towns, villages and consolidated rural schools, and even in the elementary courses of the district rural schools. The three distinctive kinds of schools in which agricultural education will be most intensively and successfully taught are State agricultural colleges; large agricultural high schools, probably one for each ten counties; and consolidated rural and village schools to which the pupils are taken in school wagons. The State normal schools also are preparing to do especially good service in fitting teachers to instruct in agriculture, and many of the colleges of agriculture are establishing educational departments in which to make a specialty of helping prepare the large number of teachers needed. Many city and town public schools, also non-public schools of all grades, including universities, will also provide more or less instruction relating to the farm and farm home, and the aggregate of their work will be considerable.

But the bulk of the work will be done in an articulated system made up of the four classes of schools which are attended mainly by pupils from the farm, most of whom are to manage farms and farm homes. These are, first, district rural schools, usually with one room, to which the pupils walk; and while these schools are destined to give way in well-settled farm communities to the larger school next named, probably a hundred thousand will remain in sparsely settled and isolated communities. Schools of the second class are formed by consolidating six or eight one-room schools in the open country, and the pupils are transported to and from the schools, for the most part, in school wagons. These consolidated rural schools (of which we should have 20,000 or 30,000, located on small school farms among farms, and giving instruction to pupils from farm homes) to distinguish them from district rural schools, may properly be called farm schools, as Grant Farm School, Owl Creek Farm School. Schools of the third class are on large school

farms, provide dormitories, or allow the pupils to board in the adjoining town, are of secondary grade, and are called agricultural high schools. They receive students from consolidated rural schools and from the district rural schools, also from village and town schools, most of whom return to the farm, but they also prepare students to enter the agricultural college. The State agricultural colleges constitute the fourth class. In a few States they are separate institutions; in others they are joined with colleges of mechanic arts and colleges of science; and in yet other cases the agricultural college is one of a group of colleges making up the State university.

In the district rural school some subjects relating to agriculture and home making may be successfully taught by well-prepared teachers. Some rather inexpensive equipment can be afforded, and the practical facilities of the farm and the farm home may be used extensively. Here the preparation of the teacher is the paramount consideration.

The consolidated rural school, or farm school, receives pupils from a district four to six miles across. It has a ten-acre farm, a four or five-room school building, a cottage for the principal and small farm buildings. On the half of the school farm which is used for a combined campus and farmstead, there are groves, orchards, gardens, ornamental trees, shrubs and flowers and ample playgrounds. On the other half, are field crops on miniature fields and plats. The pupils, under the instruction of the teacher who is trained to teach agriculture, use all these plantings as a working laboratory. The older pupils attend school only six months and the alternating six months they help raise crops on the home farm. The principal can help the parents supervise their work and make the summer a truly educational period of apprenticeship in the actual business of farming. In like

manner the assistant principal, who is trained to teach home economics, can visit the older girls in their homes during the vacation and thus supplement the instruction given in cooking, sewing and other household subjects taught during the winter in school. Thus the one to two hundred farms and farm homes in the consolidated rural school district are great laboratory adjuncts to the farm school.

The large agricultural high school has a group of trained technical teachers in agriculture and home economics, each with such equipment as is necessary to demonstrate and give practice in the various special lines taught.

The agricultural college is still more highly equipped with technical teachers, laboratories, libraries and facilities to give training preparatory to teaching research or other public or private service in agriculture or home economics, as well as for the practical affairs of the farm and the farm home.

The college receives students from agricultural high schools or from other secondary schools giving an equivalent of preparation. The agricultural high school receives pupils from the district rural school; and from the consolidated rural, village or town school where a partial agricultural high school course is given, students are received with such advanced standing as their advancement warrants. The consolidated rural school provides the elementary eight-year course, and often one, two or more years of the high school course. A system under which many farm pupils can secure the elementary course and two years of high school work in the consolidated rural school, or in the village or town school, and a two-year finishing course in a large agricultural high school, would suit the needs of hundreds of thousands who are to be farmers and farm homemakers. The expense in time and money would not be

too great and the education and inspiration for good farming, superior home-making and enlightened citizenship thus sustained in the open country will be beyond our fondest dreams. Boys from villages, cities and sparsely settled districts who wish to learn farming, can often secure places on good farms where they can work in summer and attend the consolidated rural school or the agricultural high school in winter.

This general scheme of four classes of schools, closely interwoven as a part of our entire school system, promises to provide both general and vocational school facilities for nearly all who are to live on farms. At the same time, vocational as well as general training is being developed for those who work in the non-agricultural industries. Thus vocational education in the productive industries and in home making promises to follow technical education for the professions. When all the schools needed to provide vocational training for the vast numbers of those who are to work on the farm, in the shop and in the home are thus developed, the specialization of those designed to teach these specific subjects will be produced by normal schools and normal departments in secondary and collegiate schools, as now teachers are prepared to teach the general school subjects. The preparation of teachers will be the great problem only during the period of rapidly developing vocational education, and during that period wages for those who can successfully introduce these subjects will be relatively high and the service most useful and attractive.

CHAPTER II

FARMING AS A VOCATION

Farming a good business.-Since all lines of human endeavor are open to free competition, people flock into any vocation which temporarily seems especially profitable, and they as quickly leave a vocation which becomes unprofitable, all industries thus being kept at nearly the average in opportunity. The law of supply and demand, in the main, controls. Farming is, on the whole, a conservative line of business, though often subject to severe variations in the profit it affords. In farming, few men become millionaires, and few paupers. It is not a line of the greatest financial opportunities nor of the greatest misfortunes. Its money rewards average less than those of the average city vocations, but including with things money will buy, those things money will not purchase, or for which cash is not needed, farming furnishes as much, or more, on the average, of remuneration as does effort applied in the average of other vocations. In conducting the family-sized farm, the minor portion of the remuneration comes in the form of money, while good food, clothing, a beautiful home, wholesome outdoor employment, independence, and other useful and enjoyable features of rural life constitute the larger portion.

State benefited by a strong race of farmers.—The changed conditions of modern times require a smaller proportion of the whole people on the farms than formerly; only about one-third of all engaged in gainful operations in the United States are now tillers of the soil, and the indications are that this will be further reduced to one-fourth of the whole, when the ratio must become nearly static. Labor-saving machinery makes