FARM SCHOOLS.

Northern Advocate, 23 March 1925, Page 4

FARM SCHOOLS.

It is gratifying to learn that the Agricultural Department is already receiving many inquiries from farmers in the Auckland province as to the arrangements for winter schools. The annual farm school at Ruakura has become a very important and very popular institution, and the success of the school held at Dargaville last year seems to have convinced the Department that North Auckland also must have its annual course of instruction. Both Whangarei and Dargaville have sent in requests for schools this year, and we may hope that the Department will be encouraged by the possession of admirable facilities on this side of the peninsula to give Whangarei a turn on this occasion. Both the Department and the farmers are evidently realising the value of the annual courses of instruction. Education in farming must be continuous, just as, indeed, all education should be, if it is to be real education. In the case of many people, however, especially if they live in large centres of population, the habit of study is broken too soon. The average man, even the average professional man, studies diligently in youth, but if he is not a thinker as well as a practitioner he does not carry on the good work. The true student is a student wherever lie is and whatever he is doing, but unfortunately there are not many of this type. With the farmer, if education really begins it never ends.* There is no such thing to him as a trick of the trade or a professional technique that will serve him at all times and in every place. Even if he remains all his life on the same field and under the same sky his task is always changing. It is not merely that his markets change or his tools. His soil changes, the more rapidly and subtly the more eagerly he robs it, so that mental stagnation leads inevitably to sorrow and want.' The immediate need in New Zealand is research in thoso directions in which production is beginning already to flag; but the permanent and big need is the development in all soil workers of the habit of personal research and of constant intellectual curiosity. While definite provision for systematic education in agriculture is needed very urgently, there is also ample scope for the operations of the winter schools for farmers. Their efficient practical instruction is well worth while.