it we shall solve one of the most fundamental problems of this century—the problem of checking the movement of population from the country to the city. One way to check this movement is to build up a system of rural schools which will give equality of educational opportunity to our rural youth.

Education in the country for the country needs heroic treatment. I do not believe in making haste slowly in attempting to solve this problem. I believe in evolution-not a purely natural evolution, but evolution stimulated by vigorous organization, expert leadership, and wise legislation.

It is a trite saying that you cannot legislate people into righteousness; but one of the chief functions of legislation is to create conditions favorable to righteousness. Law today, no less than in ancient Hebrew economy, is a schoolmaster to lead men to higher and better ideals.

MORE ADEQUATE SUPERVISION

This discussion brings me to Commissioner Brown's second rural-school problem-the problem of more adequate country-school supervision.

All of the states have made some provision for rural-school supervision; very few have an adequate system of county-school supervision. All of the states west of the New England states, except Ohio and Arkansas, have some form of county supervision.

In Ohio, after nearly a half-century of optional township supervision, and twelve years of township centralization, not more than 150 of the 1,369 townships are under supervision that supervises. More than a quarter of a million of rural-school youth in our state have no supervision worth the name.

In the states which have the best system of county supervision, marked improvements have been made in the rural schools, but even here it is conceded that the county unit is too large for close, adequate supervision. The township unit, it is quite generally conceded, is too small for a state-wide system of adequate supervision. There is a growing tendency in Ohio toward a system of rural-school supervision involving both of these principles-the one expressed in a mandatory county superintendency, making the county the unit for school administration; and the other principle expressed in mandatory group-township districts with a supervisor whose chief function is to be supervision. This scheme embodies both principles-the federating, systematizing, and unifying principle, expressed in the county superintendent; and the close, adequate supervision principle, expressed in a group-township district supervisor. This is the ideal toward which Ohio is striving and tending.

Among the numerous duties and powers vested in the county superintendent, the following should be some of the more specific powers:

1. To study educational needs and conditions with a view of reorganizing the ruralschool system to meet the demands of this new industrial age.

2. To create wholesome, enlightened public sentiment so essential to all school improvement.

3. To encourage centralization and consolidation where practicable, and grouptownship districts for effective supervision where the former are not practicable.

4. To encourage, stimulate, and lead in the establishment of rural high schools. 5. To become, as he has in some states, the strong right arm of the state department of education.

6. To federate, unify, and utilize all the educational forces of the country to make our rural-school education more vital and effective.

The county superintendent should be free to give much time to, and to place great emphasis on, the rural-high-school problem. Under wise and expert leadership, he could consolidate the township with the poor, struggling village high school and thus secure a sufficient tax duplicate to support one first-class high school with a strong department for the teaching of agriculture. The well-equipped rural high school, as I see it in our state, is fundamentally essential to an effective system of education in the country for the country.

I do not believe that it is feasible to introduce agriculture or any other phase of industrial education into the entire body of rural schools within a state. I believe in the conclusion reached by the Committee on Industrial Education made to the National Education Association five years ago, which declared that "under existing conditions and under conditions likely to exist for a long time to come, comparatively few teachers in the country schools will be prepared for this work." The committee further says: "In each country where the experiment has failed, the authorities have reported that the chief reason was the failure to secure teachers properly prepared to teach the subject."

"It is evident that before this phase of industrial education can be made a success in the one-room district school, there must be a body of teachers with special training for this work, that pupils must remain longer in school, that there must be greater facilities for the training of teachers, and that salaries must be materially increased," to which I wish to add that more men teachers must engage in school work.

I return, therefore, with even greater assurance to the conclusion reached before, that education in the country for the country must, under present conditions, be secured very largely thru the rural high school, and that we need more adequate school supervision to foster and build up first-grade rural schools all over the country.

WHAT HAS BEEN ACCOMPLISHED FOR EDUCATION IN THE COUNTRY FOR THE

COUNTRY?

The Hon. A. C. True, Director of the Office of Experiment Stations, Washington, D.C., in a recent address in Portland, Ore., tells us that much has been accomplished.

When Secretary Wilson came to the Department of Agriculture twelve years ago, there were but ten agricultural high schools in the country. Now there are sixty agricultural high schools. Then there were few, if any,

public high schools teaching agriculture; now there are three hundred and forty-six. Then there were but few schools training teachers to give instruction in agriculture; now there are one hundred and nineteen state or county normal schools, and fifteen agricultural colleges training teachers to give instruction in this subject. Our agricultural colleges can do much, have done much in some of the states, but they cannot do all the work. The separate agricultural high schools supported in part by the states have been established in some of the states. Alabama, Georgia, California, Minnesota, New York, and Oklahoma have congressional-district agricultural high schools. Wisconsin, Maryland, Michigan, and Mississippi are trying the experiment of county agricultural schools with a large measure of success. Add to all these the work in private schools and correspondence schools along the line of this phase of industrial education and it will appear that much has been accomplished in the last decade.

This movement has gained tremendous headway until, according to a recent bulletin statement from the Department of Agriculture at Washington, there are now more than five hundred educational institutions in the United States engaged in training teachers how to teach agriculture in the public schools.

The present scope of instruction in agriculture would not be complete without adding the efforts made in some of the states in the township high schools. This movement has begun in Ohio, and I believe will spread rapidly over our state. More than a score of township high schools are doing effective work in agriculture. In my own native township, Union, in Hancock County, Ohio, an $18,000 building, the greater part of which will be devoted to the high school, with a well-equipped laboratory for the teaching of agriculture, not only to the pupils, but to the farmers as well, is now being planned and erected.

A normal-school bill, making provision for two additional state normal schools for Northern Ohio, is now pending in the General Assembly. It is written in the bill that, in planning said buildings, provision shall be made for well-equipped departments for instruction and training in agriculture. Ohio believes in the conclusion reached by the Committee on Industrial Education already referred to, that trained teachers are necessary to make a success of any phase of industrial education. These agricultural departments are to train teachers for our rural high schools.

WHAT MORE CAN BE DONE?

The State Fair Board, the agricultural colleges, the state grange, the state training schools in agriculture, the agricultural experiment stations, and all other organized agencies along this phase of industrial education should federate their forces and more closely ally their aims and efforts. In too many states now, each seems to be independent of the other. They should be made to articulate at some points more closely.

It also occurs to me that there might be organized with profit an interstate commission on agricultural education-an interstate commission composed of states whose climatic and industrial conditions are quite similar.

The public-school men must become more active and helpful in the solution of this, one of the most vital problems of the age-education in the country for the country, and thus aid without litigation in removing one of the chief causes of the high cost of living, and aid in creating conditions more conducive to a higher and nobler type of American citizenship.

DISCUSSION

JOHN F. HAINES, county superintendent of schools, Noblesville, Ind.-The function of the school is to educate the child: the function of education is to furnish the child (1) the ability to make a living, (2) the ability to make a life.

I put the ability to make a living first, because the man who cannot make a living does not and cannot command the respect of his fellows.

What then must be the education of the country boy to enable him to stand in the community as a man of property and at the same time be a useful member of society?

We are pretty well agreed that a change in our present course of study is needed, but no change has yet been suggested that is acceptable. We are so wedded to traditions that we are not willing to give up our "partial payments," our map questions, and our long line of dates in history. Both the school n.en and the farmers are to blame for the present state of affairs. The school man sits in his study and evolves a "course of study for the rural school." He sees in his “mind's eye" the country child, by pursuing the subjects that he suggests and in the order that he suggests, become an "agriculturist," not a farmer. Such a course usually does more harm than good. The author of it does not know the conditions and cannot know them by merely reading about them or hearing about them.

The farmer is opposed to a change in the curriculum. He wants his boy to study books; the boy can learn to work at home, and the girl can learn to cook and sew under the instruction of her mother. What then must be done to improve the conditions in the rural schools?

1. Men who deal with this problem must be men who come into direct contact with conditions as they exist.

2. The public opinion of the rural communities must be changed.

It is evident that in the grades great slices of arithmetic and geography and history must be cut off and cast out, and in their places must be put manual training, some of the simpler phases of agriculture, and music, drawing, and reading, reading, reading.

In the high school much of the Latin and German and the higher mathematics and the so-called science work could well be omitted. The Latin seems to develop in the boys a propensity for swearing, and mathematics a weakness for tears in the girls. In chemistry, and sometimes even in botany, the pupil, after a full term's work, says, "What is it all about ?"

But what would the colleges do for students prepared to enter? There would be one satisfaction, that those who entered would know how to work and the education acquired would "stick" better than much of the college education under the present plan, which, like paper put on a whitewashed wall, peels off soon after examination day.

Education in the country to accomplish its purpose must do at least two things. It must put the child in possession of a knowledge of its environments and give him skill in the use of this knowledge. It must also give him culture and refinement. This, to my mind, must be accomplished not by establishing trade schools and agricultural high schools in different sections, but by eliminating from the present course of study some of the things

that I have already indicated and putting in their places agriculture, manual training, and domestic science.

It is claimed that we could not find teachers prepared to teach these subjects. True, but neither can we find teachers prepared to teach arithmetic, grammar, and history. The great trouble in my own county is, not that we cannot find teachers who are prepared or who are willing to prepare, but that if the course of study prescribed by the state board of education is carried out there is but little time left for anything else. The pupil desires to complete this course in the common school so that he may enter the high school and the high school adheres to its course in order that it may remain on the commissioned list. If we could have a course of study requiring a minimum amount of work instead of minimum grades in certain subjects it would help us wonderfully.

In some of the high schools in my county we offer courses in agricultural and domestic science, but the cry year after year is that we have not the time to do this and carry out the prescribed course.

The farmers themselves have opposed such instruction in the schools, but when it is once introduced they are soon converted. The children are ready and anxious "to do things." Some years ago I organized a Boys' Corn Club in Hamilton County, the first ever organized by a school man. I thought it would be better for the boys to raise corn than to raise so much of the proverbial "Cain." The result is that a large number of these boys have become expert corn-growers and have taught their fathers how to select and test the seed. In some of our rural schools we have introduced manual training, and here again the parents are converted. Almost without exception the boys who raise the best corn and

who do the best work at the bench are the leaders in their classes.

What then should be done for education in the country? In the Middle West this should be done: whenever it is possible the schools should be consolidated so that in each school there would be at least two teachers, the principal, a man who should receive not less than fifty dollars for each month in the year. Just as soon as he has proven himself the man for the place he should be installed so that he could not be removed without just cause. He should live in the community and have his interests there. He should be placed in charge of from ten to twenty acres of land and this should be the experiment plot for the neighborhood. Place in this school also a young woman who can teach the girls. Then give them time and material and see what will be accomplished. Give the high schools a chance to train teachers for these rural schools and they will do it.

But I would not neglect the culture side. I would have the country children taught music and drawing and literature in abundance. I would have the boy taught to build a better house and beautify the farm. I would have the girl taught to beautify the home and make it attractive.

When education in the country is made for the country, then the highest type of manhood will be developed there in the future just as it has been in the past.

TOPIC: CHILDREN DIFFER IN VOCATIONAL AIMS INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION IN THE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL BEN W. JOHNSON, DIRECTOR OF MANUAL TRAINING, PUBLIC SCHOOLS, SEATTLE, WASH.

For the sake of clearness, I define "vocational" to be that which pertains to a definite occupation, and "industrial" that which pertains to all occupations-ideas of materials and processes, their production, manufacture, and distribution.

also safely assume that children do differ in mental alertness, in