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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 '* gen eral 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 
 

 
 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 p rospecti ve 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 
 
 Productive 
 
 Non-Productive 
 
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 8 P 
 
 =6^ > 
 
 
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 p 
 
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 I 
 
 a> PI 
 
 I <=: 
 
 I p 
 
 ?. O 
 
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 8^ 
 
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 On P 
 OS fD 
 
 (0 p 
 
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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