p. 21 | The Farm a School

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Washington, D. C. · Jul 14, 1904

The Farm a School

We do not get anything like a complete apprehension of country life when we speak of its profits and pleasures. The chief fact to be considered is that, in the country, we are at school. Some years ago a French author published a book entitled “The Population of a Pear Tree.” He found every tree very full of peoples. The relations of all these lives to each other, and to human beings, is a volume that nature opens before any one who cares to study. Asa Gray used to speak of the trees as his professors. The college that he attended was “the valley before his homestead, set around with orchard-covered hills,” and everywhere man and nature at harmony. President Jordan, of Leland Stanford, says that “the best thing that a college can do for a young man is to bring him into the right sort of contact.” The country home not only does this, but it furnishes the curious mind with the very best object-lessons, to inspire the mind and purify the heart.

Professor Search in his “Ideal School” insists that every child is a born naturalist; that his eyes are open to the beauty of the flowers, and to the charm of all life about him, as an endowment of nature. So it comes about that in making a country home you are really establishing a school. Every leaf, and each twig, and the pebbles in the brooks are object-lessons to be studied. You did not think that you were building a schoolhouse, but a mere dwelling-house; yet see how wonderfully things come about. You find that your whole property, not the house only, but the garden, the orchard, the corn-field, and the potato patch, are all parts of an educational plan; and children are born into it to find out what they can of its wonders.

But even more important is the fact that the home in the country, with wise and open-eyed parents, becomes not only a school of instruction, but of application. Every one of the sciences can here be immediately put into practise. Botany goes to work in the garden, and entomology in the orchard. Geology finds its place everywhere about the farm, in its soils and watercourses; while chemistry is the very basis of systematic agriculture. The idea is just beginning to dawn on the minds of our leading educators that, after all, the greatest educational institution is a well-conducted farm. It is learning by doing. Professor Kern wisely states it in this way:—

“Along with his study of the kangaroo, the bamboo and the cockatoo, why not study the animals on the farm, and their proper feeding; the care and composition of the soil of the farm, the improvement of types of grains and vegetables, and the protection of birds beneficial to the farmer?”

We have come upon a few homesteads where it is understood that arithmetic does not find its highest application in problems of banks, stocks and brokerage, but in the practical affairs of production. He solves a greater problem who doubles the quantity of corn grown on his father’s acres, or improves the quality of potatoes and beans, than he who succeeds in working out a quantity of theoretical examples without practical application.

Professor Whitman, of the Marine Biological Laboratory, at Woods Hall, writes that the study of living plants and animals, under control and cultivation, is what is now most needed for further advance in biology. He says that we can not hope to make much more progress in the study of the laws of heredity until we have the means of investigating the phenomena in a series of generations, and under conditions that admit of decisive experimental tests. It is along this line that the aviary of Professor Scott, of Princeton, shows its practical nature. The project of a “biological farm has interested me,” says Professor Whitman, “and I believe that is our next step in the study of nature. The biological laboratories of to-day, in design, equipment, and staff, are almost exclusively limited to the study of dead material.” Botanical gardens and zoological parks have been utilized to some extent, but they are adapted to show purposes mainly, and are of little value for research. A biological farm, which brings observation, experiment, and reflection together, makes them omnipotent; but disjoined, they become impotent. The biological study of to-day has not too much laboratory, but too little of living nature. The farm will certainly do much to mend this deficiency. The farm would enable us to work out life history, bring us face to face with instinct, put it under control, so that we could handle it, photograph it, analyze it, read its history, and extort from it an answer to our question. We are following Professor Whitman somewhat closely in his argument, because he seems to appreciate most fully, among our educators, the

exact relation between knowledge and the application of knowledge. He wants a huge research farm established in conjunction with Woods Holl, in order to make biological research something practical and complete. He says:—

“The farm would enable us to approach all the fundamental problems of life from the two sides of observation and experiment. It would furnish material for study with precise records; and would make it possible to sustain continuity in experimental study.”

This is a deserved and magnificent recognition of the farm. It does not fully acknowledge the great fact that, while many of our ablest men have been working in laboratories and museums, other equally great men and able men have been plowing out, and hoeing out, and planting out some of the most important problems in life’s history. Great progress has been made already on our best farms in the way of biological research and the solution of those problems which bear upon human progress. The laboratory has done its work, and the farm has done its work; the problem now is how to bring these two together, so that every farm shall ultimately become a true school of nature, a place where botany, entomology, and zoology in all its forms shall be made contributive to human welfare. Nor is there anything to hinder just as direct application of mathematics and mental sciences. Mathematics on the farm measures wood, surveys land, and solves hundreds of every-day problems for the individual and family, and there are not a few farmers to-day who have in hand work that, with a just estimate, exceeds that of marine laboratories and most elaborate analysis. Farm work is characteristically synthetical, and while it does not often write books, it traces out life problems. There is, however, no need of jealousy—none of comparison. The farm recognizes the value of the school; the school begins to recognize the value of the farm. Bring them together, and in their co-operation you will have secured that complete education which will hereafter be furnished every human being—knowledge, but not knowledge heaped up in the brain; knowledge applied to life and living.—The Independent.