No cause has more retarded the progress of education in the agricultural part of the community than a mistaken opinion, in regard to the use that can be made of it.—That the advantages of learning, in every state of society, should not be appreciated by the grossly ignorant, is not to be wondered at; but that men well informed on many subjects, should fall into the vulgar error of denying the advantages arising from extensive knowledge is really surprising.
We hear it frequently observed by farmers, who have sons to educate, that they intend such a one to follow his own occupation; and it will be necessary that he should be taught to read, write, and cypher to the "Rule of Three." Now it is believed with theseextensiveacquirements, a farmer will be able to keep his accounts tolerably decent; to estimate the amount of any number of bushels of grain, at a given sum per bushel: but I shall forbear to mention all the advantages which this kind of knowledge may confer. The intelligent farmer well knows it has a boundary, and a very limited one too. To endeavour by force of reason to induce this class of farmers to abandon their errors, would be time spent to little purpose; their minds are not recipient for truths which lie beyond the narrow boundary of their learning.
It is to the enlightened and public spirited yeomanry of our country, that we are to look for a change in the education of our youth.—Change, did I say? Rather an entire new system of education. I ask this class of farmers if they have any such a thing as an agricultural education among them. I mean an elementary, a systematic one: we train our youth (at school) for the counting-house, and not for the farm. We teach them the mysteries of thecent per cent; all the dark intricacies of annuities, all the crooks and turns, and all the advantages of barter, discount and fellowship. While of Natural Philosophy, Chemistry, Botany, Mineralogy, Geology and other sciences, directly or indirectly connected with agriculture, they remain as ignorant as if they never were to apply any of the principles to practice. Can it then be wondered that agriculture has advanced so little? Ought we not rather to wonder that it has advanced so much as it has, since so little pains are taken to qualify our youth to make improvement in it? As an art it is perhaps more capable of improvement than any other, because the sciences on which it is founded, are more numerous and more extensive in their nature.
By whom are improvements to be made? by men whose knowledge of the art has never deviated from the beaten track which their forefathers had trodden, and this knowledge was bequeathed to them with this condition, "thus far shalt thou go and no farther?" Common sense answers in the negative. Do we expect important improvements in our present systems of agriculture, from men who have been educated merchants or schoolmasters? Their minds cannot be sufficiently interested in such subjects to pursue them either with ardour or with profit. They have never acquired a taste for those studies which would render the different operations of farming a series of philosophical experiments.
In too many instances, farmers' sons, who have been educated as above described, lose all relish for their occupation, and engage in some mercantile business. In many instances they contrive to worry through life without deserting their calling, though they receive little pleasure from any part of it, except counting the money which it yields. The source from which we have received our new systems of farming lay in quite a different quarter. Inhabitants of cities, or men who have been educated for some learned profession, are our teachers in the rules of husbandry. We will suppose these men to be well versed in the sciences above alluded to. But have they ever learned their application to agriculture? If not, as well might they adduce principles on that subject, as a person to attempt solving an abstruse problem in surveying, who has only learned the elements of geometry. When I spoke of anagricultural education, I did not confine my views to the sciences above specified.Practiceis an indispensable part of this education. The chemist may sit in his laboratory and give us a system of agriculture, stolen from European treatises, and may occasionally sprinkle it with some hard words of his own; but it is only thepractical and scientific farmerthat can draw from this heterogenous mass, all that is valuable and applicable to his own purpose, and nothing more. The principles he receives from books must be tested by experiment. To make important deductions from these experiments, unwearied patience must be exercised, in order to sift real conclusions from those which are only plausible. Let him not sit down supinely, after having ascertained a rule, for general rules in this science as in most others have their exceptions, and an accurate knowledge of these exceptions will require much time for discernment, and investigation. If agriculture, then, is an art of calling forth all the faculties of the mind, why is it not taught like other arts by a regular and systematic education?
Agricola.