70 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
gion, must somewhat rapidly readjust itself to new condi-
tions and prepare to help the common average man to lead
a life that is both useful to the community and a satisfac-
tion to himself.
The aristocracy of education, like the aristocracy of reli-
gion, whereby a few were saved while the many groaned,
is over, and education, like religion, must help the common
man to meet and solve the common issues of life better than
they have ever been met and solved before — hence indus-
trial education ; hence vocational education; hence univer-
sal education.
These good people who shy at the term industrial edu-
cation are jemnants of a past condition when educators and
others entertained that old-time and curious conception of
industry, whereby industrial people were assumed to remain
uneducated and were by common consent assigned to a
social position of natural inferiority, as if a farmer or me-
chanic, for example, acquired by his daily life a kind of
toxic poison that not only destroyed his better faculties but
was likely to exude and soil or injure others.
Let me call the attention of these good people to the fact
that, whatever their social status, the industrial people hold
the balance of power politically and socially, for they con-
stitute ninety per cent of the population, and that for all
practical purposes, and in the last analysis, they are the
people, and their education, whatever it is, will really consti-
tute our system just as their numbers will largely dominate
^ur affairs generally and fix the status of our civilization.
The colleges learned long agoi ;that to meet modern needs
j they must afford every man two educations : one, technical,
to meet his business needs and make him an efficient mem-
ber of society, but which would tend to narrow him as a
man j the other non-vocational, which-has no money-making
THE PROBLEM OF UNIVERSAL EDUCATION 71
power, but whose effect is to liberalize and broaden the'
man by attracting his interests and widening his knowledge \
outside the field wherein he gains his livelihood. — ^^
The high schools must learn the same lesson, and the
sooner they do so the better for all interests. Therefore
these high schools that are introducing the industrial are
developing in the right way. The high schools are not
preparatory schools for college. They are preeminently the
schools wherein the people are fitted for life. Where one
man is educated in college, twenty will get all their prepa-
ration in high schools. The high school, therefore, is the
place wherein the boy shall find himself to the end that if
he goes to college he will have upon matriculation clear
ideas about what he intends to do, and if he does not, he
can go out from the high school at once and take some use-
ful part in the world's work. The large number of high *
school men, even graduates, who have no plans and more
than all no fitness, preparation, or inclination, for any sort
of useful activity, is a pathetic and dangerous fact — pa-
thetic, because so much good material has been wasted ;
dangerous, because the high schools must either change
their ideals and introduce the industrial freely, or the in-
dustrial masses will found other schools of their own that
will meet their needs as they have been met on college
levels, but as they have not yet been met in secondary
grades where the masses go.
The colleges have learned that it is not necessary to
absorb all the time of a student in order to turn out an effi-
cient man vocationally. Much less is it necessary in sec-
ondary schools. On college levels from one half to two
thirds of the student's time suffices for the vocational, and
when we learn better how to teach, results can doubtless
be attained with still less, leaving a generous amount of
72 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
time for the pursuit of non-vocational and therefore of
liberalizing courses, for the effect of a course of study,
whether narrowing or broadening, depends less upon the
subject-matter than upon the attitude of the student and
the purpose for which he takes the course. Chemistry to
the farmer is a professional subject ; to the journalist or
the lawyer it is non-professional and liberalizing.
If we will honestly take into our high schools as we have
taken into our universities all the major activities, splitting
no hairs as between the industrial and the professional,
for no man can define the difference so imperceptibly do
they shade the one into the other — if we will take them
all into the high school as we have already taken them
into the universities, and carry them along together, the
vocational and the non-vocational side by side, day after
day, from first to last, so the boy is never free from either,
then will all our educational necessities be met and we
shall have gained a goodly number of substantial achieve-
ments, prominent among which I would mention the fol-
lowing : —
1. One fourth of the time of the boy or girl could be
devoted to vocational work in class room or laboratory
throughout the course.
2. This would turn out every boy with some skill in some
branch of the world's work, and do away with that large
and growing number of young high school graduates who
are fitted for nothing and are good for nothing in particular.
3. It would attract the attention of the boy to self-sup-
porting activity before he loses his natural ambition by too
much schooling with no initiative.
4. It would turn out girls with some training in house-
hold affairs, and those who desired it in such occupations as
women follow for self-support.
THE PROBLEM OF UNIVERSAL EDUCATION 73
5. It would vastly uplift most occupations and all of
the more ordinary industries by bringing into their practice
the benefit of trained minds and methods.
6. It can do all this and still leave three fourths of the
time for the acquisition of those non-vocational lines of
knowledge which all men and women need, because they
are human beings getting ready to live in a most interest-
ing world.
7. In this way, we should have a single system of edu-
cation under a single management, but giving to all young
men and women really two educations : one that is voca-
tional, fitting them to be self-supporting and useful, the
other non-vocational and looking to their own develop-
ment.
Expensive ? Not more so than to have it done in sep-
arate schools, sure^. It will be done somehow, and the
question now is, will the high schools really rise to their
opportunity and secure through themselves a real system
of universal education, or are they to lose their chance and
are we to have in the end not a real but only a patchwork
imitation of a system of universal education ?
I am well aware that all this will be held by some as
a lowering of standards and a degrading of education by
commercializing it. Against this conclusion I protest
most emphatically. Does it degrade a thing to use it?
Does it degrade religion to uplift the fallen or to sustain
the masses of men from falling ? Is education a luxury
to be restricted to a few favored f ortunates, or is it a power
to uplift and sustain and develop all men ?
Are you afraid to educate the ditch digger ? Is the edu-
cation of the gentleman too good for him ? Are the facts
of history too profound or the satisfaction of knowledge
too precious to be the common property of man } Does
74 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
it make my satisfaction less when it makes his more, or
are we afraid that he will climb out of the ditch if he is
enlightened ? There is no danger of that. I have dug
ditch and laid tile every month of the year, and that since
I was a college graduate, and I am ready to do it again.
I am ready to do my share of the world's work ; yes, of
the world's dirty work. It was Colonel Waring who
cleaned up New York City. It was the educated engi-
neer who made a sanitary Cuba. The educated man does
anything that needs to be done to get results. It is the
uneducated or the badly educated who fails to comprehend
the eternal balance of things.
I desire to call attention to one more phase of our prob-
lem ; to what may be called our leisure asset. There are
two leisure classes, one small and unimportant, the other
large and important. The first consists of the idle rich
who by accident were born after their fathers, and who
intend to live a i)arasitic existence, paying for their needs
with other people's money. They are altogether useless.
It matters little how they are educated, and the sooner they
die off the better for the world. They do not think ; they
do not act ; they only vegetate and glitter ; they do not
enter into the discussion here. The wealthy who do not
belong to this class are too busy for leisure.
The other leisure class is the great industrial mass, who,
after all, own and control about all the useful leisure in the
world. The minister has no leisure. The teacher has no
leisure. The lawyer, the leader everywhere, has no lei-
sure. What he does he does under pressure and because
he must.
But the farmer, the craftsman, the industrialist generally,
labors only in the daylight hours and for a portion of his
time. What he does with the balance of his waking energies
THE PROBLEM OF UNIVERSAL EDUCATION 75
is of the utmost concern. Here is the great racial asset,
both social and psychical ; both economic and political.
If this great mass of men, constituting all but the degen-
erates, can be properly educated, the racial asset of their
leisure moments will in the end be tremendous. It is this
mass and what it thinks and does in its leisure hours, either
blindly or intelligently, that will ultimately fix the trend of
our development and the limits of our achievements, not
only in politics and in business but in literature and art as
well. There is no reason why the craftsman should not
be also a connoisseur in lines outside his personal and daily
activities. It is better, therefore, that our common people
be educated and educated broadly.
Moreover, it is out of this mass that leaders arise, and if
their education be sound, then will our leaders be wise and
safe. You cannot longer maintain an educated aristocracy.
There will be but one aristocracy, and that will be the aris-
tocracy of personal achievement ; and if we do not want
the world entirely commercialized, we must so merge our
industrial education into our general system as to have in
the end not a mass of separate schools with distracting
aims and purposes, but a single system of education serv-
ing all classes and all interests. It is the only influence
that will preserve a homogeneous people.
In thus amalgamating the vocational and the non-voca-
tional, I would like to say a word for what might be called
the parallel system as distinct from the stratified. That is,
I would have a boy from his first day in the high school to
his last have to do with both the vocational and the non-
vocational. I would have him every day take stock of
things vocational in terms of world values. I would have
him devote a full fourth of his time to what will bring him
earning power, to be used for that purpose if he needs it
i
76 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
and to give him an independent spirit if he does not need
it. Every man is a better man if he feels the power to
earn his way, whether he needs to do it or not.
Do you say that this will so cut into his time as to
prevent his getting an all-round education } Then I say
that he will never get an all-round education anyway;
that the most he knows at forty will be learned out of
school, and that the business of the school is to give him a
good start.
I beg, too, for a reform in the idea that a course is
framed mainly for the one who graduates. If the voca-
tional and the non-vocational are properly paralleled, the
course is good from whatever point it is left, and whenever
or wherever abandoned it has taught the student the prQ5Ler_
balance between industry and-life ; between the means,aiid
the ends of existence.
All this will take time, because it means to sOme extent
the readjustment of ideals, the addition of new courses of
study, and of new materials and methods of instruction. It
means the making of a new class of teachers who must
largely train themselves by a generation of experience. It
means the making of a more complicated system of in-
struction than has ever been undertaken — a system as
complicated as American democratic life.
But it is worth the while, for nothing better is possible.
It is easier, of course, to short-circuit the matter by assent-
ing to the separation of industry and education, but no
race need hope for supremacy nor for the evolution of its
best till it combines industry and education, which belong
together in the schools as they do now and always must in
life.
So I say to the high schools — Do not wait for approved
courses of study, nor for the production of skilled teachers.
THE PROBLEM OF UNIVERSAL EDUCATION 77
Go ahead and do the best you can. An honest effort is
half the battle, and it is worth more now than it will ever
be again. Do not hesitate till methods are marked out.
If you do that, you and the cause are lost, for the separate
industrial school will surely come. We know the ideal —
an educated American in all the activities of life. Let us
go ahead and produce him and mend our methods later on.
Education is no longer a luxury. It has become a neces-
sity for the doing of the world's work. It is no longer for
the edification of the few ; it is for the satisfaction of the
many; and whether we regard it as industrial or non-in-
dustrial ; as contributing to the efficiency of men or to their
elevation in civilized society ; however this or any other
educational problem is regarded, they are all but phases
of our general and stupendous problem of universal educa-
tion, the best guide to whose solution is to teach in a unified
system of schools all the things that the community needs
to know, and let the individual take his choice concerning
the vocational subjects.
CHAPTER IV
THE EDUCATIVE VALUE OF LABOR
The daily doing of needful things with regularity and efficiency
is half of a liberal education.
I YIELD the palm to none in my appreciation of what
education can do for an individual, for a profession, and for
a community, but in many .respects we are school mad.
Every child needs as much as he can get of the knowledge
of the world and of the wisdom of the ancients to help him
to meet the issues of life, but he needs also personal touch
and experience with the world of to-day, that he may know
how to meet and to deal with the world of to-morrow when
he will be a man with maximum responsibilities.
I have said that in our thirst for information we have
become school mad. I say it because we undertake to
absorb practically every moment of the time of the child in
his academic work, most of it with books dealing either
with ancient affairs or with abstract information which,
good though it is, cannot constitute a sufficient preparation
for a Hfe in the present and with the concrete. When the
high school girl must choose between her music and her
high school course, then something is wrong, and the evi-
dent remedy is to absorb less of her time in her studies,
leaving time for music, or else to count the music as a part
of her course. When she is so busy with her studies that
she has no time to perform any part of the necessary labor
of the home, then something is wrong, and the remedy is
78
THE EDUCATIVE VALUE OF LABOR 79
to require less of her time in the school, or else to take
household affairs into the course.
If the schools as now organized could have their way
with a boy, they would use all his time in the schoolroom
and get him through the grades and the high school at
seventeen or eighteen, then on into college for four years,
with three more for a doctor's degree, expecting to turn
him out at twenty-four or twenty-five an educated man.
Educated in what ? Educated, no doubt, and highly so,
in that world of knowledge which is sufficiently old and
well-ordered to have found a place in books. Educated,
too, perhaps, in methods of acquiring new knowledge by
reading old literature from a new angle, or by a first-hand
study of some great natural law or some little-known
organism.
All these things he may know and do, but as to that
great moving, whirling mass of mind and matter that we
call the world, where the concrete and the everlasting pres-
ent are uppermost; where man rubs up against man — in
this relation he is a child, with a child's outlook and with
that queer combination of timidity and of ignorant assur-
ance that mark the child's first contact with the world
about him. Such is the penalty we pay for that form of
education which is almost exclusively academic.
Now the difficulty with this man is not that he knows
too much. It is that he has experienced too little. It is
not that he has lived too much in the past; it is that he
has not lived enough in the present. It is not that he is
too familiar with the abstract, but it is that he has not dealt
enough with the concrete. It is not that he is too adept
at generalization ; it is that he is unfamiliar with the par-
ticular. It is not that he knows too much of books ; it is
that he knows too little of men. It is not that he knows
8o EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
too much of the history of the race ; it is that he has not
himself met and conquered the personal issues of life.
What is it that such a man has really missed ? The
answer can be framed in many terms. We may say that
he has been taken out of his natural environment, and that
is true. While other young men have been plowing and
planting and reaping, buying and selling and building, he
has been looking on and going to school. While others
have been earning, he has been spending. While others
have become independent and self-supporting, he has been
dependent. While others have married and estabUshed
families, he is unmarried or perhaps is being supported in
college by the labor of his wife. While others have devel-
oped in experience as in stature from children into men,
he has remained undeveloped on the experience side — a
man with the outlook of a child. What wonder that so
many of our brightest young men scent this thing from
afar and get out of the school at a deplorably early age !
What wonder that of those who remain so many conclude
that after all it is better to go on learning than to begin
doing and drift ultimately and necessarily into minor posi-
tions. This is of special detriment to the teaching pro-
fession, because of all men the teacher should have had
much experience with the world.
To realize still better what this man has lost who has
lived inside the schoolroom till he was twenty-five, let us
examine a little more in particular into the life of young
men outside the schoolroom, with a view of better under-
standing the educative value of that form of work which
we call labor. The boy on the farm, for example, is told
that it is his job to feed the pigs, and he knows by this
that if he neglects or shirks the duty the pigs will tell of it
and he will be called to account. There will be no ques-
THE EDUCATIVE VALUE OF LABOR 8i
tion of a " passing grade " or a ** conditioned examination."
There is no way to partly do the job, nor can he escape by
cribbing. The only crib in the case is the corn crib, and
to this he must go, not once or even twice, but daily and
regularly, for the pigs will tell on him every time he shirks,
for no " point of honor " is involved with them. To the
teacher who has had this experience in boyhood the cheap
excuses and the petty deceptions so often indulged in by
the schoolboy to avoid meeting squarely the issue of daily
duties, to him the contrast is keen, and to him is laid bare
the fatal defect in attempting to educate solely by the
schoolroom method.
When these pigs are ready for market, the boy will see
them sold, and if the father is what he should be, one of
them belongs to the boy, and so will the proceeds thereof.
Now this is a better way of getting money than to run
errands or to have an allowance, because the process is
natural and highly educative. All this is the experience
of a boy on the farm before he is twelve years old, and I
know many a boy who is buying and selling and dealing
with men in standard values by the time he is fourteen.
This boy, if he is good for anything, will never rest well
o* nights till he has harnessed a horse — for did he not
break a yoke of calves of his own ? — and he is never com-
pletely happy till he has driven a double team. Perhaps
there is no development in a boy when for the first time he
handles the lines and directs the energies of somewhere
from a ton and a half to two tons of horse flesh ! I know
by experience as well as by observation that he is about
six inches taller afterwards, and I believe he has grown
more inside than he has grown outside. This boy soon
"makes a hand "; that is, does a man's work, and I want
to say that not again until his wedding day will this boy be
82 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
SO happy and so consequential as when for the first time
he is recognized as taking a man's place in the world.
Soon after this the girls begin to call him mister, and then
his cup of satisfaction is completely filled. After that he
is a man.
Is all this trivial and unimportant } It is involved, I tell
you, in the making of a man,. and some time, somewhere,
this experience must come, or the boy will never be a real
man; for, like the young thing of any other species, the
boy must test his environment day by day, and grow in
strength and experience as that environment broadens.
The daily doing of needful things with regularity and
efficiency is in itself highly educative. It constitutes a
good and a necessary part of a liberal education, and with-
out it no system of education is safe. It teaches, first of
all, personal responsibility for things to be accomplished,
whereby the child learns the useful lesson that things do
not "just happen," neither do they "do themselves."
The getting of results, often against obstacles, and the
bringing about of what would not otherwise have come to
pass, so that the child can say with satisfaction, " I did
that" — this, too, is educative. It may only be finishing
the planting before rain sets in perhaps for days ; it may
be only the getting in of the last load of hay or grain be-
fore the threatened storm; it may be the breaking in of a
spirited horse and the curbing of his nature to a superior
will ; it may be the feeding off of a bunch of steers or
even of pigs and their marketing — it may be only these
things, but they are the things that men do, and if the boy
can measure himself with men a part of the time, it is
better than to measure himself with boys all of the time.
The writer counts now as his most blessed privilege and
the most valuable part of his early training the experience
THE EDUCATIVE VALUE OF LABOR S^
of an only son who planned and executed day by day for
many years side by side with the father. The companion-
ship of these two, boy and man, as they planned together
to surmount their small difficulties, — small indeed, but
they were the issues of life to them, — all this was, as I
count it now, the most truly valuable part of my prepa-
ration for life. Such an experience cannot be compared
with what is learned from books. The two are different.
The important point is that neither can replace the other,
and both are necessary.
When we take a boy out of his family life, off the farm
or out of the shop, and absorb all of his time in the school-
room, we owe him something in compensation. Do we
say that manual labor is depressing, and that it tends to
produce dullness and stoHdity } That is only when it is
abused. That is only when there is too much of it. That
is only when it is unaccompanied by intelligent plan and
purpose. That is only when, year after year, the same dull
routine of toil is endured as a necessity of existence, with
no high purpose and no ray of hope ahead.
But to the child manual effort is easy, yes, instinctive.
It is for this reason highly stimulating and therefore edu-
cative. When a new thing is done well for the first time
by the young, a sense of achievement and growing power
possesses the doer, and manual accomplishments are among
the earliest of possible achievements.
I cannot, therefore, overrate the educational value of
manual operations, particularly as they develop into pro-
ductive labor with financial recompense. A boy sets out
to make a box. It only means the nailing together of five
pieces of board, with a sixth for a cover. It seems simple,
but trial shows that the boards must all be square, or the
box will gap at the joints; and the attempt proves the
84 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
problem not so simple as it looks. The box does gap at
the corners. It gaps badly, and the boy realizes what he
would not have believed before — how difficult it is, after
all, to saw off a board so that all the angles are right
angles. If he tries twenty times before he succeeds, what
matter ? Only a little lumber and a few nails are wasted,
but the boy is saved, for he has learned how easy is failure,
and how difficult is success, even in so simple a matter as
making a box. He has had the experience of failure, of
repeated trial, and of ultimate success. Such a boy will
never be discouraged later on by ordinary difficulty, be-
cause he has had the experience of winning over failure.
The boy who has not had this experience till he begins
business as a man will not know how to take the unex-
pected difficulties that beset what would seem to be the
simplest case. It is better that the boy get this experience
at the expense of a little lumber and a few nails while yet
a child than at his personal cost when he gets to be a man,
and is experimenting with himself and not with a box.
I know of no way either in which a just appreciation of
money values can be so well indoctrinated as when the boy
as a child earns some money by means of labor, as most
men must earn it all their lives. Now, the need of learn-
ing the value of a dollar in terms of hours of labor and
drops of sweat is as incumbent on the child of the rich as
on the child of the poor ; and public safety demands that
they both learn it early in life. If this nation ever goes to
ruin, it will be from inefficiency and unbridled extrava-
gance, with the corruption which so surely attends upon
non-constructive existence.
As a means of giving early experience with failure fol-
lowed by success after repeated trial ; as a means of teach-
ing personal initiative and constructive activity; as a
THE EDUCATIVE VALUE OF LABOR 85
means of teaching the money value of effort and the en-
ergy value of money, I must unhesitatingly recommend a
course in that kind of work commonly denominated labor,
and inasmuch as labor cannot replace learning, I must
earnestly urge the closest possible joining of the two.
I would not, therefore, take a child out of his home envi-
ronment and compel him to spend all his time in mental
effort with academic lines of work any more than I would
confine him to labor with no chance at that larger world of
knowledge and experience which is mostly recorded in
books. I would have him do both in order that he may
grow somewhat naturally into the environment of men and
things of his own time, and also be informed as to what
other men and other times have to teach.
Accordingly, I propose that one fourth of the time of
our school children be devoted to something distinctly vo-
cational, and the nearer it is to manual labor the better, as
I see it. In any event, I would have it deal with the or-
dinary things of life, not in a dilettante way, but in genuine
fashion as men deal with the same things in the way of
business. Is one fourth of the time too much to devote
to this business of growing a boy in his environment, and
what I am saying of boys is intended also to be said of
girls, and to apply to all children who attend the pubHc
schools ?
Private schools may run upon their own plan, but we
cannot afford the consequences of a public school system
of universal education that does not recognize the funda-
mental and substantial value of education in terms of in-
dustrial activity as well as in terms of the widest knowledge
and the highest culture.
It is highly important that we never lose sight of our
real problem of education. It is to fit a generation of
86 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
young people to live a life not like that of Babylon or
Egypt, or even Greece and Rome ; not like that of Western
Europe; not like that of ours in America to-day, but a
life such as has never been lived anywhere on earth since
the world began. The average child that is born to-day
will live his active life from 1930 to i960 or 1970 or even
later.
Before that time comes, conditions here will be greatly
changed. Moreover, there will be new conditions on the
earth. Population has doubled thus far in America once
every twenty-five years. If that ratio keeps on, we shall
double our population before the children in school to-day
get well started in active life. Think what industrial,
economic, and social changes are involved therein, raising
issues that they, not we, must meet and for which our pres-
ent-day schooling, I apprehend, is none too well adapted.
If the normal rate of increase continues, we should have
180 millions of people in 1935 ; 360 millions in i960; 720
millions in 1985, and 1440 millions in 2010.
Manifestly, this normal rate of increase cannot continue
another hundred years, but something will happen in its
checkings and the children that we are educating will be
there when it begins to happen. Are we schooling them so
as to be ready to meet these issues } I fear not.
Accordingly, I would not educate them less in the world's
past or in whatever useful knowledge has been learned, be-
cause they will need that knowledge for guidance in meet-
ing new and difficult issues, but I would educate them more
in terms of the present and in the way of personal and in-
dependent initiative, and above all in the methods whereby
the individual takes his place among men and becomes at
once and with certainty a self-supporting member of society.
The proper blending of these two forms of education is
y
THE EDUCATIVE VALUE OF LABOR 87
necessary to efficiency ; moreover, it is the way to prolong
the school period and keep the boy in school.
I repeat, therefore, my firm conviction that a fourth of
the time of the child in school up to the level of the col-
lege should be given to vocational work. Is the objection
raised that there is no time .? V\^hy not .? there is all the
time there is. The objector is thinking about that sacred
four years* high school course and the customary passing
up through the grades to reach it. He is thinking about
graduation. I say, never mind graduation, but look out
for the boy and preserve a proper balance in the material
and the processes employed for his educational develop-
ment. We get our children through the high school too
early now. It were better to take more time.
It has been assumed in the educational world that vo-
cational training is college work to be undertaken after
graduation from high school, and some would say after a
non-vocational undergraduate course. Now, manifestly,
this must apply, if at all, to leaders in highly specialized
callings. It cannot apply to the rank and file nor to ordi-
nary occupations because most men do not and never will
go to college. Most men do not, but most men might,
attend high school, though few will graduate, whatever
the conditions of graduation may be. I am thinking more
about those who attend and the conditions of attendaftoe
than I am thinking of the conditions of graduation and of
those who graduate, for they will adjust themselves, whether
graduation takes four years or five years, and whether and on"
whatever terms they enter college. What theyistudy and
do, day by day, is of vastly more import than when or how
they graduate or whether they graduate at all.
That is why I would not take a child entirely out of his
environment to school him. That is why I would not
88 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
make the acquisition of information the sole business of
childhood. That is why I would say that from the first
day of school till the last, one fourth of the student's time '
should be devoted to the vocational.
Having done this as a condition of attendance, the con-
ditions of graduation can be modified so as to give credit
for the vocational, or the time can be extended to five
years, if graduation is to be based only on academic work.
I care little about that, but I care everything for the prin-
ciple and the practice of uniting by the closest possible
educational bonds, day by day and every day, the vocational
and the non-vocational.
When we come to do this, then will the individual be
able to take his place among men because he has had the
experience of men. Whether he graduates or whether he
does not graduate — whenever he leaves the school, if this
be the plan of our schooling process, he will have some
education of the head with some initiative of the body,
with some promise of at least fair efficiency, with a little
knowledge that is beyond his own horizon.
It is a sacrifice for the individual and a distinct loss to
the state that so many children feel obliged or are com-
pelled by their parents to leave school and earn money to
support themselves and perhaps other members of the
family. It has, however, its compensations, and I would
mitigate its evil as far as may be by taking over much of
this work into the educational field and giving for it sub-
stantial credit in the fraction that I have indicated as being
properly devoted to the vocational.
Does the boy spend his summer and his mornings and
his evenings on the farm ? Then let him report on what
he does there ; whether he helps to carry the work and
business forward, or whether he idles the time away. If
THE EDUCATIVE VALUE OF LABOR 89
the former, he is entitled to credit for one of the most
valuable components of his education ; if the latter, then
let the school set him at something useful, something tend-
ing toward the vocational, that no boy may acquire knowl-
edge without thought of its utilization.
Does a boy sell papers after school ? Why should not
that fact be officially known and recognized as a factor in
his education ? Why should he not report upon it regu-
larly — the number and kinds of papers sold, the place and
the customers, whether regular or special, cost and profit,
together with the disposition of the proceeds ?
No child of school age should be permitted to spend all
the day in the factory. Some portion of the day should be
devoted to academic training, but surely the discipline and
experiences of the factory have educational value, and it
is to the advantage of the public that the various activities
in which children engage should be assessed by the schools
and their relative educational value ascertained.
Is all this shocking to our educational sensibilities?
Does it smack too much of the practical, of the commercial,
and of the ordinary .? Is it too much a lowering of stand-
ards } I beg the objector to remember that we are talking
about the public school and a system of universal education,
whereby the masses are to get their only preparation for
life and the trend that will fix their outlook forever.
CHAPTER V
f
THE CULTURE AIM IN EDUCATION
To put thought into our work and work into our thought; to
idealize existence and to preserve these ideals in everyday life —
this, too, is culture.
I AM exceedingly anxious not to be misunderstood with
respect to that phase of education which we call culture,
particularly that form of culture which has had in the past
and is likely to have in the future its highest realization
through the study of literary and philosophical subjects.
All this I would preserve in the education of all classes of
people.
It is the special purpose of these pages to emphasize a
high degree of personal efficiency as a major aim in educa-
tion, even if that efficiency is to be exhibited along indus-
trial lines, and yet I have no sympathy whatever with any
scheme of education that would neglect, much less elimi-
nate, every time-honored subject or educational ideal that
cannot demonstrate its direct and immediate application to
utilitarian ends.
There is education, even culture, in technical training
properly undertaken, but any attempt to secure industrial
efficiency by the sacrifice of cultural subjects will defeat its
own ends. If in the past we have made the mistake of
assuming that a system of education aiming chiefly at
culture would also secure efficiency, that is no reason for
now driving to the other extreme and discarding the culture
90
THE CULTURE AIM IN EDUCATION 91
aim entirely, by confining our attention exclusively to the
so-called practical. While I would give to the individual
large liberty of choice, I would teach to all classes of people
all forms of human knowledge, both those that lead to
immediate results and those that appeal strongly to the
intellect, regardless of professional ends, and that is why,
as in the next chapter, I have argued for that unity in
education which would neglect nothing that is really valu-
able to our civilization in the education of the masses of
the people.
Not that all will react equally to the culture phase of
education, because they will not. Some fail to react even
when possessed of personal ambition to excel, just as many
a man with no voice essays to sing, to the huge satisfaction
of his own unattuned ears and to the torture of all who
hear him. Even this is laudable in the effort, and the ad-
vantage to the performer is doubtless worth all it costs to
the auditor.
But some will react, for this reaction to the highest in-
tellectual conceptions is a personal matter quite independ-
ent of occupation or surroundings, and we may have, if we
will, farmers and mechanics and industrial people generally
in large numbers who appreciate as well as any other class
of people the highest mental processes of which mankind
is capable.
A great sculptor found, quite by accident, a little boy
molding images at the mouth of an Illinois coal mine. He
took him to his studio, and this miner's son is now one of
the world's greatest masters in molding children's features
in clay. Here was a genius born among the masses.
If only the education of industrial people be rightly bal-
anced and the world of culture be opened to their vision,
then will their leisure hours be made profitable, for there
92 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
is nothing about labor or even about common things that
makes impossible the loftiest intellectual achievements.
It was the shepherds on the Judean hills that evolved
the highest conception of existence and of God that has
ever been announced, — all as they watched their flocks
under the starry skies and wondered at the mystery of life ;
all in the leisure moments of their needful employment.
There is another form of culture, however, that I desire
especially to emphasize, and that is the intellectual devel-
opment that comes to the individual as the direct result of
doing extremely well whatever is undertaken, even though
it be the most common things of everyday life. It is the
doing of common things in shiftless ways, .through dire
necessity, under mental protest and with intellectual stag-
nation — this is what degrades ; this is the degradation of
labor ; and it is inevitable to the uneducated and unskilled
who regard labor only as a disagreeable necessity to be
avoided if and whenever possible.
But to him who looks upon labor as an opportunity to
achieve results; to him who sees the end from the begin-
ning and labors to realize his ideal ; to him who sees the
results of his achievement as a part of a harmonious whole ;
to him who develops the thing he does until it discloses its
proportions and perhaps its beauty — to him labor is ele-
vating and the products of his labor are cultural.
The farmer who produces the finest horse that ever trod
the turf could not do it unless he saw a mental picture in ad-
vance and dreamed a vision of what he would produce gen-
erations before he found and brought together the material
that would produce it. Is not this art as high as that which
puts the picture on the canvas after the farmer had pro-
duced the original as a living expression of his own dream.?
Yea, verily, and if we are to have fine horses, we must first
THE CULTURE AIM IN EDUCATION 93
have farmer artists to produce them, for, look you, the
horse existed before the painter ever put him on the can-
vas. The original was first of all in the breeder's mind a
mental vision. Yes, if we are to have great things, then
men of every occupation must dream dreams.
Here is a pile of soiled and crumpled linen, — a most for-
bidding prospect. Who shall bring back again the beauty
of pattern and design that are now obliterated? Not the
menial, surely, who sees only the tumbled pile of dirty
lace. It will be the artist, either born or trained, who has
faith in the prospect and who sees through it all the pic-
ture that was in the mind of the designer of the patterns
on which the lacemaker and the weaver wrought. This
person, with results in mind in advance, by processes well
understood, removes the filth of the street, and by cunning
method brings out again the pattern and restores the pic-
ture, just as the sculptor chips away the outside stone that
the statue within may appear. Is this menial employment.^
Well, if it is, it can never be performed by a menial, be-
cause no such person can appreciate the possibilities;
hence much bad- sewing and worse cooking ; hence clean-
ing that does not clean, hence disease, unhappiness, and
death with its trail of wasted racial resources.
Nor would I have my reader overlook the fact that
the culture that comes from doing in the best way possible
the everyday and common things of life is the best prepa-
ration possible for an appreciation of that other culture
that is purely intellectual, but which can never be properly
appreciated except by him who creates, who produces in
some fashion or other the expression of an ideal, whether
the ideal be a picture upon canvas or in stone ; or whether
it be upon the landscape in the figure of beautiful trees and
flowers or of bountiful crops ; whether the ideal be teeming
94 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
thoughts in words that will never die, or whether it be in
the flesh and blood of an improved animal; whether it be
in daily duty of a high and unusual order or of a common
and ordinary kind, the individual must be an artist himself
or his culture is only a veneer.
To the writer, culture is the best expression of the high-
est faculties of man, with considerable stress upon the
word expression. I cannot see much culture in mere
ravings upon the achievement of others or even in medi-
tation upon lofty thoughts and purposes unless that medita-
tion leads to action.
Mere information is knowledge static, but the highest
product of education is an informed and disciplined mind
at work. So it seems to me that real culture, the only
culture at least worth aiming at, is the highest possible
exercise of the finest human faculties, working not for
immediate and utilitarian ends, but for the best of which
the man is capable.
In an earlier chapter I alluded to the fact that the so-
called industrial people are in possession of about all the
real leisure of the race. This is not only because of their
overwhelming numbers, but also from the fact that outside
of working hours the relaxation of industrial people is more
complete than is possible with those of any other class.
If the time of this relaxation be not profitably employed,
then it is the fault of the system of education by which the
industrial people are prepared for life. There is nothing
about ordinary employment that is degrading or that is
adverse to the highest ideals ; on the contrary there is much
that is of itself elevating and stimulating to the develop-
ment of the very best that is in man, all of which will be
evident to any one who takes the pains to study carefully
the character and the personality of country people or those
THE CULTURE AIM IN EDUCATION 95
of any other industrial class that has had even a fair chance
at education and a reasonable protection against over-
whelming and wholesale influences tending to inevitable
degradation.
It is not at all uncommon to find great readers and
great thinkers, even philosophers, among these people.
They have the best opportunities for culture of any of
us if only their education affords them a decent outlook
upon the world, and somewhat broader than their earning
powers.
It is a mistake to assume that all the culture is in the
dreamer's mind, or that it is unattainable by him who meets
fairly the world's demands. One of the things that is
needed now is to put more of idealism into common things
and more of culture into the common men, whom the Lord
especially loveth as he made so many of them.
The man that builds my house : shall he be merely a
sawer off of boards and a nailer on of shingles, or shall he
have and feel an intelligent sympathy with its architectural
plan > If he have that sympathy, he will feel it as he works,
and he will unconsciously put it into his work, and we shall
have the plan fully executed and the house will become a
habitation full of human thought in its execution as well
as in its design. If he does not feel that sympathy with
the ideal of the architect, he cannot put the best into its
execution, and the result will give the impression of an ideal
badly realized and badly executed. The common man may
not be able to originate and create, but if he is properly
educated, he will feel the artistic thrill in execution, and
both he and his work will be the better for it. This, too,
is culture.
Why should not and why may not a farmer be a student
of language or of economics } Why may he not be an
96 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
authority upon some particular period of ancient or modern
history ? He has more leisure than any other large class of
independent people. His occupation should not absorb,
and indeed cannot absorb, all his time. Moreover, if he
regards it rightly and is properly educated for it, his farm-
ing broadens him and does not narrow either his outlook
or his mental capacity.
Why should not the craftsman generally live a part of
his time in a world other than the one wherein and whereby
he earns his bread } If he does, two things will happen :
first, he will be a better and a safer man ; second, he will
drive his business more successfully and his craftsmanship
will be of a higher order.
All this I concede and most thoroughly believe. The
great fault and failing in our educatipn is that we have
foolishly assumed that education for culture's sake would
necessarily and mechanically secure efficiency, and when it
did; not, we have again foolishly and hastily assumed that
there is something about industrial activity that is antago-
nistic if not fatal to culture. So we have surrendered the
industrial people as such to a hard life of toil, barren of
the better things of life, hoping only to deliver as many as
possible from their fate as brands snatched from the burn-
ing. Refusing to be delivered over in this way, the indus-
trial people are proceeding to set up a system of education
of their own over against the old, with the very natural
but fatal defect of sneering at culture, surrendering every-
thing to present needs.
It is for educators to come to the rescue and put some-
thing of culture into industrial training or else to graft
industrial education upon our school system, producing a
kind of education adapted to turn out people that are both
efficient and cultured.
THE CULTURE AIM IN EDUCATION 97
Of these two possible procedures the author regards the
latter as in every way preferable for reasons that will be
more fully stated in the chapter on Educational Unity, and
hence it is that these pages are addressed to those of the
old school, hoping to induce the most experienced educa-
tors to have more regard for efficiency and thereby adapt
our present system of education to the needs of the indus-
trial masses. If these pages were addressed to the indus-
trial people in the hope of influencing the education that
they would of themselves build up, then, under such con-
ditions, I should attempt to attain the same ends by laying
stress upon the need and value of culture, not as the whole
but as an essential ingredient of the mixture that we call
the educational course. Thus I should emphasize the
weakest spot in either system, as I am now doing here.
I know a small city with great clay-working interests
within its borders. The call is sharp for men sufficiently
skilled to turn out crocks and jugs, and the best boys are
eager for the time when they, too, can go into " the works "
to earn money like men. They will even leave the school
in order to do it. What wonder when the school is as silent
9n all matters of clay working as if the factory and its in-
terests were a thousand miles away ! Now if the school
should recognize the facts of the community life and teach
something of ceramics, even ever so little, the inevitable
consequence would be : —
1. An improvement in the quality of crocks and jugs in
the factory.
2. An improvement in the men that earn their living by
making crocks and jugs through a higher and more intelli-
gent purpose and through association with a more artistic
product.
3. If a clay- working genius is ever born into that com-
98 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
munity, — and he will be sometime, — then he will promptly
be discovered and will arise to enrich the world of art and
not be lost to his generation and to time in the shape of
a genius making jugs.
If in addition to all this the clay be found to be truly
superior, then in all likelihood there would develop in time
a ceramics department in the local school and the little city
become known the world over like Limoges for its beauti-
ful as well as its useful product.
If the masses of people as they labor, think and also
dream, and if they think and dream about their labor, then
will their labor be uplifted ; then will the common things
of life be beautified, and after we have learned to beautify
the concrete that is all about us, then shall we know how
to spiritualize the ideal and the abstract that is within us
through literature, philosophy, and religion.
The readiest avenue to culture is by way of the common
things well done, and the masses of men should find_in
their daily duties the means of their own uplift. Culture
and refinement are not for the few, they are for the many ;
and the road to their achievement must not be made nar-
dow or unduly tortuous.
The human animal is what he is because of his inherent
tendency upward, a tendency that is not the peculiar prop-
erty of a favored few, but the common possession of the
mass of the race; for our race, like all others, owes its
progress not to the few but to the many.
I invite the reader to let his mind dwell upon the ultimate
consequences of two different educational policies regard-
ing this matter of culture : —
T. A policy in which the masses of men are unendowed
with the opportunity of idealizing beyond the day and its
duties as a means or maintaining existence. What is the
THE CULTURE AIM IN EDUCATION 99
consequence, firsts to them as individuals, second, to the state,
when we know that one third of their working hours are em-
ployed neither in labor nor in means of self -improvement ?
2. Over against this a policy of education that recognizes
that a man should be a skilled workman ; first, in order
that he may be sure of a livelihood, and second, that the
world may be well provided with needful things ; but that
also recognizes that the man himself is capable either of
elevation or of degradation and that he has on his hands
about one third of his time that will be devoted to one or
the other, — a policy further that recognizes that the end and
aim of existence is not to live but to develop man who is
made in the image of God with a divinity that will assert
itself if it can.
With culture of this sort I am deeply sympathetic as I
am out of sympathy with either extreme that would on the
one hand sacrifice the man to his daily toil or on the other
hand proceed upon the unjust assumption that culture is
only for the few who by some fortunate circumstance or / ^
superior cunning are enabled to avoid and shirk thQirt:
share of the world's work only because they have found a
way to eat by the sweat of another's brow.
So, culture is for the race; for the man that God has
made in his own image. And who are we to shape our y y
policies of education upon the theory that all men are not y\
created equal ? It is rather for us so to shape these policies
that by the process of education every man may realize in
his own personality the full measure of his capacity as en-
dowed by the Creator and not as limited by man.
With this I hope that the purpose of the writer will at
least not be wholly misunderstood and we may pass to the
more detailed consideration of what is involved in educa-
tion for that kind of efficiency which fosters and does not
sacrifice culture.
CHAPTER VI
UNITY IN EDUCATION 1
I would have it so that in a company of American citizens one
cannot tell by the dress, the manners, or the speech what is the occu-
pation of the individual. To this end let there be few schools with
many courses, not many schools with few courses. ^/
No fact in the educational situation is clearer than this
and none is more significant : Industrial education is com-
ing into its own and it is here to stay. The ninety-five per
cent are to be educated and educated in terms of their own
activities. This means a well-defined system of education
in some form, designed and administered for the good of
the industrial masses, and of all other classes as well. If
this cannot be accomplished, then each will suffer separately
and all will suffer together.
There is a system of college education designed for the
development of the industries and the benefit of industrial
people, but there is no system of secondary education so
designed, except that here and there a few feeble attempts
have been made, sometimes in connection with existing
schools, sometimes separately.
The existing system of secondary schools, though univer-
sal in its invitation to students, is built upon old-line policies
of restricted human interests. They cannot by these
policies appeal to the masses because they ignore the im-
mediate and personal interests of the common man. If
any man is to be educated, that education must touch him
1 See also address at the N. E, A., Denver, July 8, 1909.
100
UNITY IN EDUCATION lOl
first of all at the point of his daily activities — in general
his occupation ; and in order to reach the industrial people
as such we must have a form of education designed for
them and with special reference to the industries upon
which they depend for their existence.
This can be attained in two distinctly different ways : it
can be attained by broadening the existing system to include
the industries and the interests and needs of industrial peo-
ple ; or it can be accomplished by a separate system of
schools. Either road is open now, but both roads will not
be open long.
If the former alternative is to be taken, the academic
people must take the lead, and they must do it now, for the
industrial people are exhibiting numerous signs of a dis-
position to take the matter into their own hands. If they
do that, they will establish separate schools of industry in
which they will be encouraged by certain educators, and
we shall have the spectacle of the ninety-five per cent se-
ceding from the five per cent ; driven out, not by numbers
but by tradition, to the great disadvantage of both parties,
and the ultimate sacrifice of a large body of knowledge
that ought to come into the possession and enrich the lives
of the masses of men of all occupations.
So readily and completely can the highly specialized in-
dustrial school meet the immediate needs of industrial peo-
ple, and so seemingly complicated is the problem for the
existing secondary school to expand and take in the indus-
tries, that it is worth while to consider somewhat in detail
the ultimate consequences of the separate school, particu-
larly with respect to agriculture, with which the writer is
most at home, confidently believing that what is true of
agriculture and her people is in general true of the other
industries and their people.
I02 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
Careful consideration of this matter at this time is the
more fitting in view of the fact that federal legislation is
proposed, whereby there should be in every ten counties of
each state (not more than fifteen or less than five) ^ an agri-
cultural high school in which should be taught agriculture
and domestic science.
Now while I have devoted my life to agriculture and am
a partisan advocate of industrial education, yet I am a firm
believer in the theory that the purpose of all education of every
kind is efficiency — efficiency in something — in anything that
will contribute to the sustenance, the development, or the
happiness of man, and I can see no good and sufficient
reason why a system aiming at a particular kind of
efficiency should be cut off and separated from other sys-
tems aiming at other forms of efficiency, particularly when
human life is enriched in proportion to its capacity for
achievement and enjoyment. On the contrary, I can see
many reasons why such a separation is not only unnecessary
and undesirable, but altogether inadvisable and even dan-
gerous. Among the many reasons that might be given I
hastily and but imperfectly sketch the following, with spe-
cial reference to agriculture and country people : —
I. Separate schools can never be so good as larger schools
with separate courses, ministering to a variety of people.
This is axiomatic for both economic and pedagogic reasons.
No school designed to minister to a single class of people
and to a single group of interests can ever be so well
equipped in the fundamental arts and sciences — in chem-
istry, biology, physics, history, literature, economics, and
the so-called humanities generally — no such school can be
so well equipped as can one designed to minister broadly
to a variety of interests. Indeed, even if the attempt is
1 See draft of the so-called Davis Bill.
UNITY IN EDUCATION 103
made and a wide range of subjects taught, these same sub-
jects will of necessity be studied and taught from a com-
paratively narrow standpoint.
Every teacher knows and every investigator knows that
in order to develop a subject well, either for purposes of
instruction or of research, it is necessary to establish and
maintain a favorable atmosphere for that particular field of
mental activity, and this atmosphere is at its best only in
the presence of students interested mainly in that subject;
that is to say, there is no more favorable place in which the
farmer may study chemistry than in company with others,
not merely of his own kind but of those who believe that
chemistry is the greatest thing on earth.
There is no better place for the farmer to study history
and to learn to see himself as others see him than where
he studies history in company with those whose chief in-
terest is not in agriculture or in engineering or in teaching,
but rather in history itself, by which we study the true
significance of world movements of all classes, and come to
know things past and present in their true perspective.
That is to say, every man ought to be educated in an at-
mosphere not especially prepared for him and his own kind^
but in an atmosphere and an environment much broader
than his own interests. In this country, if our democratic
institutions are to be preserved, and if our people are to
labor together in peace and understanding, all classes must
be educated in an atmosphere at least as liberal and as
broad as all the interests of any single community can
make it.
In saying this, I do not overlook the fact that the sepa-
rate agricultural school has certain distinct advantages.
They are the same advantages that are enjoyed by any
other industrial school, or even a theological seminary,
104 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
arising from the comparative simplicity of the educational
contract they undertake. It is a fact, of course, that any
school founded, manned, and equipped to do a single thing
and minister to a single interest gains much in directness
by its simplified problem, and by the direct methods it
naturally employs. But it loses in breadth and relative
value, as has been indicated, and the best proof of it is that
none of the separate schools yet founded offer as much even
in science as the near-by high schools ; and. what they achieve
in the end is industrial training rather than- industrial edu-
cation — the training of the operative rather than the
education of the citizen.
Sir James Bryce tells us that the chief purpose in studying
history is to throw light upon our present action and future
policies, because in a large sense history does repeat itself.
In this connection it is well to remind- ourselves that agri-
cultural and mechanical education started in this country in
separate colleges. This was nece&sary because of the at-
titude of old-line colleges of that day concerning industrial
education. But that attitude has entifely changed, and
to-day these two fundamental industries are strongest, both
in instruction and research — not in the separate agricul-
tural and mechanical colleges, but in our greatest universi-
ties, where all forms of education are imparted, and where
American energy and American citizenship are trained in
a cosmopolitan atmosphere. Not only is this true, but the
proportion of agricultural students who return to the farm
is greater from our universities than from our s-eparate ag-
ricultural colleges, to say nothing of the masses of city
boys directed countryward.
So I return to my first assertion, viz.: that both from the
nature of the case and from the experience of the past we
may fairly conclude that separate schools are inferior
UNITY IN EDUCATION . 105
schools; that they lose more in breadth than they gain in
directness, and can never rank in real service with that
other type which ministers to many interests and gains
directness by its distinctly separate courses.
2. Separate schools will tend strongly to peasantize the
farmers. To undertake to train the children of farmers in
a system of inferior schools, such as these must inevitably
be, with little knowledge of and less regard for the affairs
of other people — such an attempt, if it succeeds, will
peasantize the farmers in America more rapidly and more
certainly than they were peasantized by other causes in
Europe generations ago.
To segregate any class of people from the common
mass, and to educate it by itself and solely with reference
to its own affairs, is to make it narrower and more bigoted,
generation by generation. It is to substitute training for
education and to breed distrust and hatred in the body
politic. Knowledge is necessary to a just appreciation of
other people and their professions and mode of life ; with
this only can a man respect his own calling as he ought
and love his neighbor as he should. We cannot segregate
and make an educational cleavage at the line of occupations,
except to the common peril.
We may one day need the real trade school in agricul-
ture — the form of Instruction that aims at training rather
than education ; at information rather than development ;
at mediocrity and below rather than mediocrity and above.
This time may come, but it is not here now, and our great-
est present need in agriculture is to educate the landown-
ers rather than their hired operatives ; to educate a class
of people upon the land that are in every way the equal
of their compatriots in the city or anywhere else.
The European peasant belongs to a class whose eco-
lo6 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
nomic and social status was fixed generations ago by a
variety of causes, mostly political ; and when the problem
of universal education came up for solution there, the
only way in which the benefits of education could be ap-
proximately enjoyed by all the people was to found a
system of peasant schools which should secure results
with a maximum of manual training and a minimum of
mental education. How difficult of achievement was even
this step will be appreciated, for example, by any student
of Irish industrial history, or by any one who has read Sir
Horace Plunkett's " Ireland in the New Century."
When these times come to this country, if they ever do,
I fervently hope that by that time our secondary schools
will have become so well organized and so broadly equipped
as to handle the trade school together with that higher
form of industrial education which now engages our atten-
tion and which we are trying now to provide.
The American farmer is not a peasant. He has never
yet been peasantized, and I fervently bope he never will
be peasantized. He belongs mostly to the ancient and
honorable Puritan stock descended from that great middle
class of England that came to this country to establish and
maintain, not aristocratic, but democratic, institutions.
This is the stock that first felled trees, then built churches
and schoolhouses, and prepared to govern themselves and
to found a nation and a race whose institutions should rest
on the intelligent activity of all the people.
This stock has never been exceeded, not only for hardi-
hood and industry, but for its appreciation of the benefits
of higher education and of the better things of life. This
people held three things to be cardinal virtues — to labor,
to go to church, and to go to school. This is the people
that founded Harvard College in the wilderness. It is
UNITY IN EDUCATION 107
from stock of this sort that the typical American farmer
is descended, and I would see him so trained and so edu-
cated as to remain true to his type for all time. This will
require a training and an education that cannot be imparted
by any form of European peasant school, however modified,
but it will require the best that modern human ingenuity
can devise. This great need will be met, if it is ever met,
not by old, but by new systems of education, and they
must be wrought out by ourselves to meet conditions here.
3. To educate the children of different classes separately
is to prevent that natural flow of individuals from one pro-
fession into another which is in every way desirable both
for public and for private welfare. If the children of
farmers are systematically put into schools where only
agriculture is taught, many a good lawyer and many a
good citizen will be spoiled to make an indifferent farmer.
Boys do not necessarily inherit the father's profession. In
a very large sense their natural faculties come from that
common stock of human characters that constitute the
heritage of the race, and the individual has a right to an
education that is broader than the occupation and the nar-
row environment in which he was born. True, he should
be educated through and to a large extent by means of his
environment, because that is the compass of his own ex-
perience ; but if we educate him within his environment,
we dwarf him in the process, and we do not truly educate
him.
Again, many a boy, city born, has the instinct to get
back to Nature. He should have at least a fair chance to
do so. Because a girl is born in the country is no sign in
America that she should be a farmer's wife ; nor if she is
born in the city, is it a sign that she should not. My plea
is, in the name of common sense and American citizenship,
io8 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
educate all these people together in one school, with a
curriculum varied enough to fit for more than one occupa-
tion and more than one mode of life, to the end that a
man may follow the occupation of his father or may change
it, as he pleases; but whether he follow or whether he
change, he shall do so intelligently, and for a reason, and
in either case he shall have some knowledge of and sym-
pathy with the occupation and the life of his neighbor.
It is said that if you give a bright boy a good education
and broad associations, he will leave the farm, and the
only way to keep him there is to train him to be contented
with a humble life. That false theory of education was
exploded long ago. Experience has abundantly shown
that education does not necessarily result in taking people
out of the country except when that education is one-sided
and faulty, as witness the graduates from some of our
greatest universities. I have no sympathy with the plan
of keeping boys on the farm by the blindfolding process.
There was a time, now happily past, when the schools
ignored not only agriculture but all industry. Then un-
thinking teachers advised bright boys and girls to " get an
education, so they would not have to work." This sort of
doctrine found fertile soil in the young of hard-working,
self-denying pioneers, and it was not strange that most
young men who had much contact with the schools were
lost not only to the farm but' to industrial life. Then it
was that men saw the best of the young crowding into pro-
fessions already overcrowded, and they noted with sorrow
and regret that education served principally to draw men
away from the useful callings and to pile them up Hke
salmon in the spawning season where they were not needed
or wanted, and where little awaited but their own destruc-
tion.
UNITY IN EDUCATION 109
The country is, and always will be, the great breeding
ground for the nation, and the consequence of this insane
movement cityward of the choicest men and minds could
have had but one final effect — to put the brains in the
city and the brawn in the country. It was not strange
that under conditions such as these thinking men first
denied higher education, to their young because of its in-
evitable consequences, and then came to demand a form
of education that should really serve the needs of indus-
trial people as well as those of professional people. In
this way arose the separate industrial schools, but later
experience has shown that one extreme is as bad as the
other — that industrial training without education is but
little better than education without industry, and that both
will inevitably result in a most unfortunate sorting process ;
both alike will prevent that natural flow from one pro-
fession or mode of life to another, so essential to meet
the natural desires of individuals, and to secure that ho-
mogeneity of population without which institutions such
as ours are not long safe, or even possible.
Though it is true that educators did not lead in the
movement for industrial education, they were quick to see
its significance, and to-day our greatest educators and our
best teachers are the most earnest disciples of the doctrine
that a system of universal education should fit for all the
needful activities of a highly civilized race, to the neglect
of none and to the prejudice of none.
This is a stupendous problem. Think of its new com-
plications ! In the old days all that was necessary was to
maintain whatever schools could win support and teach
the things most easily taught without much regard to the
consequences. In these days of universal education we
must teach what the world needs to know for all its essen-
no EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
tial activities, and we must so conduct our schools as not
to greatly disturb the economic or social balance of things ;
so conduct them that the overflow from one occupation or
class shall be naturally compensated by a corresponding
inflow of equally desirable individuals from others — all of
which is necessary if universal education is to be an un-
mixed blessing.
4. Secondary schools devoted solely to agriculture
would of necessity cover so much territory as to require
the students to board and room away from home. This
for students of the high school age is unthinkable. Every
boy and every girl in the early -and middle " teens " should
sleep every night under the father's roof, and this can be
if a community establishes a single school capable of cater-
ing to all its needs, and does not insist upon educating one
class here and another there, compelling long journeys to
get to the right school. A single agricultural school in
ten counties, or in five counties, or in one county — think
of it!
The problem of secondary education is largely the prob-
lem of the fourteen-year-old, and we should never rest easy
till every farmer's boy and girl may go to the nearest high
school, and there find instruction not only in agriculture
but in the other industries and professions which concern
the community, and after having lived the day in an at-
mosphere broader than their own studies go home again
at night to dream of what a great thing the world is and
to wake with an intelligent appreciation of the place in it
which they propose to occupy, for its high school is the
place in which the individual should "find himself."
5. Agriculture not only needs contact with other inter-
ests, but they need contact with agriculture. Every one
who has had experience with the introduction of agricul-
UNITY IN EDUCATION in
ture into our state universities will bear witness that the
benefits of association are mutual.
In the university which I have the honor to serve, our
agricultural students not only get a training and a breadth
of vision which they could never get in an institution de-
voted solely to their own interests, but their presence on
the campus is of distinct advantage to the other students.
Their directness and their practical methods of work are
wholesome to the institution, at least they are so declared
by the non-agricultural professors and students ahke. In
every way, as I see it, much is lost and nothing gained by
separating the students of different classes and educating
them apart, each in the occupation of the father.
Nor would I put all the so-called industries in one class
of schools and the professions in another. In a large sense
all study is professional, and in a very large sense indeed
it is also industrial. Some portion of the training of every
individual should be industrial, even manual, and another
portion of the training of every individual should be dis-
tinctly mental until habits of thought are formed quite
independent of material activity. For these reasons, which
are fundamental, I would not separate industry from any
of our schools. I would make it an integral part of every
curriculum, its proportion and character depending upon
the prospective profession of the individual ; but above all
I would have the essence of all occupations, or at least of
as many as possible, represented in the same school.
My point is, if all these subjects and professional points
of view are offered in the same school with more than one
avenue into life, then the opportunity is presented for the
individual not only to make a choice but also to acquire
professional knowledge and skill without becoming narrow
as a man. If farmers and lawyers and editors and engi-
112 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
neers and artists and merchants are educated separately,
they will either hate or despise each other, or both ; if they
are educated together, each will acquire, besides proficiency
in his own line, a sympathy with others that comes so
easily with that partial knowledge and acquaintance through
daily association in the school age, and that comes with so
much difficulty in any other way. A farmer being educated
at a great university is a little different man because law
and economics and engineering and Greek are well taught
in neighboring buildings, even though he never take one
of the courses laid down in the catalogue. The very fact
that they are taught, and that he associates with those who
take them — all this has its effect, and in a thousand ways
a man absorbs something out of every activity that is going
on about him. My point again is that this is the only ade-
quate atmosphere in which to educate an American citizen,
whatever his occupation is to be.
6. To establish separate schools for agriculture is to
injure the development of existing high schools. These
schools are not "city schools " in any proper sense of the
term. Most of them are located in small towns and vil-
lages in a distinctly rural environment. To denominate
all these as "city schools," to be devoted solely to the
interests of city people, is as absurd as it is unjust to them.
These schools, like all others, have the natural right to
minister to their constituency, whatever it is. But if agri-
culture is to be put off into a separate system of schools
just because the high schools have not yet taught the sub-
ject, it will be easy, later, to cleave off another industrial
slice, and again another until the remnant that remains
will be suited to nobody's need, unworthy alike of the
school and the community it was established to serve;
and instead of an organized system of effective education
UNITY IN EDUCATION 113
we shall have an incongruous medley of separate and inde-
pendent schools, each serving its Uttle clientele in a narrow
way without much regard to the public good — all of which
is against the true spirit of universal education.
The American high school is a new institution. It has
arisen from our determination to make education truly uni-
versal. Now, universal education means that all the peo-
ple shall be educated, and in such a way that all the
activities necessary to a highly civilized race may develop
and go forward. Only a small per cent of the people will
ever go to college and the experiment of universal education
will be tried out in the field of the secondary schools. These,
more than the colleges, will prove to be the agencies by
which the masses of the people will get their training and
their trend. For this reason the future welfare of these
schools is to be specially safeguarded ; but every subject
and interest that is taken away from the high school in
the present stage of its development lessens by that much
its power to serve the community, and by that much it is a
menace to its life and efficiency and a check if not a bar to
its further development.
7. Separate schools in agriculture will check the exten-
sion of high schools into country communities. High
schools started first in the cities, it is true, but they are
making their way rapidly out into the country, a tendency
that is to be encouraged, more especially as they are
showing a remarkable disposition to respond to their
environment. If the interests are not divided, it is'entirely
possible for any community, without going beyond driving
limits, to throw all its energies into a school of secondary
grade and make it capable of truly reflecting all its varied
interests. This has been found impossible where sec-
ondary education is primarily under ecclesiastical in-
114 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
fluence ; it will also be found impossible if interests are
to be divided and as many separate schools established
as there are interests to be served ; but if they will stay
together and solve their problems as a unit, it is possible
for every prosperous community to give its young people
at their very doors what is to all intents and purposes a
college education.
8. It is unnecessary to found separate schools in order
that agriculture shall be taught, and well taught. I am
enough of a partisan for agriculture to demand what is
needed for its development ; to advocate, if necessary, sepa-
rate schools for this purpose, even if they should result in
reducing the scope and curtailing forever the full and pos-
sible development of the high school. But it is unneces-
sary to resort to this expedient in these days. It was
necessary to do so in an early day because of the in-
different, not to say unfriendly, attitude of the schools of
the time, all of which were organized and conducted on
the classical basis in order to fit for the so-called learned
professions. Such schools had little knowledge of and
less sympathy with industrial education, and to get a start
it was inevitable that separate schools should be estab-
lished to do what existing schools would not in those days
undertake.
But conditions are changed. We are living now in a new
age — in an age which recognizes that the highest purpose
in education is to get ready to live ; that real education is
active, not passive ; and that its fruitage is service, not per-
sonal gratification. We are living in an age which recog-
nizes that all forms of useful activity can be made yet
more useful by the knowledge and the graces of educa-
tion ; and that the man himself is bigger than his occupa-
tion ^bigger than that narrow avenue of public service
UNITY IN EDUCATION 1 15
through which he obtains his livelihood and discharges the
ordinary debts to Nature. We have all learned this lesson,
and by this time we ought to have learned it well.
It is true that education for industrial people, and after
that education in and for industry, arose from the masses
and was forced upon the schools. I do not forget all this,
but I beg to call attention to the fact that that early de-
mand was a selfish one, — a righteous selfishness, it is true,
but yet selfish. The masses wanted education for their
own purposes, and it caused no little jolt to the educational
juggernaut when they proceeded to get it. But when they
had time to recover their breath, educators — real educa-
tors — began to take stock of the situation, and they have
commenced in these days a new policy of education in the
world ; a policy which if followed out will develop all our
resources, both industrial and intellectual ; a policy which
will take care of your personal needs, and mine, and yet
which is as broad as humanity and all its activities. This
new policy is working successfully in our great state uni-
versities where men of all classes, aims, and prospects are
educated together from the standpoint not of private in-
terest but of the public good. The same policy has com-
menced its work in our secondary schools, and I am
anxious above all other considerations that these schools
should solve this whole problem for their communities ;
besides, I know educators well enough to believe that they
will earnestly undertake to do it if they are intrusted with
the duty, which is also a privilege.
These modern schools must have a fair chance. They
are new institutions ; they have hardly been in the field a
half century, and how they have grown ! There are liter-
ally hundreds of them that are giving a better education
than colleges gave a generation ago, and they have only
Ii6 EDIJCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
commenced to serve the people. If they have not yet
solved all the problems and taught all the subjects the
people need, it is no sign that they cannot or that
they will not, and they should be given the chance.
Every new addition to an educational institution not only
serves a new public need, but it enriches all that was be-
fore. All the modern secondary school needs in order
to serve us perfectly is men and money and time to learn
how.
There is no longer an "issue" in education — certainly
not concerning the fundamental industries. I am told that
in certain remote sections of the country some people are
still fighting the Civil War, but most of us know that it is
over. The old issues are settled and dead and left behind.
New ones have arisen to command our attention, and it is
unworthy of ourselves to expend our energies on lines of
effort long since rendered obsolete.
Yes, the old issues between the classics and the indus-
tries are dead and the sooner they are forgotten the better.
I have been through this educational conflict myself and I
know what it is ; but even the old soldier who insists upon
fighting the Civil War over again, to-day, will get no audi-
ence. New problems have arisen with the new generation,
and this generation proposes to stand on whatever has
been gained before and expend its energies in forward
movements. We do well to imitate its example in this
matter. The new issues are constructive.
9. This demand that agriculture be taught in the public
schools is but part of the great modern movement for indus-
trial education. Whoever has lived close to the great heart
of the common people and has had his hand upon the pulse
cannot fail to have felt the throbbings of this new impulse
for more than a generation, or to have detected its first
UNITY IN EDUCATION 117
feeble flutterings an hundred years ago. Whether he has
had his ear to the ground or not, whether he has Hved
close to the heart of things or away in the upper atmos-
phere, no man can now be ignorant of the great fact that
a change is coming over the spirit of the times regarding
educational ideals; a change that is fundamental, and
whose shadow or whose light, whichever it may be, is full
upon us and can no longer be averted or ignored.
When each community had but one or two educated men,
— the minister, the doctor, and perhaps the lawyer, — it did
not greatly matter what their education might be like ; but
when everybody learned to read, and to think, which was
inevitable, they quickly saw that the system and the sub-
ject-matter of an education suited to the office and the
study were ill-adapted to fit men for the farm and the shop,
but exceedingly well-adapted to unfit them. They, before
the educators, learned that the benefits of education were
capable of being extended to all the affairs of life, material
as well as intellectual.
But, as has been repeatedly noted, educators soon caught
the true spirit of the new demand and were quick to re-
spond. They have responded so well as to discover that
in the last analysis there is an intellectual basis for all
industry and an industrial basis for all education that is
safe for everybody to use ; they have shown that the names
of various occupations are but names for different forms
of activity and service ; that all fundamental occupations
are learned professions, and that any form of education
that fits for nothing in particular is worse than useless,
even dangerous.
So we must look at this matter broadly. Our problem
is but a part of a more general one ; moreover, this general
problem of how to educate for all the useful activities is
Ii8 • EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
the very problem upon which all educators are busily at
work, and they are solving it inch by inch and day by day.
It is for us to stay with the crowd and be in at the finish.
The American high school is a form of secondary educa-
tion that has arisen, or more properly speaking is arising,
to meet this new demand for universal education. Agri-
culture, and industrial education generally, have found
their true place in the universities. The next step is that
they should find their true place in our secondary schools,
where, after all, our attempt at universal education will
render its greatest service.
lo. If industrial education is to be conducted in sepa-
rate schools, it must not be forgotten that in losing the in-
dustrial people it is the ninety-five per cent that is cleaving
off ; that the first effect of this loss is the reduction of the
high school to a girls' school ; that the next effect is the
loss of financial support, and the last stage is the degeneracy
of the high school to a college preparatory school with no
message of its own to the people.
Reasons might be multiplied indefinitely, showing why
it is wiser to go forward, meeting our educational necessi-
ties together, but they would all be of the same general
tenor ; viz. : that our educational problem is after all a
single problem — complex, puzzling, and all that ; but it is
a single problem after all, and we should stay together and
solve it.
If the high schools were as indifferent and as antagonis-
tic toward industrial education to-day as the colleges were
fifty years ago, I would raise my voice loudest for a sepa-
rate system of agricultural and other industrial high schools.
But they are not indifferent, they are interested ; they are
not antagonistic, they are exceedingly friendly. Agri-
culture has found its place in our American system of
UNITY IN EDUCATION 119
education, so far as colleges are concerned, and its place
is in most honorable company. It remains to find its place
in the high schools, and when that place is found, may it
be equally honorable and equally favorable with the place
it occupies in our great universities where it has done so
well, and may industry in general enjoy the same experi-
ence.
In a large sense we are at the parting of the ways in
this matter. The demand for education in agriculture has
come to stay. Indeed, it is but a part of a larger move-
ment for industrial education generally ; meaning by that,
education with a view to some form of useful service in
the fundamental industries as well as in the so-called learned
professions. This larger demand also has not only come
to stay, but it has the sympathy and earnest support of the
masses of the people and the very large majority of our
best educators. The only substantial difference of opinion
is as to the best method of procedure, whether by a series
of schools of as many distinct types as there are occupa-
tions and interests, or by a single system of schools with
separate courses. Which shall be adopted as the final
American policy of education is a matter before us for dis-
cussion— and there is at present no deeper educational
problem — and as has elsewhere been remarked more de-
pends upon what we actually do now within the next five
years than it can depend on what we think and say and try
to do twenty-five years from now.
This issue is upon philosophies of education so widely
different that the choice once made will be final, and the
consequences well-nigh irretrievable. I am one who firmly
believes that within the next ten years we shall decide for
all time whether we shall reap the full fruits of our
thoroughly unique educational opportunities in America,
I20 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
or whether we shall needlessly follow in the footsteps of
Europe, where social distinctions were established, and the
peasant classes fully fixed, long before the modern age of
universal education was thought of.
Personally, I do not believe in that philosophy of educa-
tion which would establish separate schools for the various
industries and occupations of life. I greatly prefer that
theory of social and industrial development which would
establish an^ maintain a single system of schools wherein
the people of all classes should be educated together, dis-
tinct courses being framed and conducted for the benefit
of each in so far as the interests differ from those of the
common mass or of other professions. And so shall we
be one people. To this end let us be wise and preserve
our educational unity as we work at the solution of our
difficult problem of universal education.
PART II
AGRICULTURAL
The preceding pages have necessarily been written from
the agricultural standpoint, because whatever knowledge
of education I may possess has been acquired by an inti-
mate contact with agricultural people and a long experi-
ence with their struggle upward to the attainment of an
adequate and suitable education.
I have, however, for the most part avoided detail, because
the purpose was to confine attention to the general policies
of education in that region where the industrial and non-
industrial meet ; where occupations shade into each other
by imperceptible gradations and where one man's voca-
tion becomes another's avocation- Any one, therefore, who
might chance to scan these pages for the purpose of ob-
taining a hint as to practical methods of procedure in
introducing industrial courses into existing schools in order
to secure the educational unity herein advocated, would be
disappointed unless a little space were devoted to that end.
I have, therefore, added Part II with the hope of being
able to show how agriculture at least may make its way
into existing schools without detriment to other courses, but
vastly to their advantage.
123
CHAPTER VII
AGRICULTURE IN THE HIGH SCHOOLS
" Is agriculture a college subject or is it a high school subject ?
Our forefathers conducted the discussion as if it were one or the
other. In these days we may answer, — it is both." ^
Agriculture has earned an honorable place in some of
the greatest universities in America, where, with respect
both to research and instruction, it is beginning to com-
pare favorably with other professional and scientific sub-
jects.
It will never, however, really reach the masses of the
people in an adequate way until it attains in the high
school the same relative rank it has already attained in the
college, nor will the work of its extension be fully done
until in some form its influence has permeated into the
grades.
The next step, however, is to introduce agriculture into
the existing high schools just as it has come in beside other
and older subjects in the state universities, and it is no
stretch of the prophetic imagination to predict that this
great study will vitalize the high school as it has helped to
vitalize the universities wherever it has been introduced
and properly supported, and from these schools it will per-
colate by natural process into the grades.
It has commonly been assumed that the place to begin
1 Extract from an address of the author upon the History of Collegiate Education in Agri-
culture, read at the meeting of the Society for the Promotion of Agricultural Science, at Lans<
ing, Michigan, June, 1907.
124
AGRICULTURE IN THE HIGH SCHOOLS 125
the further extension of agricultural education is with the
elementary country school. The writer does not share
this opinion, but his feeling is that the strongly organized
high school is the next place in which to undertake the
work of agricultural education. This opinion is based
upon the following reasons : —
1. The students are older than those of the grades and
are beginning to think about things vocational.
2. The teaching power is stronger and the work can
be better done, while that which is experimental will be
in the hands of more experienced teachers better capable
of making necessary readjustments or amendments as to
methods.
3. The Experiment Stations have provided a mass of
material entirely suitable for secondary school purposes,
while the literature for the elementary school yet remains
to be made.
4. The colleges of agriculture have tested a mass of
material and methods and found by experience what is
most successful from the teaching standpoint. Much of
this can be carried over bodily into the high school with
only such modifications, eliminations, and change of
emphasis as a good secondary school teacher with fair
knowledge of the subject will know well how to make.
5. The same energy and the same teaching force will
accomplish vastly more at this point than in the grades.
Not only that, but activity here will in a short time produce
in the high schools as well as in the normal schools a class
of teachers who can transfer this work to the grades with
prospects of success ; whereas to begin in the grades pre-
supposes a class of teachers that does not at present exist
and for whose training there is as yet no adequate machin-
ery.
126 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
Before discussing details further, let me say that when I
speak of teaching agriculture in our high schools, I mean
agriculture. I do not mean nature study, nor do I mean
that some sort of pedagogical kink should be given to
chemistry or botany or even geography and arithmetic.
Let these arts and sciences be taught from their own stand-
point, with as direct application to as many affairs of real
life as possible ; but let chemistry continue to be chemistry,
and let agriculture introduce new matter into the schools and
with it a new point of view. Nor should this new matter
be " elementary agriculture." In some ways I could wish
the phrase had never been coined. What is wanted in our
high schools is not elementary agriculture, but elemental,
fundamental agriculture. For this purpose we should select
out of what is taught in our colleges not only those phases
of agriculture which are adapted to use in the high school,
but also those that strike at the root of farm life and its
affairs — something that will appeal to real farmers and
that will serve actually to educate their boys for the busi-
ness of farming — soil physics, soil fertility, laboratory
fields in crop production, the use of farm machinery,
and the classification and principles of feeding of live
stock.
As I see it, every high school that has a natural agricul-
tural constituency of any considerable importance should
put in a department of agriculture on the same basis as its
department of chemistry, and proceed to offer at least one
year, and better four years, of technical agriculture taught
.from the standpoint of the farm, that is, for the purpose of
making farmers, to be accompanied by such collateral in-
struction in the arts and sciences as shall provide a suitable
course for such of its pupils as find their interests in the
country and on the farm.
AGRICULTURE IN THE HIGH SCHOOLS 127
The other point on which I would be particular is this :
I am not arguing that the high schools in their present
condition are doing, or are able to do, what is needed for
agriculture. My contention is that they can get ready to
do it, and that right speedily ; and that if they will pro-
ceed to get ready they should have the chance, for it is
their opportunity and their privilege ; and if they do not
propose to serve agriculture and her people as faithfully
and as well as they are serving or intend to serve other
interests, then they should be compelled to do it. That is
my thesis in a few words ; but my conviction is that they
are for the most part fully ready to direct both their schol-
arship and their tremendous efficiency toward our problem
if we will let them, and show them how.^
I can best illustrate my thought in this connection by
an outline of four years' work in agriculture designed to
occupy one fourth of the time of a high school student
preparing for the farm. This course is not assumed to be
ideal, but it is known to be teachable to students of high
school age because most of it has been so taught, and
while special cases will require emendations, additions, or
substitutions, it is confidently believed that this outline
may be accepted as a safe basis for the present tentative
efforts. Indeed, I am convinced that it will require less
radical change than has been found necessary in college
courses everywhere.
The following outline is intended to provide one of the
four subjects which the high school student is supposed
to take ; that is to constitute one fourth of the work of such
high school students as expect to live upon the farm : —
1 Extract from an address on The Next Step in Agricultural Education, read at the Uni>
versity of Missouri, January 9, 1909.
128 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
Outline of Four Years' Work in High School Agriculture
FIRST YEAR
Farm Crops, One Half Year, alternating with Soil Physics, One Half
Year
Farm Crops
Corn
Description of at least six varieties.
Corn judging by score card.
Testing seed corn for germination.
Testing of varieties for yield on experimental plots. Repeat if possible
on neighboring farms.
Methods of cultivation.
Plant foods necessary for crop production (lo elements) ; special needs
of corn.
Place in the rotation.
Botanical relations of Indian corn.
Oats
Methods of cultivation.
Place in the rotation.
Treating oats for smut.
Wheat
(To alternate with corn and oats)
Description of at least six varieties — red or white.
Judging market grades of wheat.
Testing of varieties for yield on experimental plots or on neighboring
farms or both.
Methods of cultivation.
Experiments on effect of size of seed.
Place in the rotation.
Harvesting and marketing — shrinkage.
Botanical relations of wheat.
AGRICULTURE IN THE HIGH SCHOOLS 129
Legumes
Identification and description of alfalfa, red clover, white clover, alsike,
cowpeas, soy beans, and vetch.
Uses and comparative value of each.
Botanical relations of clover and the other legumes.
Grasses
Identification and description of timothy, blue grass, orchard grass, and
any other three true grasses.
Botanical relations of the cultivated grasses.
Tubers
Potatoes — effect of large and small tubers upon yield ; effect of seed
from prolific hill ; treating for scab.
Sweet potatoes — culture, yield, and uses as compared with Irish potatoes.
Botanical characters and relations of each.
Weeds
Identification of ten of the most troublesome weeds by stem and leaf.
Identification by seeds.
Make collection of seeds of each. Put in small bottles or packages
and label accurately.
Habits of growth and methods of eradication.
Literature
The Cereals in America. Hunt.
The Book of Corn. Myrick.
Chemistry of Plant and Animal Life. Snyder.
Grasses and Clovers, Field Roots, Forage and Fodder Plants. Shaw.
Germ Life in the Soil. Conn.
The Potato. Fraser.
Farmers' Bulletins, Nos. 35, 91, 129, 132, 199, 214, 215, 229, and 249.
U. S. Dept. of Agr., Washington, D.C.
Soil Physics (Winter laboratory work)
Physical composition of the soil.
Formation of soils.
How soils differ in texture and how they are classified.
Moisture relation of soils.
130 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
Experiments in the laboratory and on plots to determine the water-hold-
ing power of diflferent soils.
Experiments to demonstrate the capillary movements of water in differ-
ent soils under different conditions.
Experiments to show the possibility of conserving soil moisture, and
different methods of accomplishing the object.
Physical effects of humus in the soil.
Meaning and methods of tilling the soil.
Soil temperature affected by color and drainage.
Physical improvement of clay soils by the use of lime.
Literature
Secondary School Agriculture. Barto.
Rock, Rock-Weathering, and Soils. Merrill.
Physics of Agriculture. King.
The Soil. King.
Physical Properties of Soil. Warington.
The Soil. A. D. Hall.
Rocks and Soils. Stockbridge.
Cyclopedia of American Agriculture, Vol. i, pp. 320-521.
SECOND YEAR
Horticulture and Gardening, alternating with Farm Mechanics
Horticulture
Pruning of common fruit, shade, and ornamental trees of different ages.
Grafting apple, peach, pear, potato, and tomato.
Budding common fruits.
How fruits fertilize, with some practice in identifying the staminate and
the pistillate parts.
The proper way to plant a tree and its subsequent care.
Identification of twenty to forty trees and shrubs used for planting or
ornamental purposes.
The most troublesome insect and fungus enemies of fruit and orna-
mental trees and their destruction by spraying and otherwise.
Special work in making, and in the application of spraying mixtures.
Plant propagation, illustrated in the school garden by at least six of the
most common vegetables and an equal number of varieties of flowers.
Cold frames and hotbeds ; their preparation and use.
AGRICULTURE IN THE HIGH SCHOOLS 131
Literature
The Pruning-Book. Bailey.
The Principles of Fruit-Growing. Bailey.
The Nursery- Book. Bailey.
Garden-Making. Bailey.
Farm Mechanics and the Homestead
Cement construction — walks, tanks, small bridges ; reenforcement.
Silo construction.
Leveling for drains.
Location of tile and sewer drains.
Construction of both drains and sewers.
The germ nature of infectious diseases.
Methods of dissemination of infectious diseases.
Disinfection.
Sanitary draining and sewage.
Farm sanitation.
Source and supply of pure water.
Literature
Farm Drainage. Elliot.
Irrigation and Drainage. King.
Sanitation of the Country House. Bashore.
Water and Public Health. Fuertes.
The Chemistry of Life and Health. Kimmius.
Bacteria in Relation to Country Life. Parts H and HL Lipman.
Proper Disposal of Sewage Wastes in Rural Districts. (Nelson, Bull.
166. New Jersey Agr. Exp. Sta.)
Sewage Disposal on the Farm and Protection of Drinking Water.
(T. Smith, Farmers' Bull. 43.)
Cyclopedia of Am. Agr., Vol. i, pp. 231-307.
THIRD YEAR
Animal Studies, alternating with Soil Fertility
Animal Studies
Composition of milk.
Use of Babcock test ; testing of individual cows.
132 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
Keeping quality of milk by different methods of sanitary preparation —
fore milk, middle milk, last milk : open dish, closed bottle.
Studies of feeding practices of the neighborhood.
Silage and its uses.
Comparative studies of yields per cow and per ton of feed.
Different cuts of meat ; their location in the carcass and value for food.
Breeds and characteristics of form animals — to be carried through the
year. Text — Plumb.
Identification of breeds.
Judging live stock — market types.
Each pupil to prepare written detailed history of at least one breed of
domestic animal.
Raise, if possible, two or three breeds of chickens.
Studies of local live stock interests.
The elements of animal nutrition, — protein, carbohydrates, minerals, —
feeding standards and balanced rations.
The common ailments of farm animals : symptoms and methods of pre-
vention or treatment.
Literature
Milk and its Uses. Wing.
Feeds and Feeding. Henry.
Breeds and Characteristics of Domestic Animals. Plumb. -
Breeders' Gazette.
Hoard's Dairyman.
Soil Fertility
Pot experiments in growth of plants with the different elements of
fertility withheld.
Duplicate on field plots with certain elements increased.
Critical comparison of crops grown on fields of different degrees of
fertility, considering both yield and the character of the crop.
Study of the comparative yields of the neighborhood.
Root tubercles and inoculation.
Sources of nitrogen, of phosphorus, of potassium. •
Farmyard manure as a source of fertility. .
Commercial fertilizers as sources of fertility.
Practical methods of maintaining fertility. .
Testing soils for acid conditions.
Practical rotations.
AGRICULTURE IN THE HIGH SCHOOLS 133
Literature
Secondary School Agriculture. Barto.
Soil Fertility and Permanent Agriculture. Hopkins. (In preparation ;
in the meantime use Bull. 123, 111. Exp. Sta.)
How Crops Feed. Johnson.
Fertilizers. Voorhees.
The Fertility of the Land. Roberts.
Soils. E. W. Hilgard.
Illinois Bulletin No. 76, Alfalfa on Illinois Soil.
FOURTH YEAR
Improvement of Animals and Plants, alternating with the Farmstead
Improvement of Animals and Plants
Origin of domesticated races.
Natural selection.
Improvement by selection.
Heredity.
Practice in breeding.
How to cross ; cross pop corn, sweet com, field corn — naturally and
artificially ; inbreed field corn, sweet corn, and pop corn ; plant the
mixed kernels. Note the character of crop. Detassel and com-
pare the yield of the detasseled with the entire rows ; select for
length of ear ; select for greatest yield ; select for height of ear on
stalk; select for widest leaf; select for number of rows; select for
any striking feature, as for corn on the tassel. Plant corn found
growing upon the tassel ; establish separate strains of clover and
timothy ; hunt for divided head of timothy — plant it. Make a collec-
tion of freaks in plant growth. Experiment in transmission of color
in sweet peas. Experiment with small animals, and, if possible,
establish a poultry plant in connection with the school ; select for
maximum in egg production and for plumage coloration.
Literature
Improvement of Animals and Plants. Davenport. (In press.)
Origin of Species. Darwin.
134 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
The Farmstead
Suitable exteriors for farm buildings, especially dwelling houses.
Comparative studies in designs for farm buildings.
Equipment of houses and barns with heat, light, motor power, water
pressure, ventilating and cleaning devices, and other machinery.
Design of farmstead grounds and their suitable planting.
Literature
Country Life in America.
Farm Dwellings. Wing.
The Farmstead. Roberts.
Is it objected that such a course of academic procedure
is certain to exclude other studies that are indispensable ?
To such objection I answer as follows : —
1. No instruction is more indispensable than that which
enables the individual to be self-sustaining and to contribute
his share to the world's work that must be done if man as
a whole is to progress or even to exist.
2. There is no law but custom to dictate that a high
school course is to be exactly four years long, and if such
a procedure as is herein advocated should lengthen the
school period to five years, it would be to the advantage
both of secondary and of higher education.
3. Something can be done both by condensation and
elimination as well as by better methods of study and of
teaching to reduce the time limit without impoverishing the
course.
4. If the student is getting something day by day which,
to his senses, is evidently going to help him to succeed as
he sees success, then he will not only remain longer in the
school, but he will pursue his other studies with greater
willingness and better results, all of which tends to higher
scholarship within the school as well as to greater efficiency
afterward.
AGRICULTURE IN THE HIGH SCHOOLS 135
5. At best but a small fraction graduate from any
course, hence this plan will provide the student day by day
with a balanced programme as between the vocational and
the non-vocational, and the preservation of this balance is
of vastly more consequence than is the total length of the
course or the mere element of graduation.
The call for teachers fitted to conduct this new work in
high schools is so sharp the present year as to take at
generous salaries every available candidate, with many
schools unsupplied. This insufficiency of teachers shows
not only the interest in the subject but the suddenness
with which the demand has arisen ; indeed, anything like
a demand is less than two years old.
Wherever this kind of teaching has been tried it succeeds,
and quite to the surprise of the skeptical, the students who
take agriculture accomplish not less but more of other
work, and do it better than before. It seems that the
introduction of this professional study has added a new
and a live purpose to education as the student sees it, and
when taught in connection with academic work it seems to
broaden instead of to narrow the student.
Minnesota has just enacted a law by which any high
school which will add a department of agriculture that
meets the approval of the State Board of Education may
draw upon the state funds to the amount of twenty-five
hundred dollars annually, the number of schools being
limited to ten additional for each year. Over sixty made
the first application, many of which are going on with their
plans independent of state aid. To this great state be-
longs the credit of taking the first right step in the direc-
tion of secondary education in agriculture in thus giving
state indorsement and aid to what is rapidly becoming a
general movement among the best high schools, especially
in the distinctively agricultural regions.
CHAPTER VIII
AGRICULTURE IN THE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL
" As the twig is bent the tree is inclined."
Something of agriculture can certainly be taught in the
grades, and especially in such of the ungraded country
schools as have not yet felt the blighting effect of better
schools in the near vicinity. Just what this will be is yet
to be worked out. It must be borne in mind that about
all the real experience we have had in teaching agriculture
is in colleges and for the specific purpose of training
farmers. Manifestly this experience can be transferred
almost bodily to the high school, which also fits for life, so
that the problem of introducing agriculture in these schools
is largely one of selection of material and its proper corre-
lation with the non-technical.
The introduction of agriculture into the grades, however,
is another matter. It is not simpler, but vastly more diffi-
cult, partly because the technical significance of the sub-
ject is less and its pedagogical significance is more, and
partly because the teacher is and must be less of a
specialist.
No thinking man, however, can avoid the conviction that
technical instruction should begin in the grades and the
child not to be permitted to reach the high school age with-
out its attention having been sharply directed to the way in
which the family life is sustained. This is partly because
habits of industry and thrift are necessary and need to be
136
AGRICULTURE IN THE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL 137
instilled early to be effective, and partly because the great
mass of children never continue beyond the grades.
The unpardonable sin of the parent or the teacher is
to urge the child to " get an education so he won't have
to work." Unfortunately neither parents nor teachers can
claim immunity at this point, and when this economic,
social, and moral offense is committed, it is directed alike
against the little one and the generation of which he is so
soon to form an integral part. He is to get an education
that his work may be more effective and his life as a whole
more successful ; and as life in general is founded upon
industry, so should the industrial side of his education begin
early and proceed as a parallel to the end, or, at least, until
intelHgently abandoned for a non-industrial profession. It
may be remarked parenthetically that the public is not
interested in those forms of education that end in nothing
and that express themselves in no form of human activity,
using the term activity in its broadest sense.
Our first attempts at universal education resulted, not
advantageously, but disastrously, to many of our most use-
ful and necessary occupations. Children of farmers and
mechanics flocked to school, but the course of study was
adapted to the so-called learned professions. It was not
only silent about the great industries of life, but the in-
fluence exerted upon the young was to fire them with an
ambition to " rise in the world," whatever that may be.
The meaning given the term, however, by repeated if not
almost daily injunction of teacher and text alike was to "get
an education that you may not be obliged to labor."
This was universal education only in the sense that
everybody was admitted to the schools : it was not univer-
sal education in the sense that a true picture was afforded
of the many activities of a highly civilized state. It was
138 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
not universal in the sense that the necessary occupation of
some ninety per cent of all the people was fairly treated.
The courses of study not only failed to provide anything
directly professional in farming, mechanics, and the useful
arts and industries generally, but the incidental influence
was to crowd the hundred per cent into the occupations of
the ten per cent.
So the mechanic's boy that went much to school seldom
or never returned to the shop, and out of the many who
went out to seek their fortune, a few, of course, succeeded
and served as examples to fire other hundreds to " escape
from a life of toil."
In the same way the farm boy who had much contact
with the schools seldom returned to the farm, but hied
him to the city, where he was welcome for his habits of
thrifty industry, whether he ever rose or whether he ground
his life out in a cheap clerkship. This stripping of the
land and the country of its brightest and best, its most
ambitious and promising young went on until a general
state of public alarm ensued as to the consequences of
such a system of one-sided education when applied to all
the people, for the evident effect was to strip the useful
industries and occupations of the choicest young men and
pile them up in a few favored callings where many of them
were not needed nor wanted.
This was not the worst result, either, because this effect
of education upon the industries themselves was not help-
ful but disastrous, whereas we have a right to assume that
if all men are to be educated, then all occupations will be
elevated and developed and improved as only educated and
able men can improve a profession. Hence the revolution
against the first effects of universal education ; hence the
crusade for agricultural education ; hence the demand for
AGRICULTURE IN THE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL 139
industrial courses, hoping that the young may thereby be
really fitted to live the lives that most normal men must live,
and that useful occupations may be profited and not dam-
aged by the operations of a system of universal education.
Accordingly we must begin industrial education as early
as possible, and agriculture is no exception. I do not
claim that it is easy : I only say that it must be done. I
do not claim that it is as easy as to teach the same subjects
and the same ideals to older pupils in the high schools and
colleges : I only say that the way must be found, the matter
selected, and the method worked out. I propose no definite
details at this point, but await the results of the many
trials that are now being made in this new and most diffi-
cult field of education, confidently believing that in the
very near future we shall have as definite knowledge as to
matter and methods here as we now possess in the realm
of the college and the high school. Like all new move-
ments this will proceed from above downward, and as ex-
perience in the teaching of agriculture in the colleges has
paved the way for the high school, so will its teaching there
and in the normal schools assist progress in the grades.
Fortunately for this particular subject it is closely related
to that recently recognized pedagogical necessity, nature
study, only it is nature study of a peculiarly valuable sort.
"Agriculture, even in the grades, is something more
than ordinary nature study. It is nature study plus utility.
It is nature study with an economic significance. It is
nature study which articulates with the affairs of real men
in real life. It is nature study in which the child may in-
fluence the processes. It is nature study which distinctly
stimulates industry." ^
^ Quoted from a paper by the author on the Relation of Nature Study and Agriculture in
Elementary Rural Schools, Meeting of the American Nature Study Society, Baltimore, De«
cember 29, 1908.
I40 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
When the pupil is sent to study the tree, the bird, or the
insect, the most that he can do is to observe and record.
This is all good in its way, but the tree, the bird, and the
insect are self-sufficient unto themselves, or, at least, are
in no sense dependent upon the boy, nor are they of much
consequence to him or his except in anaesthetic sense.
When, however, the boy is set to studying the pig, the
matter of utility at once enters in as a factor of the problem.
The pig is worth something and the boy can see it. He
can see how the bare existence of the pig is dependent
upon regular feeding which he himself may give ; and
how the pig, when he is brought to a finish, is capable of
contributing not only to the support of the body, but can be
sold for money with which the boy may possess himself of
anything dear to his heart. He sees, in other words, how
he himself may influence the production of pigs, and if
he has even a fair share of that creative activity which most
boys possess, it will be stimulated into action by the pros-
pect.
If he is set to studying the cow and her milk, especially
if he learns how to compare one kind of milk with another,
or if his attention is even directed to the conditions under
which different kinds maybe produced, he sees in concrete
ways how Nature behaves in her workshop, what it is that
Nature is doing, day by day, and how it is that these activ-
ities are connected with the affairs of men. He cannot
help seeing how the family that owns good cows has an
advantage in the world over those whose cows are poor or
ill-fed.
If he is set to studying corn, he knows at once that he is
dealing with a crop whose management is in the hands of
man ; with something that does not exist for itself alone
and that would not and could not exist except for man's at-
AGRICULTURE IN THE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL 141
tention. All this helps to stimulate activity and produc-
tive energy on the part of the child, which is one of the
things we need to nourish when we take children out of
real life for a considerable length of time and put them
into that artificial world we call the schoolroom.
So we might review the whole gamut of topics agricul-
tural and show how their study stimulates and satisfies
something more than curiosity or even observation and
record ; how they reach out and take hold of the very life
of the boy, and how they connect the affairs of the school
and the schoolroom with those of the home, the neighbor-
hood, and the world into which the child is already anxious
to plunge and make himself known and felt.
One of our problems in education is how to give inform-
ation to the young and how to teach methods of acquiring
more without destroying creative instinct; how to com-
pensate in the school for some of the damage we have
done in taking the child out of real life during the educa-
tive process. Now nature study in itself is good for this
purpose. It is more than that ; it is excellent. It stimu-
lates a love for the material that is around us. It stimu-
lates observation of what is going on, and it gives practice
in making accurate records of what is seen ; but if nature
study can extend into the realm of the useful, into the
region of the productive, into the world where human
relations are involved, then so much the better.
This is the possibility of agriculture as a subject for
study in the grades. The large question is the teacher.
To what extent can the grade teacher know the field well
enough to use it to advantage for these purposes ? The
only answer is that all too often the teacher is unable to
make proper use of this mass of the best material in the
world for teaching processes and that lies close at hand.
142 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
It is the old story over again of looking afar off for the
things that after all are close by ; but in this, as in many
other things, even though the ideal cannot be attained, an
honest attempt is well worth while, and if the teachers can
be induced to combine, along with observation and record,
the elements of usefulness and the human relation, then it
will be well worth all it costs to stimulate as much as pos-
sible the teaching of agriculture in the grades of the public
schools.
Moreover, as this subject makes its way into the high
schools and the normal schools the time will not be long
before teachers will be developed with the training and the
material to go out into the world of the children and hold
up to them a fairly true picture of the world in its industrial
activities.
As I see it, the objects of teaching in the grades and
especially in the country school that superior quality of
nature study which we may call agriculture may be briefly
outlined as follows : —
1. To educate partly by means of that industry lying
nearest at hand, to the end that the student may be active
rather than passive — a doer as well as a thinker.
2. To widen the perspective and so far as possible to
introduce the student to the real life of the world.
3. To instill a respect for industry in general.
4. To give some agriculture for its own sake as well as
for its educational value in order that its fundamental need
shall be appreciated and its practices improved.
Not all of agriculture is available for this work, hence
only those portions that lend themselves to the purposes of
the school should be used to this end. Just what these
portions shall be and precisely how they shall be handled
remains to be determined, but the solution of the problem
AGRICULTURE IN THE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL 143
is nearing and its general character is commencing to
appear in outline.
Whatever may be done, however, in the way of teaching
agriculture in the grades, the ultimate solution of the
country school problem lies not in the old-fashioned, un-
graded district school, but in the modern method of con-
solidation whereby a half-dozen or more weak single-room
and single-teacher schools are combined into one school
with several teachers — an effective organization for doing
well-defined high school as well as grade work. I am
not unaware of the substantial advantages of the old-time
country school or its present utility where it still lingers
with its old-time vigor ; but it is an institution of the past ;
an outgrowth of conditions that are passing never to return :
moreover, its decay is hastened rather than retarded by the
rapid movements of life in the near neighborhood, and the
solution of the country school problem involves the exten-
sion of the modern high school until it includes the country
as well as the city and the town.
In no other way can the country child as such be in-
sured as good educational opportunities as his city cousin, •
but with a school sufficiently large to be strong and with
good courses of agriculture in the rural and village high •
schools, the people of the country will enjoy educational
privileges second to those of no other class, for in many
respects they enjoy a natural and initial advantage in more,
and better sleep, in better air and more of it, and in a life
that is richer in experience day by day.
CHAPTER IX
AGRICULTURE IN THE NORMAL SCHOOLS
The sudden call for teachers of agriculture outside of
agricultural colleges is by no means limited to high schools
and the elementary country schools. The call is sharp
from the normal schools of the Middle West which have
this year taken some of the best trained and most promis-
ing of teachers of this class.
This problem in the normal schools is still different
from that in any other field of agricultural education. It
resembles that of the high school and college in that the
school is large and strong, the pupils fairly mature, and the
teachers skilled. It differs in the fact that the students
are not prospective farmers, so that the technical character
of the work is at least one remove farther from its final
object. Not only is all this true, but the students of the
normal school, when they in turn become teachers, will
mostly be called upon to adapt the subject to the grades.
On the side of both matter and method, therefore, the
problem in the normal school possesses all the difficulties
of the problem in the grades, with the added handicap that
it is always more difficult to teach teachers than to teach
students.
Nevertheless, because it is early in the field and because
of its interest, there is every prospect that the normal
school will be one of the early agencies in the solution of
the problem of secondary education in agriculture, as it will
144
AGRICULTURE IN THE NORMAL SCHOOLS 145
doubtless be the principal agency in the solution of the
difficult problem of teaching this subject in the grades.
The incidental effect of this effort upon the spirit and
purpose of the normal school as a whole is certain to be
decidedly advantageous. Agriculture is a form of real
life that is readily seen and its public significance is easily
appreciated. Again, nowhere else will the school garden
be Hkely to reach so perfect a stage of development as in
the normal school, where the maturity of the student will
insure exceptional results.
Here, however, as in the work of the grades, much
original work remains to be done. While the means are not
yet clearly defined and while matter and method are still
under experimentation, the end is clear — to train teachers
in the art of inducting the child by easy and natural stages
from his own little realm into the world of the present and
the past, and to do it all without losing touch with his own
personal environment at any point to the end that the
educational process shall terminate in service and not in
shiftlessness.
It is more than likely that the introduction of agriculture
into the normal schools will in the end exert a profound
influence upon the teaching of general science. There is
no manner of doubt that the masses of people are best
benefited by the teaching of science in its applied form.
The normal schools, however, like the high schools are
dependent upon college graduates for teachers of science.
In the colleges the sciences are largely taught in the
abstract, each science from its own standpoint and with
a view not so much of its application to the everyday
affairs of man as to the further extention of knowledge in
its own realm. The teacher of course, especially when young
and inexperienced, instinctively repeats what was taught
146 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
to him, and thus is transferred to the secondary school
both the matter and the point of view of the college class-
room, whereas the subject should doubtless undergo much
transformation before being presented to the younger
pupils of the secondary school.
Without a doubt as the sciences come to be better de-
veloped by the more complete exploration of their limits
and as their mutual interrelations become better established,
the time will come when the application of these sciences
to human affairs will be more generally prominent in the
mind of the experimenter and the teacher alike. With
this will come an accumulation of a teachable body of this
class of knowledge, and under these conditions applied
science will come to occupy much of the time and attention
now devoted to the abstract — all of which will be vastly
to the profit of the people and, in the end, to the practical
extension of science.
Agriculture is evidently to be a pioneer in this business
of the adaptation of science to the common affairs of life
in the schools that are attended by the masses, and if this
be true, its incidental service may be even larger than its
direct In the meantime it is vastly significant that the
schools where teachers are made have at last commenced
seriously to study real life in one of its most concrete forms.
CHAPTER X
THE DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN AGRICULTURE —
WHAT IT IS AND WHAT IT MEANS ^
The energy of the soil is the life of the people.
Agriculture is a remarkable occupation for a number
of significant reasons : —
1. It engages the time and attention of nearly half our
people and it will always absorb the lives and energies of
a very large proportion of the race.
2. This is the only considerable calling in which the
home is situated in close connection and in intimate contact
with the heart of the business so that all members of the
family, men, women, and children alike, live in the atmos-
phere of the occupation and each finds some useful part to
perform as a contribution to the general effort; that is,
agriculture is not only an occupation but a mode of life as
well, and whatever touches and uplifts the one is bound to
react powerfully upon the other.
3. The conditions of country life are peculiar in their
contribution to health, their stimulus to personal initiative,
and their fostering influence upon that spirit of individual-
ism upon which rest our free institutions and our demo-
cratic government. The country is a good place in which
to be born.
1 This chapter is added to call attention to the significance and the possibilities of Ameri-
can agriculture. It follows clearly the line of thought of an address delivered by the writer
at the University of Maine upon the occasion of the dedication of Agricultural Hall,
February 24, 1909,
147
148 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
4. The business of farming, dealing as it does at every
step with the subtlest laws of nature, is capable of infinite
improvement and of indefinite development as soon and as
rapidly as the findings of science are applied to its affairs.
5. The occupation is, and from the nature of the case
must always remain permanent, because all men forever
must subscribe to the decree of nature and eat, for food is
the fuel that feeds the human engine, and in the last analy-
sis our future development as a race will be conditioned
upon our success in providing an assured and independent
food supply, abundant and suitable for a highly developed
and always advancing civilization.
6. There is, therefore, a public as well as a private
side to agricultural development ; and it is because of
this public and exceptional interest in this particular oc-
cupation that we have established and maintained at public
expense in every state of the Union institutions whose busi-
ness it is not only to instruct in the most advanced methods
of agricultural practice, but also to conduct research through
experiments by the most approved methods with a view of
adding to our knowledge of the scientific facts and princi-
ples upon which further development of agriculture and of
country life may be established.
It is exceedingly important that the aims and purposes
of this modern educational movement be clearly understood
and especially that they be not misunderstood.
First of all the purpose of agricultural education and re-
search is not to benefit the farmer as an individual or even
farmers as a favored class. The principal aim of other
forms of education in the past was to benefit their devotees
personally without much regard to the consequences, either
public or private. Not so with this form of education. Its
primary purpose is the development of agriculture from the
DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN AGRICULTURE 149
public standpoint as a productive occupation and inciden-
tally and necessarily of the people who live by farming.
In other words, its first objective is the distinctly pubhc
one of producing food, and all other considerations are
secondary and subsidiary.
Now the public is not interested in the question whether
John Smith succeeds or fails at farming : indeed, it does not
care whether he farms at all or what he does or does not do
so long as he does not become a public charge and so long
as he continues to contribute some share to the public
good.
But the public is interested that somebody should suc-
ceed in farming. More than that, it is interested that
enough people should succeed and that they should suc-
ceed well enough to operate the land to the best advantage
and provide an assured and sufficient food supply. Now
the lands cannot be operated to the best advantage by an
ignorant peasantry. Only men of good parts and educated
in the principles involved can handle these lands in such a
way as to secure a maximum of human and animal food at
the least expense and at the same time preserve their pro-
ducing power against future needs.
The aims and purposes of agricultural education and
/ research are, therefore, primarily the promotion of public
I safety in the matter of a racial food supply, to which matter
the education and information of individuals is an essential
but subsidiary incident ; which incident, however, is certain
.to result in producing a country population of a superior
type, all of which also reacts powerfully upon the public
good in matters both social and political.
In the last analysis and reduced to the lowest terms,
the fundamental purpose of agricultural education and re-
search is the development of agriculture as a productive
I50 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
occupation and of the agricultural people as a numerous
and important part of the social and political fabric.
Development is, therefore, the central thought in educa-
tional activity along agricultural Hues to-day and the devel-
opment of American agriculture to its highest attainable
estate both as a business and as a mode of life is the high
purpose for which the agricultural colleges and experiment
stations were founded and are supported by a far-seeing and
liberal-minded public. It is profitable and in every way
highly important that we all pause a moment from time to
time to gain the clearest and most comprehensive understand-
ing possible of all that is involved in so important a matter.
Accordingly, that we may all alike be intelligent and work
together to a common end, I invite your attention somewhat
carefully to the details of this development which may be
briefly outUned under six fairly definite propositions as.
follows : —
I. An Agriculture Profitable. The first step in the de-
velopment of any business is to " make it pay." Whatever
we may say about the glories of country life, and it is much ;
whatever the songs we sing of the free air, the twittering
birds and the blessed sunshine, and they are many ; after
all and before all, farming is a business, and the first and
the fundamental step in its development is to put it on a
paying basis. Our colleges and our experiment stations
have done well, therefore, to devote their first, and up to
this time their principal efforts to the labor of increasing
the profits of farming. In the past, farming was not a
capitalized industry and such a thing as failure was almost
impossible. From now on, however, farming is to be a
capitalized occupation and failure will be relatively easy ;
for the new discoveries of science, while they tend to estab-
lish the business on a sounder basis, do not make it easier
DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN AGRICULTURE 151
in the sense of better adapting it to the novice or to men
of low capacity. Agriculture is rapidly becoming more
difficult, calling not for less but for more, of brains, of
knowledge, and of executive ability, and as such it is rap-
idly challenging the attention of the brightest men, who
will be attracted into the calling about in proportion as
they can feel the possibility of reasonable profits.
No business can hold the respect and the service of men
of ability unless it affords them a reasonable reward for
what they put into it, and certainly no occupation can com-
mend itself to ambitious young men until it offers promise
of a good and reliable income.
In this connection it is most significant to note the in-
creased respect for agriculture and the new interest in
farming and in country life that commenced to spring up
among all classes almost immediately after the work of the
cbllege and experiment station began to show how to put
this business on a scientific and paying basis, and it is
significant, too, that we now hear less and see less of the
drift from the farm to the town, and that men of sound
business sense and wide experience are beginning to look
to the land and to agriculture not only as a safe business
but in every way as a desirable occupation. This is the
main influence that will regulate the flow from the country to
the town and hold in check that insane rush of young men
cityward that we have all deplored for these many years.
2. An Agriculture Productive. It is not enough that,
agriculture should be profitable. In its development it
must also become in the very near future enormously pro-
ductive. How pressing this point will shortly become few
people are able to realize, so abundantly have the virgin
soils of this country produced in the past, so boundless
have been their extent, and so small has our population
152 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
been almost up to the present day. A little careful con-
sideration, however, will speedily show that conditions in
this respect are to undergo a fundamental change in the
very near future indeed.
Under good conditions, the human animal can double
his numbers every twenty-five years. By the aid of im-
migration and despite the ravages of four wars, we have
maintained this rate of increase in this country since the
Revolution, and the population of the United States doubled
four times in the last hundred years. If we maintain this
rate of increase for another century — and something is
wrong if we do not — if we maintain this rate of increase,
we should have in this country a hundred years from now
no less than twelve hundred millions of people, a hundred
millions of whom should live in Illinois. Under these con-
ditions not less than thirty millions should live in the state
of Maine, — that is, the population of the entire United
States at the time of the Civil War would then be crowded
into a single one of our smaller states, and that within the
present century.
For various reasons this ratio of increase cannot much
longer be maintained, yet it is the natural rate, and it tends
to show us what would come about under normal conditions
within a century, — and what is a century in the Hfe history
of a people ?
Believe me, race suicide if it comes will be due not to a
failure of the birth rate : it will be from our sheer neglect
to maintain conditions that will insure food for the people.
This is the form of race suicide against which we need most
to protect ourselves, and it is none too soon to begin. The
world has not yet learned how to feed such a population as
is just ahead and before the present century is ended the
largest single public issue will be that of bread.
DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN AGRICULTURE 153
Within the lifetime of children born to-day, scarcity of
labor will be a matter of history, and abundance of cheap
food will be a tale that is told by the grand'ther in his chim-
ney corner dozing in his dotage. We are educating in our
schools to-day a generation of children to live a life that we
ourselves have never seen and that history does not record,
and we do well if we soberly calculate what their conditions
of life are likely to be and mend our methods accordingly.
We were three hundred years in getting a population of
five millions of people, so slowly do numbers pile up when
the base is small, whatever the ratio, but we have increased
ninety millions in the last hundred years. With such a base
and with modern conditions of life, this country can and will
produce men at a rate the world has never seen. We can
now produce in this country as much increased population
in the next twenty-five years as we produced in the whole
four hundred years since its discovery by white men, and we
can produce twice as many more in the next twenty-five.
In fifty years from now we shall have the population of
China in this country, unless something goes wrong, and it
is the business of agriculture to learn how to feed them,
and feed them well. When it has learned this, it will have
learned many a lesson the colleges do not now know how
to teach.
We have thought but little on these things because all
of our experience has been with an insufficient population
and we have even courted immigration as a source of labor.
Had you thought of it.-* with our present population matured
we can in ten years duplicate every emigrant dead or alive
that ever touched this country. We have never yet been
conscious of our population as far as adults are concerned,
because we have had room and food and labor in superabun-
dance. But we have never had to deal with such numbers
154 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
as are just ahead, the whisperings of whose coming may be
found in the housing and the teaching of our now enormous
child population. . When Chicago calls for eight million
dollars* worth of additional public school buildings in the
next two years, you hear from a tide of young humanity
whose numbers and reproducing powers will make new
problems for our race and for its agriculture to solve. Not
the least of these will relate to the power of the land to
produce food for man and the animals he has domesticated.
Aye ! for the animals — there is another rub. We revel
now in the luxury of animal life. Every family, on the aver-
age, has a horse, four head of cattle, four sheep, and four
pigs, with some few millions to spare. They literally work
and eat and root for us, and we consume their bodies and
their body products with a prodigality that no dense popu-
lation has ever yet found possible. Now animal service is
an expensive luxury when food becomes costly. Animal
food is approximately ten times as expensive as vegetable ;
that is to say, it takes ten pounds of grain to make a pound
of flesh, which is no more valuable for supporting life than
is any one of the ten pounds of grain that went to make it.
Our descendants will face the day when they must sur-
render some of this animal life as surely as they face the
day of their birth, and when we consider the fact that eco-
nomic nitrogen production involves leguminous plants that
are fit only for animal food, we will begin to see how compli-
cated is the problem of developing an agriculture sufficiently
productive to meet coming requirements without distress.
3. An Agriculture Perma7ient, The conditions that
have just been discussed will not be temporary and tran-
sient : they will be enduring, yes, permanent, and they
must be met by a permanent agriculture — a thing the
world has never yet succeeded in establishing. No race
DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN AGRICULTURE 155
has ever yet learned to feed itself except at the expense of
the fertility of their own or of some other country. Other
races have had to meet this problem and have gone down
under it.
Where is Carthage to-day } Where is Egypt, whose
civilization once flourished upon fertility brought down from
the highlands of a great interior ? What of Palestine, that
once flowed with milk and honey and blossomed as the rose,
but now supports only a miserable and straggling popula-
tion of wandering Arabs ? What of Babylon, amid whose
** heaps " the jackal snarls where once kings held revelry
and where civilization was born in the richest river valley
in all the earth } What of India, where struggling millions
maintain their racial existence at the cost of periodic and
decimating famine relieved from other regions that have
not yet met the " Great Issue " ? What of China ? With
a population of four hundred to the square mile, it must
presently either move, adopt new methods, or starve. It
is pointed out as a people who have solved in some un-
canny way the problem of a permanent agriculture and a
permanent food supply, yet good authority says that on
the highlands are regions once peopled and now aban-
doned, where for stretches of ten miles no man lives.
What of England } She is a new country, yet she long
ago faced failing fertility and built fleets of ships to carry
guano from the South Sea Islands, exhausting within the
recollection of men now living those natural beds which
the seabirds had been ages in producing. Not only that,
she has brought mummies from Egypt to fertilize English
soil that the Englishman might have his beef, though
already bread riots wage from time to time in London. So
narrow is the margin on which English agriculture is main-
tained that good judges say that the law of primogeni-
156 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
ture is the only condition that makes beef production still
possible in England.
Our Federal Government announces the newly discov-
ered theory that lands do not wear out, but the fact remains
that large sections of Old Virginia are so worn as to be
abandoned, and families that once entertained presidents and
foreign diplomats, now that the wheat yield has dropped to
ten or twenty per cent of its former magnitude, eke out the
income by keeping summer boarders.
Every intelligent man knows that the old cotton and to-
bacco lands of the South are badly worn and have lost for-
ever their power of spontaneous production. That great
grain-growing region in southern Illinois, known locally as
" Egypt," covers an area large enough to make ten such
states as Rhode Island, but much of it was sufficiently ex-
hausted, so far as profitable agriculture is concerned, by
two generations of grain farming, that some of the land be-
came in local parlance " too poor to raise a disturbance."
It is fortunately being rapidly restored by methods devised
by the Experiment Station, but the saddest fact is that the
effects of soil impoverishment had in some cases gone so
far as to affect the people, and they were unable to raise
even the small initial cost of restoration, in which case, of
course, the problem must go over to men of capital who
had sojourned on more fortunate lands.
Not only does all this have a bearing upon the problem
of a permanent agriculture, but added to this is the fact that
our "boundless prairies" with their "inexhaustible fertility"
are found upon examination to be surprisingly short in
phosphorus.
If we lack nitrogen, we know now how to get it from the
inexhaustible supplies of the air by the use of leguminous
crops. If we lack potassium, the natural deposits are ap-
DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN AGRICULTURE 157
parently unlimited, but when we lack phosphorus we are in
need of a commodity which exists in usable form in but
exceedingly limited areas on the earth and yet which is
absolutely essential to the production of food.
Considering all this — considering, too, the fact that at
the present rate of consumption all the American deposits
of high-grade phosphate rock will be exhausted before the
end of the present century, and considering our own over-
whelmingly increased need for food in the very near future,
I am constrained to say that in the interest of self-protection
and the founding of a permanent system of American agri-
culture, the annual exportation of a million tons of phos-
phate rock to Germany ought to be stopped^ by constitutional
amendment if necessary.
No man can study for a moment the entirely new con-
ditions and problems that will confront our people in the
immediate future without realizing that the establishment
of agricultural colleges and experiment stations was the
largest act of foresighted wisdom in recorded history, nor
can he fail to realize that their adequate maintenance and
fostering support is not only the first duty but one of the
highest public privileges of the commonwealth of our day
and time.
There is to be, in the near future, a struggle for land
and the food it will produce, such as the world has never
yet beheld. He who knows where and how to look can
see it coming. The African activity among western Eu-
ropean nations is a part of it. It is always cheaper to
move than to stay when over-population and failing fertility
threaten a shortage of food — provided there is any place
to move into ; that is, provided we can dispossess the
other party and his land is worth the contest.
However that may be as an abstract proposition, for us
158 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
there is no more moving. For us there are no more " new
worlds." For us there is little more ** Out West." Our
fortune and our future, whatever they may be, are staked
down on the American continent. Literally ''here we
rest," and whether we like it or not, we must devise and
establish a permanent agriculture here or go down in the
attempt.^
Our descendants will certainly be as cultured as we;
they ought to be more so. Their needs surely will not be
fewer or of a more modest character. Their numbers will
be, vastly greater, and unless we^ not they^ can succeed in
founding a permanent agriculture, the race will degenerate
and end where it commenced, in poverty and barbarism.
I have already pointed out that restorative and perma-
nent systems must be established before the people are in
distress for the necessities of life. It is we who must dis-
cover and establish this permanent system. There is no
time to be lost, for we do not yet know how to do it and
a stupendous population is just upon us. It is none too soon
to attack with all the scientific vigor of all the Experiment
Stations of all the states this problem which will shortly bear
harder upon us than upon any contemporaneous race in
the world except the Hindus and the Chinese, who have
almost certainly delayed too long and lost their chance.
European nations will be occupied for generations yet in
exploiting Africa and perhaps South America, and we
before any other modern nation must face the issue of a
permanent agriculture in its own country.
We have no right to dodge this issue now while we are
few and young and wealthy. It is our own descendants
whose lives and happiness we literally hold in the hollow
* Since the above was written a fleet of steamers is announced as put in service to carry
Argentine beef to New York.
DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN AGRICULTURE 159
of our hands, and he who shirks that responsibility is guilty
of a crime against his race beside which ordinary treason
is trivial ; and when we are called, as we ar^, to the task of
establishing if we can a permanent agriculture, it is a call
of the race for a chance to live and work out its destiny.
So much for what may be called the business side of
farming — an agriculture that is reasonably profitable,
highly productive, and certainly permanent. What now
on the human side.? What is the development of the
farmer as a man to match the development of his busi-
ness as an occupation } And so I come to the next count
in our series of development.
4. TAe Country Comfortable. Agriculture is not only a
business, it is a mode of life as well, and if it is to be
successful in the latter particular it must in the end afford
its devotees the same comforts of life as are obtainable in
other occupations. This has not hitherto been possible, but
its early realization is becoming every day more promising,
and if the colleges and stations perform their whole duty
in this direction, and if they are supported by the people,
as they ought to be supported, then one of the earliest and
most distinctive developments of our agriculture will be
in " creature comforts " on the farm.
This development will largely take the special form of
modern conveniences, including labor-saving equipments in
the farmhouse. The farmer has provided himself with all
sorts of machinery and ingenious mechanical devices, not
only to cheapen production, but to make labor easier for
himself, his hired help, and even his animals. In the
meantime his wife gets on with few improvements and
with no real conveniences, living and scraping along as
best she can against the day when the family shall build
its home in town and "have the conveniences." By
i6o EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
modern conveniences are generally meant bath room and
toilet facilities, a lighting system, and running water inside
the house. That is about all, but it would take a book to
recite what has been sacrificed in going to town to get
these things.
For this the farmer has abandoned his business. He has
broken up his children's home. He has exposed his little
ones to the unbridled dangers of the small town. He has
set before them the example of idleness. He has turned his
back upon the farm that has made his wealth and stripped
the land of its fertility to build in the town the home to
which the farm was entitled. He has stripped the country
of its earnings to build up the city and add to its numbers an
essentially useless and undesirable population. So common
has this thing become as to excite public alarm, and no one
topic rings a more significant note through the findings of
the Country Life Commission than the abandonment of
the farm at the stage of house building.
The uselessness of all this under QWQ.n present conditions
was, I think, first called to public attention in an address
by Mrs. Davenport at the Illinois Farmers' Institute at
Peoria in February of last year. She had had an exten-
sive experience on the farm and had lived a good number
of years in town. With a natural mechanical instinct and
some experience in building, she saw how thoroughly the
conveniences and the labor of the house had been over-
looked, relatively speaking, by both inventor and designer,
except where conditions of life, as in the city, compelled some
decent attention to sanitary measures, evolving the bath
room, the toilet, and the slop sink. She saw how completely
the labor of the house had been left to servants in the
homes of the wealthy or endured by the wife unable to
afford a servant, neither of which conditions was favorable
DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN AGRICULTURE i6i
to the development of conveniences for performing the
household labor. This comparative poverty in house equip-
ment is also partly due to lack of attention on the part
of inventors and activity of manufactures, all of which is
traceable to another initial abomination — that ancient
and dishonorable custom by which the husband carries
the pocket-book and so often opens it only upon humili-
ating supplication for a share of what the wife on the
farm has fairly earned.
Mrs. Davenport knew that conditions had commenced
to mend themselves in certain particulars and were capable
of still further improvement. Accordingly, she set out to
learn how far and to what extent the farmhouse can now be
equipped, not only with the so-called modern conveniences,
but with still further devices for saving labor. The results
of her study as given in the address already referred to
may be briefly summarized as follows : —
The enterprise of the best farmers in equipping the farm
with machinery has already reached the stage of the small
gasolene engine for running the machinery of the barns,
and especially for pumping water, generally into small or
elevated tanks subject to freezing, an evolution from the
old and unreliable windmill.
Beginning at this point with the gasolene engine, which
stands as a kind of connecting link between the machinery
of the farm and that of the house, it appears that this little
engine, first of all, can pump water, both hard and soft,
into the Kewanee or other automatic system and secure a
pressure of 70 pounds per square inch in air-tight tanks
standing in the basement or buried in the ground beyond
the reach of frost. This is as good as the best city pressure,
and is abundant to throw water over any of the buildings,
carry it into both house and barn and near-by fields, and
i62 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
put both hard and soft water, hot and cold, on all the floors
of the house. It will also run a water motor — cost, six
dollars — sufficiently powerful to operate the washing ma-
chine and do the principal part of the hardest job about any
home — all for six dollars under pressure. This same engine
can run a gasolene heated mangle with a capacity of a
napkin a minute or a tablecloth every six minutes. It can
also operate a storage battery electric light plant. Not only
that, it can furnish the power for the churn and other small
machinery ; and last of all, it can operate a vacuum cleaner
system whose installation in the private house is now en-
tirely feasible.
Besides this, the soil absorption system will care for the
waste from bath room, laundry, and slop sink as completely
and as satisfactorily as the best city sewer. If economy is
imperative, acetylene or gasolene may be substituted for
the electric lights, or if electricity is used, the small ma-
chinery may be operated by electric motors.
This is actually being done on the farm now in Illinois,
and I doubt not elsewhere. A few months ago our Engi-
neering Experiment Station issued a bulletin on electric Hght-
ing in private houses. You will be interested to know that
we have had more calls for this material, which was re-
printed as a circular by the Agricultural Experiment Sta-
tion, than for anything ever before issued, showing most
significantly the direction of the drift of the public mind.
Here we have water pressure, bath and toilet room, a
lighting plant, power laundry machinery, vacuum cleaner,
with all that any city home can secure in the way of
modern conveniences and more than can be had there,
except with difficulty, for city residences commonly do not
possess a source of power, — all this, as well as in the city
and better.
DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN AGRICULTURE 163
I was amazed, optimist though I am, at the results of
this investigation into the possibilities of the independent
plant, and at what can be done, not in the future, but now,
in the equipment of the farm home with the conveniences
of human life.
But, you will say, think of the expense ! Yes, it is costly ;
all good things are costly. Farm machinery is costly, es-
pecially a reaper that is seldom operated ten days out of the
year and lasts on the average but three years. It is all
costly, but remember that we are talking about a class of
people who ride always in covered carriages, drive good
horses, and are able to go to town to live.
Now an entire bath room outfit can be bought and in-
stalled for the price of a single covered buggy and will out-
last the buggy half a dozen times over. The vacuum
cleaner, that acme of comfort and luxury, will cost the
price of a good horse or a medium team. Yes, it is costly.
The whole outfit will cost a thousand dollars, perhaps
twelve or fifteen hundred with the engine, depending upon
the size and grade of the outfit.
Yes, it will cost just about what a city building lot will
cost in any town worth living in and not on a principal street
either. In other words, the moment the farmer moves to
town to secure " modem conveniences," he *' planks down"
at the outset for a building site as much money as it would
take to provide all these things and more on the farm he
has left behind. Then, in addition, he will need to draw
generous quarterly checks for water rates, gas bills, electric
lights, and invest from two to three thousand additional for
income to meet the extra cost of taxation.
Many of the choicest physical blessings are inherent in
country life, such as good air, plenty of room, open sun-
shine, and comparative freedom from dangerously infectious
i64 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
diseases. Others are being rapidly added, such as the
telephone, which is both better and cheaper than in the
city; the rural delivery of mail by which the farms are
better served than are most towns, and the consolidated
secondary school by which the farmer's children may re-
ceive literally from the father's roof the best education in
the world.
When we have learned to build comfortable homes for
ourselves and our children, then will the country be of all
places for living the most delightful and the most desirable
from the greatest variety of standpoints.
5. The Country Beautiful. Time and space are all too
short for saying all that ought to be said about the human
side of agricultural development, but I shall steal a word
and a moment to enter a plea for the country beautiful ;
something to please the eye and uplift the soul ; something
beyond the body ; something that shall foreshadow here
what heaven may be hereafter.
First of all, I plead for the early evolution of a suitable
country architecture : for house and barn exteriors that
shall blend with the natural features of their surroundings.
We build a barn on the ugliest lines that human ingenuity
can devise, often " go the limits " by painting it red, and
then wonder why it is so often struck by lightning.
Let the country house be built on good lines within and
without. Let it be generously and hospitably big, with
broad low roof and wide projection. Let it be surrounded
by porches wide and deep ; and inside, let the rooms be
generous and the stairways broad. Let the colors every-
where be strong but soft, and outside let it blend into its
setting of lawn and trees as if this home had been builded in
a spot which Nature had made expressly for the place
where a family might live and where children might be
DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN AGRICULTURE 165
born and grow up and go out into the world to engage in
and succeed in many things, but never to forget the child-
hood home of blessed memory.
This is a sentimental side of our business, I know, but
after all, sentiment is the strongest thing in the world, and
you and I may not know the racial asset of a dozen gen-
erations born and reared in such homes as may now be
estabhshed on the farm.
It is traditional to assume a plain, hard life, destitute of
comforts, for the family on the farm. In this we err.
Nothing is farther from the essential. We cannot build
and maintain a permanent agriculture on that proposition.
In such an assumption we confuse the necessary hard-
ships of the pioneer with the possibilities of the open
country.
Farming and pioneering started off together, and the life
of the pioneer farmer was hard, not because he was a farmer,
but because he was a pioneer. Nature was unsubdued.
Men and women were poor, and life was hard at the best
when necessities were counted luxuries. But those days
are over on real agricultural lands, and farming is coming
into its own. There are non-agricultural lands where
country life will continue hard, but this is not American
agriculture. These are not farmers.^
Look for American agriculture on agricultural lands and
you will find it in any state of the Union. Here pioneering
and farming have parted company forever. Farming will
go its way on its own plan, and if you look for it here, you
* No greater mistake can be made than by assuming that every inhabitant of the country
is a farmer. The man who lives in the hills and obtains a precarious living by a combination
of hunting, fishing, and loafing is no more a farmer than is the peanut peddler on the street
corner a merchant. Men are first of all countrymen and citizens from choice of habitation ;
after that comes the question of occupation. This is why the millions living wretchedly in the
congested city can never be moved upon the land.
1 66 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
will find it a thousand years from now. I wonder what it
will be like ? The people then will be our descendants —
yours and mine. I wonder what they will think of us, and
how they will record history l^etween now and then. I
should Uke to be well thought of by them, for they ought
to be a very superior people, and they will be if we are all
wise, for what they are then will depend not a little upon
what we do now.
Let us at once set about building country homes that
shall last for generations. Let us give them plenty of
room, with broad lawns and much grass. Let there be
some flowers and shrubbery to add a touch of brightness,
but above all, let there be trees ^ trees ^ long-lived trees ^ that
will tell the children of the future that their grandfathers,
who are we, took thought for them. Let the whole picture
have its setting in a natural frame of forests and of hills,
of fields where cattle be, of meadows and lakes and run-
ning water. So shall we build, and in this way also leave
our best thoughts behind. So will the farm at last come
into its own.
6. The Country Educated. I now come to the last,
which is also the greatest of the separate features of agri-
cultural development. I refer to the education and the
culture of the men and women who shall live upon the land
and till our soil — it is ours and not theirs — who shall think
our thoughts as we cannot think them amid the stress and
strain and struggle of the city ; who shall keep the country
as the great breeding ground where children may grow up
into men and women without that prematurity and that
dangerous sophistication that mark so many of the city
born and bred.
This matter involves the whole philosophy of agricul-
tural education, both of collegiate and secondary grade ; in-
DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN AGRICULTURE 167
deed, it covers a large part of our educational effort, for it
involves the education of nearly half our population.
Agricultural education is but a feature, albeit a large
and important one, but none the less it is a feature of our
system of universal education, and the spirit and purpose
of our system of universal education, as I understand it, is
this : so to educate all men as to make them first of all self-
supporting and useful contributors to some feature — no
matter what — of the public good; and second, to encourage
and develop in their several personalities the best that is
in them as human beings and members of a rapidly advanc-
ing society whose capabilities, if not unlimited, are as yet
unknown.
Universal education is an attempt to make the most not
only of the exceptional man, but of all normal men, the
masses of whom really represent the race and limit its
achievements and advance. As nearly half the people live
by farming, the problem of agricultural education shoulders
approximately one half the problem of universal education,
at least so far as numbers go ; moreover, it is the half that
will have more than its share to do in fixing the future of
all classes. How shall agricultural education be conducted
so as to meet these broad requirements felt alike by farmers
and all other members of our social body .<*
First of all, agricultural education must be so conducted
as to make the farmers efficient in a business way. It has
taken more than a generation to begin to find all that is in-
volved in this single feature of education for the business
of farming, and few men yet realize that, of all forms of
education, that in technical agriculture is the most costly
if it is made good enough to be really worth while. The
young man does not want to study about cattle : he
needs to study cattle themselves ; a distinction not yet
i68 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
observed, I am sorry to say, in some of our institutions of
learning.
Young men who are fitting themselves for farming want
not a mass of information about present day agricultural
practice ; that will pass, and it ought to pass. It is com-
paratively easy to teach, but it will be out of date and gone
before it can serve a man now in school as a definite guide
to procedure. What he wants from a business standpoint
is instrivtion in the principles involved in agriculture so
far as they are known and in methods of investigation after
the unknown, that he may keep himself intelligent as this
great business of agricultural development proceeds before
his eyes day by day.
Furthermore, they want this, not in the university only,
accessible merely to those who may go to college, but they
want it and must have it in every high school, that it may
be accessible from the home. They want it not in a few
congressional district schools separated from everything
else educational, but they want it wherever men from the
country seek an education, and they want it associated
with all the other subjects and where other men are edu-
cated. All this is extremely difficult for both teacher and
student, and it involves an expense for skilled men, for
equipment and for research, such as is not yet appreciated
by anybody, much less by public men.
Teachers and investigators who have skill in this line
are few and their services are extremely valuable, so valua-
ble that the state which fills its quota with the best must
stand ready to pay teaching salaries such as have never yet
been paid. They must also devote money to equipment and
facilities for research to an extent which makes all that has
yet been done look microscopic and miserable — all this
must be done if this development of agriculture is to pro-
DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN AGRICULTURE 169
ceed along all these lines as fast and as surely as it ought
to proceed.
So much for the technical side : for what a man must
know if he is to occupy the soil of the public domain to the
best advantage to himself and to the state. Because of what
I am about to say and lest I then be misunderstood, let me
remark before passing, that I am a stickler for technical
education both collegiate and secondary and for; e;,gricul-
tural research of the most strictly technical character
beyond anything that any man has ever yet dared to
propose.
But that is not all. There remains a human side to
agriculture. The farmer is not only a tiller of the soil ; he
is a man and a member of our permanent society ; moreover,
he is a voting member of the body politic. This is only
another way of saying that as a man he possesses inherent
privileges for himself and owes therefor substantial duties
to the community quite outside and beyond the limits of
his vocation and his education.
So I enter a protest against that philosophy of education
and that system of schools which would by design or by
necessity confine the education of a farmer or of any other
man, industrial or non-industrial, to the limits of his voca-
tional and business needs, and I protest against the estab-
lishment of separate agricultural schools in this country for
the same reasons that I protest against the exclusion of
the farmer from good society or from any other common
interest of American development.
Every man is, or ought to be, bigger than his business.
He does not and should not be so educated as to live for his
business. He is in business that he may live, and the large
question — the largest of all questions before any man — is,
what shall he do with himself.? what shall he do with the
170 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
result of his earnings ? what shall he do with his leisure ?
how shall he justify his existence ? He has a right to be
so educated as to answer these questions, which are final ;
to be in business for something other than to conduct busi-
ness or to while away the time.
A good part of the education of the farmer as of other
men is, or should be, non-vocational, and of such character
as shall best suit his individual tastes and surroundings.
It will be history and economics for one, philosophy for
another, language and the classics for a third, music, paint-
ing, or some other form of art for others — I care not what
it is, provided it is something that develops human facul-
ties outside vocational needs, and if only it serves to
broaden rather than to narrow, which is the inevitable
consequence of exclusive technical training.
I therefore enter a plea and a demand for the broadest
possible views regarding agricultural education. The
farmer as a man is not different from other men unless we
make him so by our education, and if we do the time will
come when other men of other classes will share with him
the consequences of a shortsighted and inadequate system
of education for industrial purposes,
A scheme for the education of farmers in separate
schools is being industriously advocated in these days by a
class of educators who seem to feel that a Httle education,
and that almost exclusively technical, is sufficient for farm-
ing purposes, and that the European peasant school is
a model. The advocates of this sort of school overlook
certain important features of agricultural education and of
the philosophy of education in general : they overlook the
fact that the prospective farmer should be educated as a
man as well as a farmer ; in other words, that the farmer's,
like every man's, education should include both the tech-
DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN AGRICULTURE 171
nical and the non-technical, both the vocational and the
non-vocational.
They overlook the fact that we cannot safely educate
separate professions in separate schools, for to do so is to
build up distinct classes, each educated for and prejudiced
in its own affairs and against the world.
They overlook the fact t'lat there is a great body of
knowledge that can form the background and the backbone
of the education of all men for all pursuits, and that this
is our chief reliance for holding our people together as one
people.
They overlook the highly educational influence of mere
association with other men as secured in universities which
fit for all the affairs of life.
They overlook the capacity of the American secondary
school still further to broaden its curriculum and widen its
educational influence. This thoroughly unique American
institution is abundantly able to reflect in its atmosphere
and its class rooms the same cosmopolitan influence
that constitutes the chief distinction of American uni-
versities.
They overlook the fact that our high schools are not
" city schools " wholly given over to the affairs of the city.
They are schools of the people in the best and highest
sense of the term, willing and able to reflect all the major
interests of the people of their respective communities,
and to denominate as a ** city school " every school in a
village of 2000, and therefore, as a school where agricul-
ture presumably should not be taught is, to say the least,
un-American.
They overlook the fact that to establish separate agri-
cultural schools of an inferior grade for country people
would fail to serve with the education best suited to their
172 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
need that large element of the country-born that is not
adapted to farm life.
They overlook the fact that the European system of
education was evolved after distinct social classes had been
estabHshed by generations of political and economic influ-
ences whose repetition in America it was the special pur-
pose of our Puritan forefathers to prevent.
They overlook the fact that in America the country peo-
ple have not yet been peasantized, but that so far we are a
homogeneous people except for immigration, which is prin-
cipally a city and not a country problem.
They overlook the fact that to educate farmers by them-
selves in separate schools almost purely technical and dis-
tinctly inferior both in breadth and intensity to the high
schools in which other classes are educated — that to do
this thing is to peasantize the farmers more rapidly and
more completely than they were ever peasantized in Europe
or than would be possible by any other method that could
be devised by the ingenuity of man.
They overlook the fact that to peasantize the schools
wherein farmers may be educated is to peasantize the
farmers themselves, the first effect of which is to put
them out of sympathy with other classes, and the other
effect will be to Hmit their very ability as occupants and
managers of the land and their economic efficiency as
farmers, after which will be due and payable to men of all
interests and all classes the social and political conse-
quences of this proposed educational sin.
They overlook the fact that this sort of educational phi-
losophy, extended to its conclusion, would demand that all
men be educated exclusively to vocational ends, each class
in its separate schools, out of touch and out of sympathy
with the rights and ideals and ambitions of other classes,
DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN AGRICULTURE 173
the only final consequence of which is social chaos and
political anarchy, because if our people are once broken up
into classes according to occupation, they can never again
be amalgamated.
They overlook what has been achieved in universities,
wherein men of all conceivable purposes are educated both
separately and together in a common atmosphere of demo-
cratic wholesomeness.
I would have Americans so educated that in a company
you cannot tell by the dress, the language, or the manner
of a man what his occupation is.
Agricultural Development a Public Investment
This development of American agriculture until it shall
be profitable, productive, and permanent, and until the
country shall be both comfortable and beautiful, and the
people educated — all this will cost money, stupendous
amounts of it, as we are accustomed to measure values in
private life, for it means a reorganization and very largely
a redirection of the lives, the purposes, and the achieve-
ments of at least a third of our great people.
If it were solely a matter of their own concern, we might
leave them to provide for this development or let matters
rest as they are. But in the last analysis the develop-
ment of agriculture is 2^ public question. The farmers are
interested in it, of course, and for selfish reasons, but even
if they were not interested, we should still insist for public
reasons that our agriculture should be developed to the ut-
most. The farmers will reap the first advantages of such
development, to be sure, but they can realize no advan-
tage that is not shared with all interests of all people
everywhere.
174 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
The farmers have developed the handicraft of farming,
or the art of agriculture, if you please, about as far as ex-
perience alone can take it. What is needed now is the
study and promulgation of the scientific principles involved
in agricultural practice, and in this field experience may
correct and help to shape results, but it cannot originate.
This is the great work of the Experiment Station, as the
education in these principles is the business of the college.
These institutions then stand in the very forefront of
further agricultural progress, and the rate of this progress
will depend upon the amounts of money which the public is
willing to put into the effort, and the mutual incHnation and
ability of the colleges and the farmers to go along together.
Illinois, which has led the states in the amounts of public
money devoted to the development of her agriculture, is
devoting no less than ^317,000 to this purpose during the
present biennium. This seems to be a large public out-
lay, but all things are relative. The way this compares
with other public outlays, both productive and non-produc-
tive, is graphically shown in the following diagram.
By this we see that 23 per cent of the public outlay of
Illinois is for the care of the insane, and that the state is
putting into the development of its agriculture less than
half as much as into the education and care of its defective
children. By this we see that her state university as a
whole is not yet on a level with her penal institutions ; that
is, that her penitentiaries are now absorbing a larger share
of the public resources than are devoted to higher educa-
tion and research in the university, and nearly as much as
in the university and five normal schools combined.^
* It is significant in this connection that Michigan has spent almost equal amounts of
money since its admission to the Union on its great university at Ann Arbor and its
penitentiary at Jackson.
DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN AGRICULTURE 175
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Non-Productive
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176 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
By this we see that Illinois could increase her endowment
for agriculture more than fifteen times and still devote less
to the development of this great industry than it costs to
care for her insane. By this we see, too, that 48 per cent
of all her public outlay is for non-producing purposes.
Now the care of our dependents is a moral charge upon
us and I would not shirk it, but it produces nothing and
contributes nothing to development, and I propose a new
plan — the dollar for dollar principle. I mean by this,
that every time we expend a dollar in charity or for non-pro-
ductive purposes^ we put down another dollar to develop the
resources of the state}
I wish I could in some vivid way impress upon the
reader the enormous discrepancy in this respect at present
and make him understand and appreciate how exclusively,
almost, our public outlays are going into non-productive
channels. If, for example, we denote the amount expended
in Illinois for the College of Agriculture and for the work
of the Experiment Station by the distance from Boston to
Buffalo, then the amounts devoted to the care of the defec-
tive children on the same scale would reach from Boston to
Salt Lake City; those for our prisoners would pass the
western coast line and reach out into the Pacific and beyond
the Hawaiian Islands, while the expense of the insane on
the same scale would reach from Boston across our conti-
nent, across the Pacific, and into the heart of Mongolia in
Central Asia ; or if we should go to the east, it would land
in almost the same spot, reaching, as it would, a little over
halfway round the world.
If you combine all the expenditures for all non-produc-
tive dependents, it would reach around the world and over-
1 See Address : The Development of the Natural Resources of the State, delivered at
State Farmers' Institute, Peoria, February 12, 1908.
DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN AGRICULTURE 177
lap a thousand miles besides, against which our little dis-
tance from Boston to Buffalo as representing agriculture
is not even a respectable Sabbath day's journey.
With comparisons such as these it is folly to say that a
state cannot afford the most liberal support not only of
college and station work for the development of its agri-
culture but for the development of all essential activities as
well. Charity is commendable and in every way worthy,
but after all it is non-productive, and money so expended
is gone forever. Statesmanship dictates not only charity,
but development.
Again, measured by the standard of production, these
amounts are not large. The farmers of Illinois produce
every day of the year, winter and summer, in sunshine or in
rain, a million and a half of dollars of new wealth. These
amounts represent less than a quarter of a day's work for
each two years — a modest proportion, surely, 'to devote to
this business of agricultural instruction and investigation,
looking to the further development of our greatest produc-
ing industry. Yes, all things are relative, and it is propor-
tions and needs rather than magnitudes that we must study.
Agricultural improvement is enormously productive, and
money expended in its development is money not ex-
pended but money invested, for the returns are both enor-
mous and perpetual. Every bushel per acre added to the
yield of Illinois cornfields adds three million dollars to the
income of the state. Every disease and every insect and
fungous enemy which we learn to control saves enormous
values to the country.^
Every contribution to our knowledge of soil manage-
ment is of direct public benefit as surely as are improved
1 Bitter rot alone took a million dollars' worth of apples out of four counties of Illinois
without warning iu 1902.
178 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
methods of mining, and every step towards a permanent
agriculture is a step along the road that must be traveled
before we can talk about an assured future.
Measured by still another standard these outlays for the
development of the agriculture of a state are not large.
In this connection I quote as follows from the Peoria
address already mentioned : — -
" In order to emphasize the comparative uselessness of
some of our small economies I am desirous of asking your
attention to some of the items of the 628 million dollar
appropriation for Federal purposes the current year. It
may be of interest to remark in passing that these appro-
priation bills alone fill a large quarto volume of 574 pages,
giving some idea of the magnitude of large things. I may
add that the naval appropriation bill covers 54 pages of
this volume, and the war department appropriations, in-
cluding river and harbor improvement, cover 124 pages.
Certain Federal Appropriations for 1908 ^ and Illinois'
Share 2 of the Expense
Illinois'
Appropriation share '^
Total for the year $628,625,763 44+millions
War department 176,116,606 12+miIlions
Navy department 100,511,051 7+milIions
Rivers and harbors 43,000,000 3+millions
Transportation of army 17,159,091 i| millions
Indian affairs . 10,464,384 $750,000
Dam on the Rio Grande 1,000,000 70,000
Target practice, army ...... 1,300,000 100,000
Ammunition, army 648,000 46,000
Agricultural department 9,447,290 670,000
* An increase of 70 per cent in ten years.
2 On the basis of the fact that Illinois represents one fourteenth of the buying power as
she does of its population.
DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN AGRICULTURE 179
Illinois'
Appropriation share
Valuable seeds $241,633 $i7Poo
Support Sioux Indians 622,000 45,000
Education Sioux Indians 200,000 15,000
Indian schools ........ 4,173,680 300,000
U.S. penitentiaries 520,720 37,000
Insane hospital 305,800 22,000
Public schools, District Columbia . . 2,424,609 173,000
National parks 628,165 45,000
229 post-office buildings . .s . . . 11,703,359 836,000
Smithsonian institution 1,593,116 113,000
" In all this I must not be misunderstood. I am not
criticising the character or the magnitude of these appro-
priations. On the contrary, I am accepting them as em-
bodying the broadest wisdom, and the ripest judgment of
our most experienced men, — men who have learned by
experience what it takes to build and maintain a nation.
In my opinion we do well to imitate their example in state
affairs, as we should certainly do were it not for our un-
fortunate and grossly inadequate means of raising revenue.
" Here is food for reflection and comparison with state
affairs, particularly when we note the very large share that
we of Illinois inadvertently play in the whole matter, and
when we consider the fact that these amounts represent the
result of long-continued experience with the larger rela-
tions of life and the deliberate judgment of what is needed
to really conduct the affairs of a people.
•* A few instances will help us better to realize what
these large figures mean. For example, of the whole bud-
get our share (over 44 millions) is more than the total out-
lay of the state for all purposes for over four years, and
more than seven times what we raise by direct taxation for
state purposes.
i8o EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
"Of the war department appropriation, our share (12
millions) is more than the entire outlay of the state of
Illinois for the same length of time, and our share of the
war and navy together is twice as much.
"We are just informed ^ that the military estimates be-
fore the present Congress aggregate 427 millions, or more
than half the visible Federal revenues. Our share of this
alone would be over 30 millions. It is only in this way
that you realize what it really costs to maintain the big
stick, even in time of peace. And yet what are you going
to do about it ? Are we going to abolish the big stick and
let somebody run away with us some fine day .? Those
who ought to know most about it say ' no.' The estimate
for building and converting war vessels next year is 74
millions, our share of which would be over five milHons.
Thirty-eight millions of this is for four new battleships, —
at nine and one half millions apiece. Evidently something
must be done when we remember that every boat in Ad-
miral Evans's fleet going to the Pacific was built since the
Spanish war. Even the famous Oregon is out of date now
and near the junk heap.
" Everybody knows that we have no military force worth
mentioning in comparison with the great standing armies
of the world. Yet it costs something to maintain it. The
appropriation of the war department is about evenly divided
between * public works ' and * military establishment ' which
represents the army expenditures. This latter is something
over 80 millions for the current year, our share of which is
almost the same as our total state tax for the same time.
" Seventeen millions are needed this year for transporta-
tion of the army. Our share of this is nearly one and a
quarter millions, which is more than we put into the State
1 Chicago Tribune, February 7, 1908.
DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN AGRICULTURE i8l
University and all the research work of the state combined
for the same length of time.
" Our share of the cost of the target practice of this
army is ^100,000 a year, which is as much as the state was
willing to put into a chemical laboratory for the instruction
of our present 4000 students and others still to come.
" Indian affairs cost us three quarters of a million a year,
or nearly twice our support of the Normal schools. Now
I am for the Indians, from whom we have gotten a lot of
raw material and no little experience. But I am for Illinois
people too. Do you know that our share of the cost of
Indian schools is ;^300,ooo a year, or a good deal more
money than this state is putting into the development of
its agriculture }
" Do you know that we are not putting as much money
into the study of soils and crops combined as our share of
the cost of ammunition for the army in these piping times
of peace ? (;^46,ooo.)
" I am prepared to maintain before any tribunal that we
ought to put as much money into the study of Illinois soils
as our share of the support of the Sioux Indians (;^45,ooo).
Isn't that a fair proposition ?^ But if you do it you will do
almost what this Association asked and double the present
appropriation.
" Besides the support of the Sioux Indians our share of
their education is $15,000 a year, which is the exact amount
you are putting into the development of the dairy interests
of the state.
" We have all heard of these new and valuable seeds that
come in little packets about planting time bearing the local
1 The Fanners' Institute, before whom this address was read, had asked that the annual
appropriation for the study of Illinois soils be increased from $25,000 a year to $50,000. The
request was denied at that time, but the session just closed has made the amount $60,000.
1 82 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
congressman's frank. Do you know that our share of the
cost of these stock seeds is over 1^17,000 a year, which is
about what you are putting into the horticultural develop-
ment of the state ?
" Now the District of Columbia is Federal territory, and
there are children there to be educated. Our share of the
cost of these public schools is 1^173,000 a year, or more than
you appropriate to the agricultural college and experiment
station combined.
" The Federal appropriations to the agricultural depart-
ment of Washington are nearly nine and one half millions of
dollars.^ Your share of this is no less than the sum of
^670,000. Now this is more money than was ever appro-
priated per annum to the State University before the last
session of the General Assembly, and it is more than four
times what you appropriate for the agricultural college and
the experiment station both.
" Is there any reason why Illinois cannot afford to put
as much money into the development of the agriculture of
the state as her share of the cost of maintaining the Fed-
eral department of agriculture ? Can she afford not to do
it } Russia is the best modern example of a people that
was taxed for generations for central purposes without re-
gard to local development, and we find that they have
already reached the limit of taxing power and are going
backward.
" We in this country feel as yet no burden of taxation.
That is because the cost of our military is small, and be-
cause we have a great body of virile people engaged in
productive industry in a new country. But our population
has doubled four times in the last hundred years. If it
* At the present writing over i6 millions; and " Illinois' share" of the appropriations of
the last Congress is, on the basis of this calculation, some 135,000,000 dollars.
DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN AGRICULTURE 183
should continue at that rate another hundred years, we
shall have in this country more than a thousand millions
of people.^ How many of them will be insane, how many
penal, how many defective ? What will be their power to
earn money, pay taxes, and take care of themselves ?
There will be no scarcity of labor then. The problem will
be one of maintenance and world supremacy in food and
trade. What they can do then will depend much on what
we do now ; whether we establish and maintain policies
that shall put adequate amounts into development of otrr-^^^
productive resources in men and materials, or whether
while our country is new we allow ourselves to drift. ^-^
Think on these things and decide whether you will make
a policy of your own in this matter, whether you will de-
pend upon Federal authority to do it for you, or whether
you will go on without one. If I do not misjudge the
character and temper of Illinois people, I will predict you
will make a policy yourselves, and take a little more of
your own money, keep it at home, and develop the state, to
the end that its earning power shall be increased and the
burden of taxation grow less instead of greater as genera-
tions come and go.
" Yes, in every way money expended for agricultural de-
velopment is not an outlay, it is money invested in the safest
bank on earth — the soil of the commonwealth and the
people on whom we must depend for its management and
in whom the balance of power will always rest. Cannot
any state afford to devote as much to its agriculture as to
its prisoners ? Can it afford not to do it }
"They cannot afford not to do it, first, because agricul-
ture needs it, and second, because the development of our
* Theoretically about fourteen hundred millions.
l84 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY
producing industries and of the productive powers of the
people is the best protection against the crushing burden of
non-producing dependents as it is the best guaranty for the
future. I therefore close with the thought of dollar for dol-
lar ; that is, a dollar for development against every dollar
needed for charity. As a corollary to this proposition and
in behalf of agriculture, I propose as a temporary policy
that as much be devoted to the development of our agricul-
ture as to the support of our penitentiaries.
** I beg of you, my reader, in the strongest terms, to study
these questions in all their meaning, both now and in the
future. And when you see their full significance and real
bearing, be outspoken and insistent that our commonwealth
at once adopt policies that shall put agriculture on a safe
and progressive basis both economically and educationally.
" This is agricultural development and the meaning of it.'*
The words just quoted are still true, and the development
of American agriculture is to be a large factor in our
affairs, for it will absorb the energies and shape the lives of
at least one third of our population. The education of so
large a mass is a tremendous problem, not only because its
character so directly decides the weal or the woe of so
many people, but because the development of agriculture
and her people indirectly affects all the people of all classes
everywhere. It is fitting therefore that all classes interest
themselves in agricultural progress, for it is after all a public
and not an individual question.
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