AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXV, Issue 20086, 25 October 1928, Page 16

AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION.

Sir, —I quite agree with your correspondent, " A Father," when he says " no farming for my boys." but, unfortunately, that saying is not sound in economics. Farming should bo a better life than any occupation at all times, but it cannot be proved so in practice to-day. Why? I don't- doubt the country has prospered on farming, but has farming been carried on by sound methods, or has it just depended on rising markets, borrowed money and robbing {ho natural fertility of the soil ? I have nothing against what is being taught, but it is what is not being taught that causes my feeble pen to scratch a few lines. Puwera State Farm is the only recorded instance of a farm scientist telling the public they were going to try and make it pay, and it is nothing but a gross failure. Any fool can 111 alto grass grow, buy cows, make them milk and fatten pigs anywhere if ho has the money and does not need to take into consideration the economic cost. I will defy anybody to show that Puwera has been managed with (lie intelligence the average farmer uses. Agriculture is the systemising of tho arts in husbandry. A few of the arts in husbandry aro taught by farm scientists and other teachers who virtually know very little of them. That, means these teachers are trying to give the pupils elementary knowledge which they should gain from a systematic study of the rudiments of husbandry. People might as well try and learn to be carpenters, engineers and shopkeepers without arithmetic and elementary geometry as try and learn to bo farmers by learning how to grow grass, etc., without a knowledge of the rudiments which seem to mo to be the principles of animal intelligence, instinct, correlation of life, domestication, habitation, selection, subsistence, fertilisation, irrigation. cultivation and afforestation all dovetailed into one another, <hf same as have subtraction and division in arithmetic. 1 defy Sir Oeorge Fowlds or any authority on education to show logically, not merely assert as most people do, that tho rudiments of husbandry are svsteriiriilea lly taught in any school in the Dominion. The primary school syllabus says, " There seems to bo a good deal of haziness and lack of aim in this subject . . . , teachers should learn off t' ,e pupils, elc." What chaneo has farming with an admission like thatT wns., "had" badly when I started fanning, And. I don't mind admitting it, but 1 have, one consolation, and that is I know 1 who were " had " worse than nn'. J God give these farm scientists, school teachers and educational authorities the in. (diligence to see they themselves are only fumbling and bluffing tho public with the*, subject the same as farmers aro doing with their own business. Maungatapere K. M. Stevens.