the subject-matter of agriculture at Cornell University, or elsewhere, the individual work, such as preparation of papers and theses, will in the educational course be centered around problems of agricultural teaching.

Approved courses in the science of agriculture taken in agricultural colleges other than Cornell will be credited at Teachers College.

In the University of Missouri the Teachers' College utilizes courses in the College of Agriculture for teachers who desire to fit themselves for teaching agriculture in the public schools. These courses in the College of Agriculture are in the main distinct from the regular agriculture courses, and are designed primarily for teachers. Credits are given for the work only to students in the Teachers' College who are expecting to be teachers. In addition, for the university students who have taken sufficient of this elementary work for teachers and who have also the requisite preparation in the natural sciences, provision is made for electing and receiving credit for some of the technical courses in agriculture and horticulture which are given in the College of Agriculture. A good many teachers in the Teachers' College are enrolling regularly in these courses in agriculture and horticulture, and some of them later elect the more technical courses in the College of Agriculture, in order still further to increase their training in agricultural subjects for the distinct purpose of enabling them to teach agriculture in the public schools.

Speaking of their various experiences in aiding teachers to handle agricultural work, an officer of the University of Missouri writes as follows:

In my judgment the most effective results in proportion to the energy expended have been secured through the courses offered to teachers in the university. Perhaps the majority of teachers who take agriculture regularly in the university courses do not themselves teach directly in the country schools, but in the better high schools of the State, in smaller towns surrounded by good farming communities. These teachers in the high schools have the training of a large number of young people who teach in the country schools later, so that it is safe to say that every teacher who takes our regular university courses in agriculture reaches with this teaching hundreds of young men and women who will go out into the country schools as teachers. A good many schools of this State are teaching agriculture and kindred subjects in one way or another. Many of them are correlating the work with geography, with language, and even sometimes with other subjects in the schools, through the aid of school gardens or school plantings, and by a study of the material with which the pupils come in contact at their homes. In addition to correlating the work with other subjects, some of the schools give regular courses in agriculture and horticulture.

(G).—COLLEGES OF AGRICULTURE.

The agricultural colleges are now beginning to devise means of extending their efforts to the training of teachers in agriculture. This movement is of such vast importance in the field of practical pedagogy that it may now be separately discussed in a final chapter,

PART III. THE GENERAL OUTLOOK, AND THE SIGNIFICANCE OF NORMAL WORK IN THE COLLEGES OF AGRICULTURE.

We have now taken a general look at the demand that is arising for teachers in agriculture of a public school grade, and we have reviewed the main types of agencies that promise to aid us in supplying these teachers. We may now throw these normal agencies into something like a classified system, and indicate the main lines of a rational procedure.

1. The elementary schools demand general teaching. Not much that is named agriculture is possible with the pupils of elementary school age, but nature study and the industrial spirit should constitute the foundation of their work. The district rural schools are elementary schools. They pay small wages and offer few attractions to teachers. For the most part they are able to secure the services only of those persons who are on the way to other employment. Their teachers are mostly women. Until these conditions change, the rural schools must draw their teachers chiefly from the region of the high schools. Whenever good science work is an important part of the high school course of study, and particularly when good agriculture teaching is also introduced as a regular part of the curriculum, a training class in connection therewith and requiring a high school diploma for the completion of the work should be able to make great progress in preparing teachers for the elementary grades. Some of the teachers for the grades will be recruited from the ranks of those who do not complete normal school courses, and some States or counties may provide special means of training such teachers by organizing normal school work below the regular normal school grade. In the end special local means or institutions must be provided for the training of these teachers, and it is time that this were recognized. At present, however, it may be repeated, it is incumbent on the secondary school region to train the teachers for the elementary region. 2. The teachers who are to train these elementary teachers must themselves be trained. They must have real preparation, if the agriculture teaching is to be of permanent value; they can not be trained in the common teachers' institutes or by other mere short cuts. The teachers of this secondary normal work must be trained in institutions where genuine agriculture is established; some of the State normal

schools may provide this work; some of the special separate schools of agriculture may provide it; some of the education departments or teachers' colleges in association with agricultural departments of higher institutions may provide it; the agricultural colleges will be obliged to provide it. The best trained and best adapted of the graduates of the colleges of agriculture, however, will find better openings than most schools of the secondary region are at present willing to pay. The preparation of such teachers should include general scholarship and training in the principles of education, as well as specialized scholarship in agriculture and other industrial work, and also sufficient hand practice outdoors and indoors to give them command of the technique of instruction.

3. If the regular agriculture teachers of secondary schools and the teachers of secondary training classes are to be prepared in the State normal schools, then these normal school teachers must themselves be trained in agriculture. Their training must be more than can be secured in the normal school itself. They may be trained in education departments of universities and in teachers' colleges, provided always that these institutions are associated with real agricultural work, such as is possible in an agricultural college; or they may be trained in the agricultural college itself.

4. The agricultural college necessarily stands at the head of the system. It holds the key to the situation. It must provide the leaders.

The body of knowledge and philosophy that is comprised under the modern word "agriculture" is of such vast range, the subjects are so numerous and so difficult, the equipment required to teach it is so large and so expensive, that only such institutions as are specially devoted to the subject can understand it or properly represent it. These institutions express a great phase of our national life. More than any other institutions they stand for the very democracy and nativeness of education, for their purpose is nothing less than to reach the last man on the last farm by means of the very things by which that man lives.

It is good to have seen these colleges of agriculture gradually emerge and then enlarge their territory, quietly annexing this subject and that, until they have come to be one of the great social and spiritual forces of the day. They have not yet developed a pride of education, and they have not reached the limit of the territory that they will annex. It may be found, in good time, that they have forced new standards of education. These colleges will now add normal departments and they will attract the teaching type of mind. The graduates of these departments will supply some of the normal schools; some of the high schools; some of the training classes and special normal organizations; and what they give will be passed on

from school to school and grade to grade, until it fertilizes the whole enterprise. This is not at all a mere visionary outlook, and for the very good reason that the agricultural colleges are the only teaching institutions that are in possession, at first hand, of the essential facts of rational agriculture.

A number of the colleges of agriculture have already undertaken to develop teachers' courses, either on their own account, or in association with the education departments of the universities with which they are connected. Congress has also given them a direct opportunity to establish such work in a provision of the Nelson amendment to the agricultural appropriation bill for 1907-8: " Said colleges may use a portion of this money for providing courses for the special preparation of instructors for teaching the elements of agriculture and the mechanic arts."

The Nelson amendment provides, when it shall have matured, for the appropriation of $25,000 annually to the land-grant colleges of each State. This is the only national appropriation that specifically recognizes this particular kind of college work. This fund will afford an unexcelled opportunity for some of the stronger institutions to establish a department or school in which persons shall be trained directly for the teaching of agriculture and the mechanic arts in the public schools.

MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE.

The Massachusetts Agricultural College established in 1907 a department of agricultural education, with a professorship. W. R. Hart, formerly of the State Normal School at Peru, Nebr., has been chosen to head the department. This department is organized under a State law that makes an annual appropriation of $5,000. This law originated from a recommendation of the Massachusetts commission on industrial and technical education, in 1906. (The report of this commission is a most valuable contribution to the subject of industrial education.) The first move was the organizing of a summer school of agriculture of four weeks, which had an attendance of considerably more than two hundred. Following is a course of instruction for the year 1908-9:

1. The meaning of education, dealing with the biological and psychological aspects of the processes of learning.

2. Vocational education, being chiefly historical. This is given in 1907-8. 3. Methods in agricultural education.

4. Seminar, a study of problems in agricultural education.

COLLEGE OF AGRICULTURE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS.

The College of Agriculture of the University of Illinois has an instructor in secondary school agriculture, D. O. Barto, an experienced school-teacher and a graduate of the college, who for two years has