to be taught, or the quality of grosser products studied, independent class work must be provided throughout the course. Then there are certain scientific phases which must be pursued in class further than may be thought profitable to the science student, though the cases are not nearly so numerous as is generally supposed.[1] Such training must be provided largely by collateral courses and from students' projects carried on at their homes. And it is necessary that agricultural students who purpose to apply their knowledge to that vocation, be segregated late in the course for the treatment of the subject as whole, where its ideals may be developed and its various phases synthesized into an independent "science of agriculture."
Could it be known at what stage a young person's schooling is to cease, his best interests seem to dictate a previous substitution of immediately usable knowledge for much of that of merely "disciplinary" or "preparatory" value.[2] The practical difficulty of accomplishing such
- ↑ "The sharp distinction between preparation for college and preparation for life is fading out. . . . So far as general culture is concerned, preparation for a higher school, rightfully conceived, coincides with preparation for life."—Brown, "The Making of Our Middle Schools," p. 438.
- ↑ "Vocational training is to be postponed as long as possible. It is to rest upon the most extended general schooling which the individual can get."—Brown. "The Making of Our Middle Schools," p. 459.
"The human plant circumnutates in a wider and wider circle, and the endeavor should be to prevent it from prematurely finding a support, to prolong the period of variation to which this stage of life is sacred, and to prevent natural selection from confirming too soon the slight advantage which any quality may temporarily have in this struggle for existence among many faculties and tendencies within us. The educational ideal is now to develop capacities in as many directions as possible."—Hall, "Adolescence," Vol. II., p. 88.
"Vocational training ought not to be included in the six years that are sufficient for the elementary school course. . . .The grave error of the past has been to frame a school course on the hypothesis that every pupil was to go for-
kink should be given to chemistry or botany or even geography and arithmetic. Let these arts and sciences be taught from their own standpoint, with as direct application to as many affairs of real life as possible; but let chemistry continue to be chemistry. . . . Every high school that has a natural agricultural constituency of any considerable importance should put in a department of agriculture on the same basis as its department of chemistry."—Davenport, "Education for Efficiency," p. 126. "A thorough grounding in the natural sciences is essential to thorough agricultural courses, but so long as the instruction is confined to the departments of pure science it has had, and will have, very little significance or importance to agriculture. . . . "If the divisions of science were strictly adhered to we should have no such thing as agricultural science. . . . The present-day plan for the classification of agricultural knowledge and its formulation into courses of instruction. . . is based on the application in the natural divisions of agriculture, rather than-on its scientific origin. . . . A proposal to return to the former basis of the primary sciences would find scant indorsement among men who have studied the pedagogics of agriculture."—Editorial in Experiment Station Record, January, 1908, p. 402.
