equipment. These are primarily laboratory rather than textbook subjects, and adequate equipment is essential to success in teaching them. Laboratories, special apparatus, and land are needed, and these are much more likely to be provided if state aid depends upon them than under a system depending entirely upon local initiative for development.

Secondly, state aid carries with it a certain amount of state supervision, and this can more easily be made expert supervision than where everything concerning courses of study and methods of teaching are left to town or county superintendents. Three of the states have already employed experts to supervise the work in agriculture in state-aided schools, and at least one other state would employ a supervisor at once if the right man could be found. The lack of expert supervision is quite generally recognized as one of the greatest weaknesses of our publicschool systems, and anything that will help to overcome this weakness should be actively promoted.

And finally, state aid will greatly stimulate the introduction of agriculture, home economics, and farm mechanics into our public high schools, and contribute materially to the success and permanence of this work. This will be accomplished because higher salaries will be paid and better teachers will be secured and retained. With the present demand for teachers of agriculture it is almost impossible for an unaided high school to secure an agricultural-college graduate and keep him for more than one year. Competent teachers of agriculture command higher salaries than those in any other high-school subject. One of the state-aided schools last year paid its teacher of agriculture $1,400 and its principal $950. It is not uncommon for agricultural-college graduates to get $1,200 to $1,500 the first year out of college, and in fact the average salary of 95 such graduates in 1910 who accepted positions as teachers or investigators was $1,017. Very few unaided high schools would feel able to employ special teachers at such salaries.

But if agriculture is to be taught in public high schools, it is highly important that good teachers, well trained technically, be employed and retained year after year. There are numerous examples of high schools that have developed excellent work in agriculture, helpful alike to the pupils and to the farmers of the community, only to have it deteriorate greatly or lapse entirely with the loss of the teacher responsible for developing it. State aid would tend, and is now tending, to overcome this difficulty by making higher salaries available and by creating a

permanent general policy with reference to the development of highschool instruction in agriculture. Agricultural-college graduates are more willing to accept high-school positions in states committed to such a policy. The building up of a well-paid and stable teaching profession is a matter of the utmost importance in this country, and if the appropriation of a few thousand dollars a year by state legislatures will contribute to this end and at the same time help to prepare young men and young women for better service on the farm, in the shop, and in the home, it is well worth trying.

IV. HIGH-SCHOOL AGRICULTURE WITHOUT STATE

SUBSIDY

W. H. FRENCH

Michigan Agricultural College, East Lansing, Mich.

The public schools of America were created as institutions through which the state could protect itself, and insure its perpetuity by affording means for training the child-mind and thus making each individual more and more intelligent and more and more capable of self-government. In the earlier stages of our history any training beyond the rudiments was not possible in public institutions. Practically all advanced training was secured through the private school, academy, seminary, or college.

As time passed by, these private institutions either passed away because of lack of support or were transformed into preparatory institutions for still more advanced training to be received in a university. When this condition became apparent, the people, realizing the need of opportunities for broader training than the common schools of that time afforded, created the "union" school, which later became the modern high school. The high school was authorized by law, and its support made obligatory upon the people in the interests of broader education.

The term "broader education" in this instance meant instruction in the classics, languages, literature, mathematics, and science, and these subjects constitute the traditional course of study, the pursuance of which is supposed to result in education. Various definitions of education have been given in the past, and probably no single school has ever measured up to any one definition. If education is to "fit for complete living," or if it is to give one power, we must admit in the first instance that the high-school graduate is not fitted for life, and in the second instance if he has power it is only in the "potential" form.

In order to give the product of the public school real power, or active power, the work of the schoolroom must be attached to the activities of human life through the introduction of such courses as will enable the student, in the process of his training, to apply principles to the actual solution of some of life's problems. In other words, vocational courses will afford an opportunity for such application, and at the same time

enable the student to discover his own aptitudes and develop a real purpose in life before he leaves the public school.

The traditional course of study, as noted above, need not be discarded; in fact, it must not be discarded, but it may be modified. Without any doubt we are spending altogether too much time upon some subjects and in so doing we have excluded others which might become even more valuable than the usual subjects.

During the past fifty years we have been experiencing a period of educational development through successive transitions from one theory of education to another, and in this period of development in educational needs the world of commerce and industry has moved forward by rapid strides. For many years the great struggle in the business world has concerned itself with securing the largest possible utilization of natural resources, and at the same time the highest degree of efficiency. In order to assist in this movement the business world has called upon the educational institutions for extensive researches into the mysteries of natural forces. Scientific schools and universities have been taxed to their limits to meet this demand.

The establishment of colleges of agriculture and mechanic arts grew out of a realizing sense on the part of a few far-sighted business men that the forces of Nature were not being utilized to their limit, and also that we were in great danger of severe losses because the unwise use of these forces was producing deterioration in them. Soil which had once produced profusely was found to be practically worthless. The mineral resources of mother Nature were being exhausted and some means must be provided by which these losses could be made good. It is the special province, then, of our technical institutions to give such training to the human mind as will enable it to utilize wisely natural forces and prevent waste.

It is not the province of this paper to discuss the work of higher institutions of learning, and we therefore proceed to discuss the relation of the high school, this modern institution the doors of which are open to all classes of people, to the great problem of the use and conservation of natural resources.

The high school has been called the "people's college," which statement contains more or less of truth. The work done in this school includes what we call in this country "secondary education." The course of study covers a period of four years which is based upon the completion of the so-called "elementary branches."

The children enter the high school on the average at fourteen years of age, in the midst of the adolescent period. The process of manmaking is going on, and for this reason the high-school period has been called the "formative period." The child enters the school generally with no fixed ideas of his future, and with little knowledge of his own personal aptitudes, largely because of the character of his previous training, or lack of training. If it is true that the period from fourteen to eighteen years is the formative period, then it would seem perfectly logical that during such time he should be introduced to the activities of human life; and his true development would consist in relating his knowledge of literature, mathematics, science, and art to the activities in which men and women engage. Probably the greatest function of the high school is to open the door of opportunity before boys and girls and give them somewhat of a vision of their own possibilities.

We have passed the point in educational history when it is particularly necessary to present arguments and reasons why agriculture and other vocational subjects should be taught. It has become perfectly clear that if there is good ground why agriculture should be taught in a collegiate institution there are equally good grounds for its being taught in a secondary institution.

The purpose of this paper is largely to describe what has already been done in agricultural education in those states which do not grant a special subsidy to individual schools for the introduction of such courses. There are various plans of operation, and we must remember that we are at the very beginning of agricultural education so far as it relates to secondary schools. Courses of study have not been thoroughly organized and we have not had time to judge of actual results. We have simply gone far enough to demonstrate the feasibility and the advisability of introducing a course of some kind in agriculture. We shall deal largely with conditions as they exist at the present time in the states of Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Nebraska, and Ohio, these states not having as yet authorized state subsidy for any special courses in the public schools.

ILLINOIS

In answer to certain inquiries, State Superintendent Blair gives the following information:

"We have no laws requiring the teaching of agriculture in public schools. Something in the way of nature-study and the elements of agriculture has been