more in the process of manipulation of his materials than in the reactions secured. He is engaged in a scientific investigation of the educative process, not of childnature; and the outcome of his experiments is the discovery of pedagogical laws and the formulation of rules of the art of teaching.

It is impossible in the brief limits of such a paper as this to make any comprehensive enumeration of types of possible experiments for the pedagogical laboratory, however much such a course would appear to be demanded in justification of the writer's contention. It may also be doubted whether such a list of problems would have any practical value in advance of the establishing of particular laboratories. Each research student must formulate for himself the problems to the solution of which he would devote himself. In the present inchoative stage of the scientific study of pedagogy, when even the definition of education is undetermined, there can be no consensus of opinion as to fundamental laws or central truths, much less any precise defining of the field for experimental exploration. The pedagogist, even admitting that there is such a class of scientific students, must do what the psychologist has done in his laboratory from Fechner down, feel his way gradually to the definite formulation of problems in his separate laboratory. It would be presumptive folly for anyone to attempt to delimit the field of possible research. At most it can only be dogmatically asserted that there is such a field, and indicate in a general way something of its contour and relief. In the evolution of the race the responsibility of the more mature members for the cultivation of the lives of the less mature has been progressively recognized, and the field of education has found a place in the general mapping out of human activities. While but little attempt has been made at a scientific exploration of this field, some general features of it have been empirically determined. All of the dogmas in the schoolmaster's creed now credulously accepted need to be critically examined in the pedagogical laboratory. We need to ask ourselves anew many questions. Is it true that ontogenesis so parallels phylogenesis as to render the Culture-Epoch Theory a rational basis for a school curriculum? Is the use of the nature myths desirable in teaching young children to understand and appreciate their physical environment? Is the story overworked in primary education? Is it possible to discipline the mind apart from the content employed in the process? Is manual training essentially a matter of mental culture? And so on for scores of questions that can only be rationally answered through experimental research.

The rules for experimentation in laboratories in general apply with peculiar force in the pedagogical laboratory. The following may be instanced. here:

Direct each experiment toward a single result. A clearly defined aim in the particular teaching-act is essential to any valuable result in the discovery of pedagogical truth. Indiscriminate angling for possible pedagogical facts is not practicable in this field. The rights of the children demand that every experiment be expressly for their welfare; and equally does the interest of the teaching art require well-directed procedure.

Select the educative material with the utmost care as to purity for the purpose sought

The means employed in the specific influencing of the child's life-current should be freed, as far as possible, from any catalytic or other disturbing factor.

Watch developing results with a view to modifying the experimental process at any stage. Since the experimenter is studying his own procedure, not child nature or the genesis of knowledge, he should hold the process closely under his control, ready to meet changes in his constantly active material.

Note the by-products as well as the chief results aimed at. The child's life is so complex that no purposed interference with it, however carefully guarded, can ever be seen in its simplicity. The experimenter should learn not only from the immediate results sought in his teaching-act but also from allied and secondary results revealed incidentally to his watchful eye.

Make due allowance for errors in the use of educative material. It is a common fault of teachers to proclaim "methods” as established from an apparently successful use under poorly defined conditions. The research student in the laboratory must be more conservative than this. He should keep constantly in mind that there may be unrecognized premises or missing data in all his conclusions.

Plan a series of experiments toward a total result in character. Education is the affirmative guidance of a whole life movement; and the value of a single teaching-act can be known only in a comprehensive view of the whole life. Further, education is a dynamic process, concerned with a growing entity; and the modifying influence must be progressively adapted to the developing life. Each teaching-act prepares for and demands another. The successful research student in this field must see the relation of each experiment to a possible succession of subsequent experiments. Nor is it a valid objection to such experimental study that it would be difficult to obtain children for a sufficiently long time for successful work. It would be no more difficult to secure the privilege of this extraordinary educational direction of the lives of children by expert teachers, when the real aim and value of such teaching is known, than it is for Luther Burbank to secure unlimited plant life for helpful modification.

The interests of exact educational science certainly demand that there should be established in connection with our leading colleges of education research pedagogical laboratories. Until our universities and normal schools recognize this field and possess it, teaching will continue to be the empirically learned trade of unskilled workmen rather than the artist life of the wellequipped specialist. The laboratory will do for pedagogy what it has done for every other modern science in which it is employed.

AGRICULTURE IN NORMAL SCHOOLS: COURSES OF
INSTRUCTION AND FINANCIAL SUPPORT

E. E. BALCOMB, DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE AND PHYSICAL SCIENCES,
STATE NORMAL SCHOOL, WEATHERFORD, OKLA.

It is no longer a question whether state normal schools shall serve a course in agriculture in their educational menus. The normal schools are established to prepare teachers for our public schools. Whatever should be taught in the public schools must appear, and necessarily should first appear, in the curriculum of the normal schools.

Agriculture is already required in the elementary schools of several states, and is taught in many of the schools of other states. It will very soon be a required study in the elementary schools in every state in the Union, and

whether we wish it or not the normal schools must prepare teachers to give this instruction. It will soon be as absurd not to prepare teachers to instruct in agriculture as in geography, or in physiology.

It is no longer a question whether we shall serve the course but just what, and how much, shall be served, how much time shall be allowed for its mastication, where in the menu it shall be served, what equipment is necessary to make it digestible, and from whence the wherewithal to serve a respectable, palatable, and digestible course. These are the questions that confront us.

For my report for the Department of Agricultural Education and Rural Schools at this meeting I received personal letters from state normal schools thruout the United States, and found that of the ninety-one reporting, sixty are giving courses in agriculture. They are serving the course in varying amounts and in various combinations. Some dish it up successfully with nature-study. This is an excellent plan, providing enough agriculture is given to sustain life. The trouble is that only the observational phase of agricultural education is apt to be emphasized.

Some serve agriculture with school gardens, making the garden the base. This brings good results, the only drawback being that all farm interests cannot be emphasized. This plan is especially adapted to city conditions. Professor Shaw, of Rochester, N. Y., has been very successful in this work and has created a desire among children to beautify back yards, well shown in some attractive photographs which he inclosed. Susan B. Sipe, of Washington, D. C., reports,

We have aroused a remarkable enthusiasm thruout the city on the subject of gardening. The children have purchased 160,000 penny packages of seeds. It has resulted in extensive home gardens and civic improvement.

Some combine agriculture with the science courses. The danger in this is that it is likely to be too technical, and give material that the elementary school children will not be able to digest. The only normal school I have known to fail in giving agriculture did scientific teaching. San Diego, Cal., seems to be successful by following the sciences with agriculture, but they mix it with experimental work. Valley City, N. D., proposes to culminate zoology in animal husbandry and botany in elementary agriculture. Undoubtedly they are practical, but it would be better to let animal husbandry culminate in zoology, and plant propagation in botany.

We used to begin geography with teaching definitions of geography, the equator, the ecliptic. We went to the north pole, led the children out into the universe, viewed the solar system, and observed and reasoned about the revolutions of the earth upon its axis, then we alighted on Europe and went into Asia and around by Africa and sailed around Cape Horn, explored South America, and finally landed at Boston and came slowly across the continent and at last reached our own state and sometimes even our own county. But now we begin at home. Must we go through this same process with agricul

ture, or will we learn something from our past experiences and use a little common-sense?

I believe with President Stewart, of Salt Lake City, and Professor Randlett, of North Dakota, that agriculture and its allied subjects should be the center of correlation and should strengthen and vitalize the entire public-school curriculum.

The central thought in this whole discussion, the one idea that I wish to be indelibly stamped on the mind of every educator in the United States is, that new studies are not wanted in the public schools but a different viewpoint for the old studies.

But, of course, until we can have our whole system changed so that it will begin with home environment, and until we can make agriculture the center of correlation and lead from that to composition work, geography, history, chemistry, and physics, it is well to do as President McFarland, of Valley City, N. D., and President Corbley, of Huntington, W. Va., suggest―turn all the sciences to agricultural account.

Some give a course in agriculture using only the text, being so handicapped that they have neither garden plots nor even laboratory experiments wherewith to salt it. Above everything the work should be practical. The National Educational Association Committee on Industrial Education in their report of 1905 are emphatic on this point. "The work to be given in the normal schools should not be confined to a study of textbooks but provision should be made for the carrying on of observations, experiments, and practice work.” I believe that nothing will be so fatal to this movement as the use of the textbook only with its "cut and dried" lessons.

Some of the schools are giving extremely practical work. Among these is Normal, Ill. President Felmley writes:

Five years ago we opened a school garden of two and one-half acres. The work has assumed each year more of a strictly economic and agricultural character. In the school garden we grow, (1) every sort of garden vegetable that is grown in our state; (2) we have practically every kind of flowering annual cultivated for its flowers; (3) we have grown each year patches of the chief field crops of the United States; (4) last year we paid special attention to corn, experimenting with cross fertilization and commercial fertilizers For the last year we have occupied a greenhouse with 2,800 feet of floor space. There we tested twelve bushels of seed corn. The children make cuttings of roses, etc. When they are rooted in the sand they transfer them to small pots. They themselves sow the seeds of many plants in the starting-boxes and transplant them after germination. The season has been cold and backward, but on Monday next we expect to set out in our school garden several thousand plants that are now in the greenhouse. We are distributing to all of the childen of the model school aster seed of three varieties which we expect them to plant at home, and we are offering a series of prizes for which the children will compete in the flower show in September. Each child is, also, furnished with six tomato plants which he may plant on his home grounds to compete for prizes. For the next two years we are planning, to grade the work of our school garden in such a way that the children in the first grade and kindergarten, for example, shall be busied with onions, lettuce, radishes, etc., that each year shall have its own group of plants. We expect to make good celery-growers of our eighth graders.

Beginning in September next we shall lengthen this course in elementary science from twenty-four weeks to thirty-six for our normal students, and shall make this work furnish the content for English composition.

New Paltz, N. Y., has carried on experimental work in its own gardens, using cultures procured in Washington. They say further,

The flax industry has also been carefully studied by raising the flax on our own grounds and passing it thru its various forms from raw material to the finished product. Poultryraising has been carried on for several years, the children of the grades using incubators and brooders and articulating this work with their lessons in English, history, art, etc.

Rock Hill, South Carolina, is the only normal school, of which I know, that has a dairy. There are a number of schools that mention study of stock on nearby farms, among them Stevens Point, Wis., Warrensburg, Mo., and Cheney, Wash. At the latter place Professor Hungate is working to make the course especially practical. They have three courses.

In the elementary course we take up soils and their treatment, including conservation of moisture, irrigation; proper methods of budding, grafting, slipping; wheat and fruit culture; injurious insects and fungi affecting fruit and grains of this locality; animal husbandry, including some work in stock-scoring, and testing of various milks. All the classes work in an experimental garden on original problems, and are taken on trips to visit dairy and wheat farming, do practical work in pruning, and observe spraying work of nearby fruit-growers. We are going next week to visit the Hazelwood dairy farm ten miles from here. Forty people are going.

President McFarlane, of Brockport, N. Y., writes:

Within the next two years we expect to lay out gardens on rather an extensive scale and to follow up systematically thru the grades of our training department, and with the students in the normal courses, school-gardening work. We expect to raise vegetables which may be stored in our building and used in connection with our domestic-science courses. It is our hope and intention to make the work of manual training, thru the construction of hothouses, boxes, crates, etc., contribute directly to securing results in our school gardening, and to make this gardening contribute to the work in domestic science, and ultimately to make this domestic science a satisfactory and acceptable noonday meal for the students who take their dinners at the building.

In these illustrations the scope of the subject-matter to be presented at normal schools is suggested. In a word I would say that it should include all the activities of farm life.

Even normal-school students need some time to masticate this, but some of the schools are limited for time and must require their students to bolt it down in great unprepared chunks. The schools feel this keenly. Those that have but ten weeks' time, the Wisconsin schools, for example, are crying for more time. The length of term varies from ten to thirty-six weeks. Twenty weeks is little enough, and until schools shall have had training in agriculture in the elementary or high schools a year is very necessary. We might save time as some suggest by uniting with this composition work. Kirksville, Mo., has a year. So have we at Weatherford. This work should be required in all our normal schools. It is absurd to make it optional when it is soon to be required in all our elementary schools.