The Bee

TRAIN YOUR BOYS AND GIRLS RIGHT

Don't Let Them Waste Time on Useless Studies.

WHAT CAN YOU EXPECT?

A Boy Trained For a Profession Is Not Apt to Be Contented or Successful as a Farmer. You Agriculture Is Quite as Important as the Classics or the "Learned" Professions.

Could you expect to rear a fine trotting horse or a good steady farm animal if you sent the beast in its early youth to a man who trained a stableful of fancy saddle stock? Can you expect your boy to go through the ordinary rural high school and have him "stay hitched" on the farm? These propositions are identical. The average county high school holds up ideals and teaches topics that will necessarily lead the boy to sigh for a city career in the learned professions, so called.

Are you and I to blame? Of course we are. It is only necessary for the parent, the taxpayers, the everyday folks who hold the purse strings to say: "Here. we have had enough of an education that is so old that it is musty- an education that is all books. Give our children an education that fits them for life here at home."

This new education that will fit people for life is coming, but it is coming too slowly in the country. Our very best young blood is being siphoned out of the country and into the city. The cities do not need this fine new blood; the country does.

It is quite easy to say that the cry is rising, "Back to the farm.". But it is not at all easy for the city man to go-in fact, the city man, the man bred and born in a big city, can hardly go back to the soil with any degree of certainty that he will succeed. He lacks the technical part of farm work that comes through daily contact with live, growing things, that contact which the country boy has had since the day he first began to notice things.

If these statements seem at all too strong simply pick up the Kentucky Educational Directory of 1912. Turn to the list of county high schools on page 84 and run through them. Out of about 180 approved high schools 114 are classical or English high schools and only thirty-six are scientific high schools.

Just so long as our country boys are pushed through schools that are classical in their tendencies just so long will our rural population drift cityward, for their education has developed them most carefully for that life.

IF YOUR BOY IS TO FARM TRAIN HIM FOR A FARMER.

IF YOUR BOY IS TO BE A PROFESSIONAL MAN TRAIN HIM IN THAT DIRECTION.

THIS IS 1913.

Would you plant and harvest as in 1850?

Would you light your house as in 1850?

Would you cook over the fire as in 1850?

Would you use a "muzzle loader" as in 1850?

Would you breed razorbacks as in 1850?

If everything on your farm and in your home bears the mark of 1913 why will you insist upon a school that was planned in 1850?

If your children are to live and earn a living in 1913 would it not be better to give them a 1913 education?

BY ALL MEANS.

Superintendent Barker has the right idea. He proposes to establish an agricultural course in the West Liberty high school. That should have been done at the outset. Wonder if there be any who are so shortsighted as to oppose? We hope not. An awful howl would be raised if some one should propose to take history, grammar or civics out of curriculum. Agriculture is just as important as either of these.-Editorial Licking Valley Courier.