AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION.

Timaru Herald, Volume XXXIX, Issue 2761, 30 July 1883, Page 3

AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION.

A correspondent of the Agricultural Gazette recently wrote: — "Wo are continually getting ' boxes on the ear ' consigned to us from London, through the Press, to assure us that 'of all the hignorant folk m the world wo rustics are the worat.' ' Granted,' we reply ; 'come and show us how you, with your superior education, can farm better ; wo are not indisposed to be taught, but wo expect our teachers to be ablo to do something, and not to be mere talkers.' We have had of late years BCores of town-bred and school-taught occupiers of farms. A great crisis comes ; and everywhere — east, west, south, and north — the educated, scientific, ' technically informed ' farmers have fared the worst. For one pig-headed lout of country breeding who has gone to the bad, through the terrible strain of the times), half-a-dozen of the college studentß have ' gone the same gait. 1 This one truth ia alwayß being left out of mind by our advisers — ' No man has more than a limited amount of energy and power of thought ; if he expends too much upon paper considerations he won't have enough left for adequate attention to actual practice ; and it is upon this that success hinges.' It is moro important to success m farming to have seen that ' some of the milk went to the calves and some to the pigs, &c.,' than to Bee that the skim and .cream are all measured daily, and duly entered m the right columns. Let us put things m their right order, i.e., ' readiness to grapple with the necessities of the minute ' first ; ' light and leading ' second." On thia letter the editor of the Gazette makes the following comment : — " The controversy is a very old one, and one m which practitioners and spectators are generally opposed to one another. Readiness m determining the next best step, and ability to take it, are unquestionably the measure of professional or technical success, whatever be the art or business — but it ia by no means certain that ' light and leading ' are of secondrate consideration, even for this limited purpose. We are inclined to think that j a good sound general education, even more than mere apprenticeship, is, and has been, the great necessity for the farmer m his present plight. He knows already well enough how to conduct hia

business. If he had had a little more general aptitude— and a little less of that oxclnsivo fitness for his one employment I which our correspondent glorifies, it is probable that m mapy a case he would have saved himself. Those at any rate whose general education was such that other lines of life were not altogether hopeless to them, would have savod themselves, m cases whore many a man, having no other chance than sticking to a sinking ship, has altogether foundered. Readiness to grapple with the necessities of the moment may, m some cases, be possible only to those who have the light and leading which, m our correspondent's judgment, are of only second-rato importance. The controversy to which wo have referred is not gunorally concerned with so largely worded an alternative as is here before us. It generally takes the form of a sneer at ' too much scionco for success ' — this being tho very old explanation of a fitiluro which aroso from lack of induatry, lack of skill ; not from too much of anything whatover — least of all from too much of tho knowledge gathered m a wider field of observation than that which is opon to the merely skilful man — call him shepherd, ploughman, herdsman, thatcher, hedger, cow leech, dealer, or what not, or even all seven m him whom you call a practical farmer. All these special aptitudes of hand and eye are necessary ; they are trustworthy guides, being founded on experience ; but surely that also is a trustworthy guido which is also founded on exact experience m a much wider fiold of observation. This wider field of observation is no more dreamland. Its facts are ascertained by investigation, determination, record, far more careful, precise, exact, than any which the farmer knows. There is not one of those on which farmers do not differ, whereas of those — the immense mass of determinations m the field of science — there can be no doubt whatever. ■' And if a man possessed of all this knowledge fails at farming it is not because of what ho knows — it i» because he does not possess the knowledge which personal experience m the field can alone confor. He requires skill and intelligence ia other fields beside tliOße which he has already mastered. He has not got too much science — he has too little of that particular department of - knowledge which, as a farmer, he requires. The point, however, to which it seeniß worth while to draw attention now is — that, of two men equally capable as skilful practical farmers, it is probably the one who, having had the better general education, has also capabilities m directions outside of his present business that is likely to save himself amid the general distress. Certainly a better general education, and consequently general capacity and well-founded selfconfidence, are what are now especially required m those whose prosperity depends on the bargain with the landowner by which the whole subsequent career of a tenant-farmer is colored.