the boy shall be engaged in real farming long enough and earnestly enough to develop those real powers of discrimination which ought to be exercised in determining on graduation whether or not he should go out to be a farmer. If he can not get up at 4 o'clock in the morning on the farm that requires it; if he can not stand dairying; if he can not stand the kind of work required for success in the sort of farming he thought he would like to follow, then he ought not to be a farmer. He is starting out in the wrong direction, and the quicker he finds this out, the better it will be for him. The best thing you can do for him is to put him right up against the real thing, and then let him determine whether he has made the proper selection of a calling. In this way, if farming is not what he is fit for, he can change before it is too late. We try to put the boys up against the real thing at the school itself, so far as its equipment and work will permit.

Fortunately, most of our boys have lived near enough to enable them to live and work at home during the school year, and part of the others have been secured jobs on farms near by, with the privilege of attending the school. The work of the school has been organized and conducted primarily for the benefit of such boys. Of course, we used our common sense and did not duplicate equipment that was right at hand, for the Smith's Agricultural School is within about 6 miles by trolley of the State Agricultural College. The school had a herd of cows. I advised the trustees to sell that herd, and we sold it, because I did not want our instructors nor our boys to be thinking one single minute about school cows. I wanted them to think about cows, and their profitable management on going farms. Those boys who live at home and come to school in the morning and go back at night we have worked on their own cows.

We men had organized the Connecticut Valley Breeders' Association, and had determined at the outset that we would never have a discussion without a demonstration of the thing we were talking about. For example, we decided to discuss the choice of a male calf for the improvement of a dairy herd, and we decided to have bull calves for our demonstration that came from families whose producing qualities were well known-families whose records had been kept. It turned out that the only place we could hold a demonstration with such calves was at the Massachusetts Agricultural College. We went there and held our meeting. In the midst of a demonstration of a perfect Guernsey bull calf, whose dam and dam's sister were beside him, both high record cows, and whose sire was known to be from high-producing families, a young farmer said in an undertone: "He ought to be a good one; the State owns him, and the State feeds him." Everywhere there is a tendency to discount college-owned or schoolowned live stock and operations. If excellent, most farmers are likely to feel that a "barrel of money" from some easy source has

produced the result, that such a result is beyond the reach of the man who must depend upon his own farming for a living.

Our boys are given such benefits as are derivable in a practical school from judging and scoring State-owned, live stock, but we take the boys to the State college for this part of their training. Our major effort is to deal with animals and operations which are parts of the equipment and work of actual going-farm enterprises. To this end we are going to have our boys build a model dairy barn and bring in for a test period one cow from each farm-the home farm of the boys. The dairy school for boys from a distance will then be run during three months of the winter. We are going to agree with the fathers of the boys as to a proper return for the use of the animals thus furnished for the three months' period. We will share with them the profits; or, for that matter, the bargain would be a good one if they were given all the profits. Under this plan every cow tested will be part and parcel of an economic farming proposition; she will represent some farmer's money and some farmer's judgment. If she is found to be returning a profit, well and good; if she is not returning a profit, the best possible service that can be rendered the owner is to let him know that she is a losing proposition.

Our boys put out 500 apple trees on a permanent, semipermanent, and filler plan this last spring; they dehorned, pruned, grafted, and sprayed old apple trees; they put out 3,000 forest trees of four different varieties; some of them have built poultry houses, and the others are working on their poultry houses now. They have fitted up a model horse stable. In short, in everything we do we try to create permanent improvements and to practice profitable methods. In all phases of our vocational education in Massachusetts, we are emphasizing the fundamental importance of "productive work."

Give a boy a stake to work for that will stimulate him to accomplish what you desire him to accomplish. Some of our boys need to be earning something. They need to be pulling their own weight in the family boat. Home farm work-not everything any year, but something every year, directed by the school-we believe to be the best means to this end. I do not myself have very much confidence in work on little school plats for boys over 14 years old. I do not believe we have a right to call a boy back from a home farm to work on a small school plat during the summer. If we have work at the school, let us have not a plat but an acre, and raise a crop worth marketing. Let us conduct our operations in such a way as to teach the boy the benefit of applying the best methods under extensive field conditions, by showing him a good profit produced by his faithful and carefully directed efforts.

I know there is a difference of opinion here. There are many things we can learn from demonstration plats; in their proper place

they are essential, particularly with reference to methods or crops that are purely experimental and should be tried out first in a small way. But it seems to me that in this secondary school work we should direct our attention mainly, not to experimental work, but to demonstrating what have proved to be "dead sure things" somewhere under farming conditions like those in our vicinity.

The results of our observations have led us to put forward this method for the development of our agricultural school movement throughout the State. Wherever there is a community or a group of towns wanting our assistance in the building up and maintaining of such a school, we say: "We will advise you as to buildings, equipment, and land; and the State will pay half of the expense of maintaining the school if you keep it up and run it in accordance with methods which we can approve." We have adopted the plan of what we call "approval in advance." At the end of a given year we go over the plans and if we find any mistakes, we correct them before we make our arrangements for the next year. If we can "approve in advance" we will help to support the work.

But the thing we are pinning our faith to, gentlemen, is the man— the man out among the farmers and among the farmers' boys, in what we call vocational agricultural departments. We, working with the local authorities, pick a man, put him in a high school and require him to give all of his time to agriculture and nothing else. We surround him with an advisory committee of five of the best local farmers. We tell him to take a three months' vacation, not in the summer but in the winter-January, February, and March.

Why do we give him so much vacation? In some States you require him to devote 11 months of the year to the work. Well, we want a permanently progressive teaching staff in our State in charge of our agricultural work, and a man can not always be lifting himself by his own boot straps. If he has a liberal vacation at that time of the year, he can go to any one of the various agricultural colleges and take a special course at a time when the professors are at home. He can thus renew his energy and his knowledge. He can bring himself up to date. He can get freshened up and come back in the spring full of vigor, animation, and enthusiasm for the work of the ensuing year.

Another thing: We are now working for the 1912 crop in all our agricultural school work in the State of Massachusetts. Not general and deferred values, but values local, individual, and immediate are our aim. Now, we may talk peanuts in the South, or citrous fruits in California, or sugar beets in Michigan, or cotton in Mississippi, or sugar cane in Louisiana, or tobacco in Kentucky. It will all be interesting, very interesting; and somewhere along the line we ought to talk of these things because of their broadening influence. Such

study gives dignity and horizon to the calling. But after all we must get right down to this boy's farm and that boy's farm, deal with conditions as each boy in the school knows them to exist on his own farm. If we dealt largely with school grains and school crops, if we dealt with silos and fertilizers, if we dealt with breeds and breeding or feeds and feeding, if we dealt with general principles only, we might almost as well be dealing with peanuts, and citrous fruit, tobacco, cotton, and sugar cane. We must get our general principles clearly into the minds of the boys. But we must show them, after they have mastered these general principles, that we can apply our teaching through our practical and progressive instructors to the particular conditions as they exist on the individual home farms of the boys themselves.

Two men got on my train the other day at Hornell, N. Y. They had rifles and they had ammunition. Their real sport would begin when they began to get their eyes on the birds. If you want a meal of game and do not get your eye on the bird, you go hungry. The bird we are getting our eye on is not birds in general, but the particular bird. After generalizing, finally, if we succeed in our work, we must get down to the particular bird, to John's farm, on which, in 1912, he wants to grow an acre of corn and get from that acre of corn his school clothes and as much more of profit as he can make that acre produce.

I must not talk very much longer. In closing, let me only add that there is one other great merit in this high-school agricultural department proposition, and that is its flexibility. If you can not do anything noteworthy at a given school, or if you get the wrong man, or if people lose courage, and you have to withdraw your effort in one locality, you have no buildings to rot down, you have no equipment to rust out. You can simply transfer your efforts and State aid somewhere else, still hoping to come back at a later day with a better man and woo your maiden once more.

V. THE UNPREPARED TEACHER OF AGRICULTURE IN HIGH SCHOOLS AND COLLEGES OF EDUCATION.

By A. V. STORM,

Professor of Agricultural Education, Iowa State College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts, Ames, Iowa.

This question is not one of my own choosing, but has been assigned me; nor would I have selected it had it been left to my choice. However, I am willing to discuss it because it leads to the consideration of questions that are pertinent at this time. At the outset I wish to say that I do not wish to be circumscribed too closely by the wording of the topic, limiting as it does the charge of unpreparedness to teachers of agriculture in secondary schools and colleges of education. While it is highly appropriate that we should give special attention to the proper preparation of those who are to teach agriculture in secondary schools and colleges of education, let us not lose sight of the great amount of unpreparedness on the part of many of their colaborers, especially in the colleges and universities, nor of the other fact that the unprepared in agriculture are found in other educational positions than those of high schools and colleges of education.

There are perhaps two reasons why we see so clearly this unpreparedness in the teaching of agriculture in high schools and colleges of education, while we have so long been blind to a similar unpreparedness in the teaching of other college subjects. The first is the newness of agriculture as a subject in the public school curriculum; being new and hence more or less of an interloper among the already numerous full-grown and respectable members of the educational social circle, it is scrutinized with the greatest circumspection to be quite sure that it is entitled to recognition; and, as in many of our social groups of to-day, the one seeking admission must show far better credentials to get in than many of those already in must show in order to stay there. However, this is not a misfortune, for the more carefully the friends of agricultural education guard its fitness for entrance into the curriculum, the more signal will be its achievements and the more helpful its career.

The second reason why we challenge the unpreparedness of these teachers of agriculture and raise no voice against that of certain other teachers is because of a difference in the standards of preparedness. There are university and college professors holding positions of influence who, from their moral and personal habits,