My larger education : $b Being chapters from my experienceWashington, Booker T.
General
My larger education : $b Being chapters from my experience
Washington, Booker T.
African Americans -- Biography; Educators -- United States -- Biography; Washington, Booker T., 1856-1915
In recent years there has sprung up in many parts of Europe a movement
to improve the condition of the working masses through education.
Wherever any effort has been made on a large scale to improve
agriculture, it has almost invariably taken the form of a school of some
sort or other. For example, in Hungary, the state has organized
technical education in agriculture on a grand scale. Nowhere in Europe,
I learned, has there been such far-reaching effort to improve
agriculture through experimental and research stations, agricultural
colleges, high schools, and common schools. There is this difference,
however: Hungary has tried to improve agriculture by starting at the
top, creating a body of teachers and experts who are expected in turn to
influence and direct the classes below them. Denmark has begun at the
bottom.
One of the principal aims of the Hungarian Government, as appears from a
report by the Minister of Agriculture, was “to adapt the education to
the needs of the different classes and take care, at the same time, that
these different classes did not learn too much, did not learn anything
that would unfit them for their station in life.”
I notice, for example, that it was necessary to close the agricultural
school at Debreczen, which was conducted in connection with an
agricultural college at the same place, because, as the report of the
Minister of Agriculture states, “the pupils of this school, being in
daily contact with the first-year pupils of the college, attempted to
imitate their ways, wanted more than was necessary for their social
position, and at the same time aimed at a position they were unable to
maintain.”
All this is in striking contrast to the spirit and method of the Danish
rural high school, which started among the poorest farming class, and
has grown, year by year, until it has drawn within its influence nearly
all the classes in the rural community. In this school it happens that
the daughters of the peasant and of the nobleman sometimes sit together
on the same bench, and that the sons of the landlord and of the tenant
frequently work and study side by side, sharing the personal friendship
of their teacher and not infrequently the hospitality of his home.
The most striking thing about the rural high school in Denmark is that
it is neither a technical nor an industrial school and, although it was
created primarily for the peasant people, the subject of agriculture is
almost never mentioned, at least not with the purpose of giving
practical or technical education in that subject.
It may seem strange that, in a school for farmers, nothing should be
said about agriculture, and I confess that it took some time for me to
see the connection between this sort of school and Denmark’s
agricultural prosperity. It seemed to me, as I am sure it will seem to
most other persons, that the simplest and most direct way to apply
education to agriculture was to teach agriculture in the schools.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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