The Grange Advance

Timely Agricultural Topics.

The common schools of farm districts ought to receive more attention from farmers themselves. Why? Because there is rarely any effort made to adapt instruction to the professional needs of the class of pupils who attend them.

A mechanic should be educated in the laws of mechanics, a physician study the laws of hygiene and physiology, a lawyer read law; a farmer's boy should learn botany, vegetable physiology, animal physiology, hygiene, chemistry, constituents of soils, plants, &c. But the common schools of farm districts do not furnish him any such knowledge.

In how many country schools is botany taught? Not one in one thousand, it is safe to assert, ever had a teacher who possessed any botanical knowledge whatever! Yet the farmer boy from his youth to old age has to do with plants constantly. He has also the care of animals, and yet he has not been taught how many stomachs the cow has, nor the difference between ruminating and other animals. His knowledge of the diseases of animals is only the traditional neighborhood "wisdom" handed down from father to son, generation after generation, as often opposed to all physiological law as otherwise. Even the parts of animals with which he has to do has no names for him. He does not even know enough of the points of a good animal to be able to act intelligently as a judge thereof at fairs he may attend, and give reason for his judgment. This is asserted concerning the average country boy, born, brought up and educated on a farm as a farmer.

Is there not need that the farmers who would keep their boys at home and whose ambition is that they shall take charge of the old homestead and perpetuate the family name therein, should be to it that what the country schools may do to this end, by giving instruction in matters relating to farm life and the duties of a farmer in his relation to his crops, is done and done well?

This will never happen without an effort is made by farmers themselves to secure professional instruction for their children--until they insist that the studies their children pursue shall at least relate to the vocation they are to follow.--N. Y. World.