Agriculture’s Place In Modern Education

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 15, Issue 3, 27 February 1950, Page 4

Agriculture’s Place In Modern Education

We are aware of the excellent horticultural activities of so many of our country schools where instruction is given in vegetable and fruit culture, in bee and poultry keeping and other subjects of rural interest. But what of our urban schools? Surely with the raising of the school leaving age the curriculum should be widened to include instruction in the basic principles of agriculture rather than in a variety of other subjects of less comparable importance? If, with this instruction of an elementary kind, there could be arranged a series of visits to first-class farms, what a dividend would later be paid by the disemmination of such knowledge! It would seem that in the hurry and scurry of the reorganisation of our educational system a splendid opportunity is being lost of bringing back agriculture into proper perspective. Surely in the intensive post-war period the first industry should rank in importance with the dead languages and the classics? —From “The Scottish Farmer.”