ANNUAL RESULTS-CONTINUED. 1863. 1862. 1861 1860. 1859. 1858. 1857. 1856. 1855. 1854. 1853. 1852. Ang. 16 Aug. 5 Aug. 7 July 15 July 17 July 9 July 12 July 25 Aug. 3 July 16 Aug. 10 July 10 Feb. 1 Jan. 13 Jan. 31 Dec. 23 Dec. 31 Feb. 23 Jan. 23 Jan. 10 Dec. 30 Jan. 23 Jan. 29 Jan. 25 124 135 122 120 103 May 7 April 24 April 17 April 15 July 4 May 18 May 12 April 29 May 11 May 3, Oct. 3 May 12 Apr. 20 5 Sept. 28 Sep. 14 THE EDUCATION OF AMERICAN FARMERS. BY PROF. J. B. TURNER, JACKSONVILLE, I wish to show why, and how it is, that almost the entire force of our common schools tends to throw our young men away from the shop and the farm, and to drive them into the scholastic professions; or pile them up, in huge stacks of agents, clerks, and office-seekers; or send them "prospecting" to California, or "carpet-bagging," down South. If your patience will indulge me, I would like to show it, in such detail and minuteness of description, as would enable each one of us to attempt to institute the needed reform, in his own school district. I deem this the very highest service, which I can here and now render, either to this congress,* or to the republic at large. Since farmers will be, like all other men, what their real education makes them: neither more nor less. The vital moving force, the power and the glory of modern society, consists in its capacity of voluntary co-operation. The voluntary cooperation of the voters of this Union, in upholding our free institutions, is indeed one of the most unique and sublime spectacles in the history of our race. But the voluntary co-operation of all the forty millions of men, women and children, of this wide republic, to uphold some system of common schools, to prepare the rising generation for their du ties and their destinies, in the republic, greatly transcends it. Nothing to be compared with it, was ever seen or heard of before, in the history of man. I most fully sympathize with the sentiments of an eminent and sen sible American citizen, who, after three years wandering in Europe, in search of some better place to educate his children, than our own country can afford, declared that "there was something in our American school houses, and the moral atmosphere which surrounds them, which he had missed, in all his wanderings over Europe; and that for making your average man and woman of solid utility, the public school system of America is the very best appliance on the planet." Read before National Agricultural Congress at St. Louis, Mo. "The cui bono is never lost sight of; and in a country like ours this is the great desideratum: the most precious heritage any average boy or girl could possess." These remarks, I trust, will sufficiently guard me from all suspicion of hostility to our American common school system, while I attempt to point out some of its remaining defects and dangers, especially as related to our great agricultural and industrial interests. In all things earthly, the dangers and perils are ever in proportion to the good and the power involved. We have, indeed, elaborated a true system, the true mechanism both of government and of education; at least the outline of it; and that is blessing and glory enough for one people and one age of men to achieve. But it will take many generations to come, to fully perfect the practical use, and handling, and running of either of them. It is well, perhaps, that we feel the remaining evils and defects of both, more keenly than we realize the good they already bring us. It incites us to our best endeavors for the future. In accordance with this, there is a wide-spread feeling that our schools are not doing all for us, especially for the people in the rural districts, which they ought to do. A committee of the Massachusetts Legislature, where our whole system originated, and where it has been carried to greater perfection than perhaps in any other State, report that "the results of their system of schools is not satisfactory ;" and that "the public school system of New England fails to meet the demands of modern civilization." The great uprising of the industrial classes, and their new attempts at founding schools, all over the republic, whatever may be said or thought of their work, shows the same fact. Along side of our efforts to confine children, through all their young and growing years, to school-rooms, and the abstract studies in books, the nervous system has become either excessively developed or diseased; insanity has greatly increased; a whole crop of brain and nervous diseases are said to have sprung up, some of which are not developed till late in life; females in particular become inert, weak, and nervously diseased; indisposed and incapacitated for the real duties of the wife and the mother: insomuch that the most highly educated races are perpetually running out, and giving place to races of less, so-called culture, but of greater stalwart vigor; all of which tends to show that we may be making them over into angels, a little too fast for the good of earth and time; or if not, it betokens widespread distrust and doubt, not of our present system as such, but of our present mode of running it. The general |