The most significant contemporaneous movement in education is the effort to adapt the work of schools directly to the lives of the pupils. It is the expression of the effort to make the school training applicable. The normal activities of the child are to be directed and trained in such a way that real education will result therefrom. Education will grow out of the child's experience; rather than be imposed on him. If this is to be the motive of popular education, then agricultural and industrial subjects will be made more and more a means of school work. It is therefore a question of the first importance how to organize these subjects into an educational harmony. The agricultural subjects are specially difficult of organization, because they, are so many and so diverse and so unlike in different regions. The character and success of the teaching of these subjects lie immediately with the teacher; there have been no institutions consciously to train teachers for such work; therefore it is not strange that many educators should consider the training of persons to teach agricultural subjects to be one of the most important educational questions. With the recent liberal endowments provided by the two Morrill Acts and the Nelson amendment, along with State government appropriations, the "land-grant colleges" have been able to give a greater impetus to agricultural education and have helped to form the rising demand for a wide extension of such education in high schools, normal schools, and schools of elementary grade. Fearing that the demand for the teaching of agricultural subjects may outrun the supply of properly qualified teachers, the Nelson amendment provided that "said colleges may use a portion of this money for providing courses for the special preparation of instructors for teaching the elements of agriculture and the mechanic arts." This bulletin is presented in three parts, as follows: (1) Part I: The nature of the problem; (2) Part II: The means of training the teachers; and (3) Part III: The general outlook--The significance of normal work in the colleges of agriculture. An index is also included. (Contains 2 footnotes.) [Best copy available has been provided.].

Excerpt from On the Training of Persons to Teach Agriculture in the Public Schools If the foregoing points are well taken, we then see that the prob lem of training teachers to teach agriculture in elementary schools is much more than providing them with an equipment of agricultural subject-matter. Here and there the special teacher of agriculture will be needed in elementary work, as' in certain consolidated rural schools, and in well-graded city or village schools. Now and then teachers will be needed to supervise the work in agriculture in sev eral related schools; but Cxperience will probably demonstrate that in most cases this will be only a temporary means of handling the subject, in order to organize it and to start it. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

From the standpoint of support or maintenance, secondary schools giving instruction in agriculture fall into two groups: (1) Those supported by public funds regardless of how the money is raised, and (2) those supported by private benefactions. From the standpoint. of administration, however, the line of cleavage is along rather different lines: (1) General, or nonspecialized, public high schools, with agriculture included among the various other studies taught; and (2) special, or technical agricultural high schools. Many technical agricultural schools are private, but appeal to a general constituency; while many others, both public and private, are for mental and moral delinquents. No technical schools were considered in this bulletin except those maintained, at least in part, by public funds, and open to all the young people of the community. The general high school offering instruction in agriculture is of practically every type recognized among public schools. The political units supporting it range from villages and parts of townships to counties. The special schools, on the other hand, are supported almost without exception by the larger political units, the county, the congressional or special district, or the State at large. Following a brief historical sketch of the subject of agricultural instruction in high schools, contents of this bulletin include the following topics: (1) Organization of secondary schools in relation to the teaching of agriculture; (2) The public high school; (3) Special secondary schools of agriculture; (4) High school teachers of agriculture; (5) Salaries of teachers of agriculture; (6) Provisions for the higher training of teachers of agriculture; (7) Relation of agriculture to the other sciences; (8) Relation of agriculture in the high school to that in the elementary school; (9) Difficulties of instruction; (10) State aid to agriculture in the public schools; and (11) Some typical high schools teaching agriculture. An index is included. (Contains 24 tables, 7 figures, and 26 footnotes.) [Best copy available has been provided.].