Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/436

432 educational progress. The improvement of agricultural conditions is the single issue on which the highly diversified population of the country might be expected to agree.

Whether any ordinary system of formal education in schools will have any practical result in Palestine seems very doubtful. Some parts of the country are already overstocked with different kinds of charitable and religious institutions, many of them engaged in educational work, but apparently with as little relation to the requirements of actual life as similar institutions in Europe and America. Though most of the colonists are already past school age when they arrive in Palestine, yet they are acutely in need of learning how to work and live in the new country. For effective agricultural education in a country like Palestine, there must be places where men, young or old, can acquire correct habits of doing farm work, become accustomed to the atmosphere of farm life, and learn something of its possibilities. Agriculture is a habit and a method of life, not merely a science to be studied or an art to be pursued for profit alone.

Agricultural education, in the narrow sense of formal scholastic instruction in agricultural facts, commonly fails to accomplish its intended purpose of improving the life of the farm. At the same time that the boys are being instructed in agricultural knowledge they may also be losing their agricultural habits and becoming less adapted to agricultural life. After their courses in agriculture they are more likely to enter some other line of activity involving less responsibility than agriculture and more similar to the work and life of the school to which they have become thoroughly accustomed. The unintentional training in town life usually has a stronger influence than the formal instruction of the school. The event proves the boy has been educated away from agriculture rather than towards it. Whether agriculture or other subjects are studied makes little difference in a comparison with the change of habits of life. Thus the general effect of agricultural schools and colleges in the United States has been to take more of the boys away from the farm, or, in other words, to make our civilization more industrial and commercial, rather than more agricultural.

Even less can be expected in Palestine than in the United States from the establishment of agricultural schools of the ordinary sort, because of the lack of previous agricultural contacts on the part of the students. The American student who has grown up on a farm and is thoroughly familiar with farm conditions is much more likely to project some of the new facts that he learns in the school against the background of farm life, but in Palestine most of the newly arrived colonists are without agricultural experience. They need practise in farm life and farm operations even more than they need instruction in agricultural facts.