Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/437

Rh The next generation also needs to be educated without losing its contacts with the life of the family and the farm. Otherwise the young men will go to Egypt to find employment as clerks or emigrate to Europe or America in search of better commercial opportunities, as they are now beginning to do. Ordinary school conditions are in the nature of a training for commercial life, but there is no corresponding training for agricultural life. This deficiency may be a more serious hindrance to agricultural progress among the Jews because of their stronger parental instincts. The greater the stress that is laid on the formal education the stronger the tendency to develop urban habits of school life in the children. To what extent this educational propensity may have interfered with the success of agricultural movements among the Jews would be difficult to determine, but it is evidently a factor at the present time. Though commonly considered as a non agricultural people, the Jews have clung to their agricultural traditions with wonderful tenacity and have made innumerable attempts to place themselves on an agricultural basis. It would be important as well as interesting to determine what has held them back.

The difficulties of agricultural education are not peculiar to Palestine. The same limitations to human progress are being encountered even in countries that have elaborate provisions for agricultural education. More practical methods must be found, that is, more truly human methods if the full possibilities of any country or any people are to be realized. The issue seems more acute in Palestine, in the presence of a people who have fled from the urban civilization of Europe, as their ancestors escaped from Egyptian bondage. Urban educational ideas must be left behind if the permanent deliverance is to be attained. If a solution could be found, in spite of the extreme difficulty of the problem, no movement of our times would command a wider interest. The world would owe a new debt to the Jew, and Palestine would become more than ever the historical background of our civilization.