VII,8.

The Nelson amendment of 1907 has doubtless greatly stimulated the development of "courses for the special preparation of instructors for teaching agriculture", but the "portion" of the funds used was often insufficient for To further encourage this work of training teachers, Commisioner Claxton requested the Secretary of Interior to give a ruling on the legality of using all of the $25 000 for this purpose. (1) The Attorney General was asked for an opinion and he decided that

the purpose.

"All or a part of the funds provided by the act of March 4,
1907, may be used for providing courses for the special
preparation of instructors for teaching the elements of agri-
culture and the mechanic arts'. It is held that this lan-
guage authorizes expenditures for instruction in the history
of agriculture and industrial education, in methods of teaching
agriculture, mechanic arts, and home economics, and also for
special aid and supervision given to teachers actively en-
gaged in teaching agriculture, mechanic arts, and home econo-
mics in public schools. It does not authorize expenditures
for general courses in pedagogy, psychology, history of educa-
tion, and methods of teaching. .- Nov.2,1911. (2)

It appears that many colleges did not make use of this permission of devoting a larger portion of the money for this purpose, for, in the presidential address at the 1914 meeting, Dr. True again urges the supreme necessity for adequate training of secondary teachers and deplores that so little is done by the colleges in this direction:

"Excellent as have been the technical preparations which the
colleges of agriculture and mechanic arts have given to their
students, many of them have not yet developed departments of
education adequate to the task of training prospective teachers
either of agriculture or the mechanic arts in the administra-
tive and teaching problems of the vocational school. The
comparatively poor support given to this feature of the work
by some of the A. & M. colleges is shown by the fact that

1, Proc. A. A. A. C. 1911, p.60-7.

2, Federal laws, regulations and rulings affecting the landgrant colleges. 1911. p.11-12.

out of an appropriation of more than $2 600 000 made to them by Congress under the Hatch and Nelson acts for the year 1912-13, these colleges spent less than $34 000 for the preparations of teachers in the elements of agriculture and mechanic arts'."

(1)

In brief, the development of training courses for teachers of agriculture in land-grant colleges has gone thru the following steps. At first their activity was limited to the promotion of agricultural instruction either by arousing favorable sentiment or by preparing outlines and other helpful literature for teachers engaged in teaching of agriculture. The next step was to give teachers instruction in the elements of agriculture by short courses of various kinds. The Nelson act led to the introduction of separtments of education in a number of colleges; there is considerable evidence that in some cases the teaching of other subjects, e.g. Latin, received as much attention as agriculture, if not more. In a few cases, no professional subjects were included in the course for teachers; in other cases, courses in general education were included to meet the requirements of the certification law. Special courses in agricultural pedagogy were developed later. The final step was the organization of a course on some definite principle in which general subjects, techical subjects and pr6fessional subjects, both in general and agricultural education were all combined into an organic whole. The next chapter will show that this stage has, in most cases, not yet been realized; in fact, there are now colleges in every one of these stages of development.

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1, Proc. A.A.A.C. 1914. p.91.