a recognition of this advantage in machines of all sorts that fall within the observation of the children. Another line of work-that leading to technical analysis-should be of a practical nature in connection with foods, plant fibers, and other useful plant products. In the following year this scientific study should be extended to experimental work on the effects of heat and cold on solids, liquids, and gases, and a recognition of the effects in a variety of things; a study of the gases of the atmosphere and of atmospheric pressure, involving hydraulic pressure, with a number of applications; a study of ventilation; practical work on the preservation of foods. In the eighth grade there should be a study of the electric battery, current electricity and its application in simple electric devices; a study of the eye, some work with lenses and the problem of lighting. This program would give boys and girls between the ages of ten or eleven and fourteen or fifteen years a good experiential basis in physics, chemistry, and biology, and in the practical or industrial arts. The method of handling would, in large measure, limit the young minds to the mechanical point of view, or stimulate those penetrative and constructive tendencies that underlie one of the freest and richest modes of mental activity-the scientific imagination. If the method be the one commonly followed in elementary science-teaching, that of demonstration by the teacher, the capital that was gained in primary construction or handwork is not invested by children of average mental ability; motor images are not integrated in the experience; that experience is one-sided, sensory only. If the generalizations underlying that recognition of principles which is essential to scientific thinking are derived in considerable part from the leadings or hints of the demonstrator, there is for the members of the class slight or no deepening of the moments of experience. The impulse to handle, to shift, and to adjust the bar, the rope, or cord; the power to estimate the pressure which the fiber withstands, the amount of heat, the quality of the electric current, and to appraise the value of the experience that comes almost imperceptibly by way of the adjustments of the body-much of this impulse and this power is lost out of the work in science when the teacher adopts the method of demonstration. It may seem that too much time and space are here devoted to the educational phase of elementary science. I think not. If technical training is to be articulated in the elementary-school course, it must be jointed in, not tagged on. In the high schools, the question of specialization is in a fair way to be settled satisfactorily. The commercial, the manual training, the academic high schools are all now recognized as necessary divisions of the system between the elementary school and the college. Within a period of less than forty years, the example of Washington University in establishing a manual-training high school has been followed by the cities and towns thruout this country. The commercial high school has not made such marked progress in public favor, due probably to the fact that its curriculum, like that of the academic high school, is based on bookwork instead of on the line of work which gives play to the fondness of the practical type of mind for doing something with the hand. Public high schools for technical training are not numerous. The explanation of the difference in the spread of the technical training high-school idea, and that of manual training high-school idea, is not difficult to find: the technological institutions do a considerable amount of preparatory work, taking students directly from the elementary schools. The endorsement of these preparatory departments or academies by the parents of the pupils is an endorsement of the principle of partial specialization for children of the age of thirteen or fourteen years; the training in scientific lines is more positive because there are not so many groups of studies carried on simultaneously as in the academic high schools, altho the cultural studies are not omitted. In the course of time the growth of cities with their steel and cement construction, the multiplication of inventions for bringing electricity into the service of man, the improvements in safer means of transportation, the analyses made necessary by legislation regarding foods, the advance in the quality and character of American dress materials and other stuffs, will bring more actively into public consciousness the desirability of education in civil, mechanical, and electrical engineering, and the relative values of foods, fibers, oils, ores, and other materials in the industrial arts. Whether the tendency to combine manual and technical training in one school will meet the needs of the situation, or whether the combination of academic and technical training under one administration will bring into harmonious relation two apparently opposed modes of education that yet have a method in common, no one can now foresee. One thing is evident: we have courses with the classics, or the modern language, or shopwork, or trade and its balance as the central unit; we need that the high schools shall offer a course of training of which the core shall be science. The scope of this paper does not permit a consideration of engineering and other departments of technology in the state universities. There is, however, in the system of public education, one school beyond the high school in which the problem of technical education presents itself in a somewhat different form from that in the institutions of technology. This is the normal college, limited as yet to the training of teachers for the elementary schools. An overwhelming majority of the normal-college students are young women. Their training in science before entrance is derived largely from textbooks and work in high-school laboratories. Only a few are familiar on the practical side with machines, electricity, the influence of heat and light on foods, of chemical action on bacteria and molds. The custom in homes of relegating sewing and cooking to persons employed to do that work and of reserving the daughters for the demands of the school has cut off the embryonic teacher from that experience which is an essential in even the most elementary acquaintance with the nature side of life. Here the normal college has a double problem: (1) to study the material with which the student-teachers will make an environment stimulating the sixth, seventh, and eighth-grade children to experimentation, and to the first steps in scientific imagining and reasoning; (2) to study the material for itself. For example: In the college. the study of the roots and fleshy parts of plants is made from the standpoint of the plant; in the elementary school, they are studied as food products for man. The study of plant fibers is made, on the one hand, from the standpoint of plant tissue, and on the other, from that of their use to man. In physical science, the study of heat becomes in the college, with the laboratory work in fuels and combustion, a study of cause and effect; but in the grammar grades it is solely a consideration of the effects. The normal-college students want a battery for electrolysis and ionization, while the practice-school children want a battery to furnish an electric circuit thru an electro-magnet or a telegraph. instrument. If the public school is to aid in developing, in its great constituency, not only an interest in science, but a scientific spirit, there is no point in its whole system where highly equipped instructors are more needed than in the department of science in the normal college. Such instructors must be at once scientists and intelligent students of the interests and attitudes of mind in its different stages of progress. Not only must the laboratory work be thoro as such, but. it must connect at all available points with everyday life, and in such a way as to awaken in the students an appreciation of law, of its harmonious working in the world of nature, and of its application in the inventions of man. THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE AND ITS RELATIONSHIP TO THE SCHEME OF NATIONAL EDUCATION E. J. WICKSON, DEAN OF COLLEGE OF AGRICULTURE AND DIRECTOR OF AGRICULTURAL EXPERIMENT STATION, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY, CAL. Little more than ex-parte statement can be expected from one whose thought and work have lain wholly on one side of a subject, and with such consciousness of lack of breadth I am impelled to explain that my subject is not of my choosing and if I should overexalt the importance of the agricultural college and its relationship to the scheme of national education, may I escape censure because I neither offered to write nor chose the subject of the writing? I simply go to Nineveh and cry as commanded. And yet all who observe, even but casually or remotely, the progress of the world's effort at institutional education are aware that the various forms of applied knowledge commonly termed "practical education" are overwhelmingly popular; that governments and individuals give most freely for their promotion; that pupils flock to their dispensaries; and that statesmen of all civilized and being-civilized countries invoke them and count the degree of their popular attainment the measure of future national achievement. Probably every nation in the world, if called upon to propose a scheme of national education for a nation just about to be born, would lay out a curriculum of bird songs and flowers, mud pies and hammer strokes, wheels and levers, lathes and looms, dynamos and dynamite, atmospheric nitrate-making, and advanced commercial methods which might obscure even the three R's of blessed memory. These older nations for themselves are curbed in their educational reforms by vested rights and ancestral beliefs and thus prevented from realizing popular ideals in education too rapidly, but one can easily see what revolutions might occur were these wholesome restraints removed. With such a strong bent of the popular will toward the practical in education it is very clear that the next half-century will see great changes in educational methods and materials, if not in the very ideals of education. It, therefore, becomes worth while to endeavor to descry the relationship of what we have to that which we may attain; and this will be the line along which I shall pursue the agricultural college and its relationship to the scheme of national education. In the first place, I must ask that the term agricultural college be considered a synonym of agricultural instruction. Those institutions which have "agricultural college" as a distinctive name do not comprise or contain the agricultural instruction of the United States. There is only one pure college of Agriculture in the United States-that of Massachusetts. The reports of the United States Commissioner of Education endeavor to segregate and classify higher institutions into two categories: (a) "universities, colleges, and technological schools;" (b)" agricultural and mechanical colleges;" but it has to be stated that institutions of the land-grant class are also included in the statistical tables of the former class, so that after all the grouping is not by institutions, but by subjects of instruction, so far, at least, as technological undertakings are concerned. The Commissioner's Report for 1905 enumerates the following: Universities, colleges, and technical schools... 619 44 Agricultural and mechanical colleges... 66 As already stated, these figures do not represent numerical segregation because the first group includes most of the second and third. They are not available for strict classification by subject either, because on this basis many more of the first group should reappear in the second or third group; for example, Harvard University with its Bussey Institution and Yale University with its Sheffield School are both omitted from the agricultural group, to which they are conspicuously entitled to admission. Many other higher institutions should also be claimed as agricultural. In discussing statistics of this sort Dr. True and Mr. Crosby in their pamphlet on The American System of Agricultural Education fitly remark: "Owing to the complicated organization of many of the institutions having courses in agriculture, . . . . it is impracticable to show by statistics with exactness the means and facilities for strictly agricultural education. The general statistics of the land-grant institutions may, however, serve to show with how great an enterprise, devoted chiefly to higher education along scientific lines and industrial lines, agriculture has been joined in permanent alliance, and to indicate in some measure how exten sive are the educational facilities at the command of the youth of the country who have sufficient intelligence, courage, and perseverance to follow out long and thoro courses of study in agriculture." The authors quoted evidently are apprehensive lest the statistics of the land-grant colleges should include too much for agriculture. I believe that, tho this may be true, they also exclude too much: but how excess and lack stand related I do not know. It may be important, however, to "show with how great an enterprise agriculture has been joined in permanent alliance," by citing the progress in value of institutional property, income, teachers, and pupils of the sixty-six agricultural and mechanical colleges. Surely "enterprise" is just the word for an effort which more than doubles its income and its opportunities in a decade. It would be pleasant to undertake analysis of these figures and to determine the causes operating strongly in the previous decades, which forced this wonderful development of an educational idea just at the hinging of the two centuries in which we are permitted to live and act. The limitation of this paper, however, precludes reference to causes and agencies. Two claims of significance must be presented: First, the gains in property and income of the agricultural and mechanical colleges are far greater than their proportion of the gains of all institutions for higher education, viz.: $331,905,172 $433,342,967 By subtraction then (because the 619 institutions include the 66): 30,115,146 Therefore, while 553 other institutions made a property gain in five years of $101,437,795, 66 agricultural colleges gained $22,172,326; or 11 per cent. of the institutions made 24 per cent. of the gain. In income the contrast is far more striking. The increase of the income of 553 institutions was $3,286,572, while the increase of income of the 66 was $5,264,917; or 11 per cent. of the institutions made about 61 per cent. of the total enhancement of revenue of the whole list of universities, colleges, and technological schools of the United States. This indicates most clearly the popularity of these institutions and as their support comes from governments and not from individuals, it argues generosity springing from popular appreciation and expectation which far surpasses private munificence. Second, it is significant also that the revenue of our agricultural colleges |
