AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION

Patea Mail, 17 March 1881, Page 4

AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION

The man who expects that a touryears’ course of study in an Agricultural College will fit him for the position of practical farmer is greatly mistaken. One of the most sensible statements on the subject that we have recently met is one made by Col. C. S. Chase at the Nebraska State Fair last fall. He said : “ Education in every branch of the arts and sciences, trades and pi’Ofessions, is valuable only as it is pursued with the intention of acquiring knowledge for the actual benefits it confers — the advantage it gives its possessor over those who have not secured it. The modern method of studying farming through the medium of books, and by the aid of professors, so-called, is all well, provided the student has been a practical cultivator of the soil, so that he can appreciate the subject upon which his thoughts are engaged. And it may be of much service to the man who afterwards becomes, not in name only, but in fact, a farmer. For a mere graduate of an agricultural college to suppose, unless he has been a practical farmer, working with his hands, that he has gathered from books, or the training of tutors, the necessary knowledge to enable him to successfully conduct an ordinary farm, is simply preposterous. While he has acquired a knowledge of chemistry, and of the nature of soils ani their relation to vegetable growth? and may have continued his researches until he can answer abstruse questions as to the affinities existing between vegetation and animal development, still he will find, if he concludes from this fact that he can run a farm, that he is sadly mistaken. Of all the callings

to 'which man has over turned his attention, farming requires the most actual experience. The custom in the New England States in the olden times as it is said, of sending the dull boys to college and putting the bright ones to work on the farm, was a sensible one. A boy of ordinary mind can bo educated to the standard of the so-called learned profession, or to follow the routine of the professors chair, but it takes a bright brain and energetic hand to so manage the soil as to make it a willing, profitable servant.”—Chicago Tribune.