England are, in large measure, deserted or are passing into alien hands. To retain the country boy on the land and to keep our soil from exhaustion, it is high.time that all our rural schools turned their attention, as some of them have done, to scientific agriculture. There is no study of greater importance. There is none more entertaining. If every country boy could become, according to his ability, a Burbank, increasing the yield of the fruit tree, the grain field and the cotton plantation, producing food and clothing where before there was only waste, what riches would be added to our country, what happiness would be infused into life! To obtain one plant that will metamorphose the field or the garden, ten thousand plants must be grown and destroyed. To find one Burbank, ten thousand boys must be trained, but unlike the plants, all the boys will have been benefited. The gain to the nation would be incalculable. Scientific Agriculture, practically taught, is as necessary for the rural school, as is manual training for the city school.
Xor are our people going to rest satisfied with mere manual training. The Mosely commissioners pointed out that the great defect in American education is the absence of trade schools. Trade schools will inevitably come. The sooner the better. They are demanded for individual and social efficiency.
It is not in secondary schools alone, however, that efficiency demands highly differentiated types of schools. It is absurd to place the boy or girl, ten or twelve years of age, just landed from Italy, who can not read a word in his own language or speak a word of English, in the same class with American boys and girls five or six years old. For a time at least the foreigners should be segregated and should receive special treatment. Again, the studies that appeal to the normal boy only disgust the confirmed truant or the embryo criminal. Yet again, the mentally defective, the crippled and the physically weak children require special treatment. Unless all indications fail, the demand for education for efficiency will lead in all our large cities to the organization of many widely differentiated types of elementary school.
The problem of the curriculum, important as it is, is less important than the problem of the teacher. The born teacher, that is, the man or woman who has a genius for teaching, will teach well, in spite of any curriculum, however bad. Unfortunately, genius is as rare in the profession of teaching as it is in law, or medicine, or any other profession. The great majority of us, as it needs must be, are very common-place persons, who are seeking for light and doing the best we can. Hence the supreme importance of training. And yet there is no part of our work to which so little thought and investigation have been given. Normal schools in this country are still very young—only a little over half a century old. The first normal schools were
