Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 79.djvu/391

Rh only features of agriculture that have pedagogic cohesion are the sciences involved.

Presented as they have been without any experience in their utilization having been afforded, high school sciences have not kept pace with educational needs. The fault seems to be that the student has been held too rigidly to the accuracy of an accumulated knowledge with too little experience with the method of its acquisition. Pure science can be but imperfectly appreciated by the adolescent who still retains his dominant childish interest in the use, rather than the organization and structure, of things. And if science could be taught as pure science its destructive tendency, striking as it does at the root of authority, is of questionable propriety where it does not at the same time furnish a philosophy of life. It is especially necessary under a rational government, such as ours, that it be made humanistic. And humanistic science is applied science.

The purposes of high school agriculture, therefore, await the reform of the high school sciences; and a reform in the direction of applied science is evident to many science teachers who have no special interest