Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: INTRODUCTION While it is not the province of the public schools, as at present organized, to teach the trades, it is their privilege and their duty to put the child in intelligent touch with the life about him and to use all of the means at hand in the process of education. Much has been said about the tendency among boys to leave the farm for the town, and many attempts at explanation and justification have been made. While it is perfectly proper for the boy to leave his father’s farm and seek his fortune in a crowded city, sometimes he has gone with the mistaken notion that he could substitute wit for work in life’s contest, or because of a lack of appreciation of the dignity of labor. Sometimes, also, he has gone because he has failed to see his opportunities on the farm. The fact that he has not always bettered his condition has suggested a possibility of bringing about at least a more intelligent consideration of the question. With the lessening of distance between town and country by telephone, interurbans, rural routes, with the conveniences of life brought to the very door of the farmer, with much of the drudgery of farm life removed by machinery, it looks as though the tide might turn from town to country, or at least as though the exodus from the farm might be stayed. AGRICULTURE THE DOMINANT INTEREST An essential factor in education, which for the most part has been overlooked, is to be found in the environment of the child. One’s power of interpretation is bounded by his experience, and yet we have gone on trying to fit a strange world down on to the child. We have expected him in some way or other to understand language and solve problems that are entirely foreign to him. This is neither good pedagogy nor good common sense. The school work must be based…