Repository: UIHistories Project: Board of Trustees Minutes - 1868 [PAGE 12]

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courses, and to make them anxious that their relatives and friends should avail themselves of the advantages of this Institution, In short, such a course will create a better appreciation of industrial education. " 3. Such a course is also directly valuable as a means of education. While it is somewhat superficial, it has a value from coming into immediate contact with the facts, practices and economies of every-day experience that can hardly be overrated. This is well expressed in the words of the late Prof. John A. Porter, in the New Englander for November, 1859. ' The solution which we prepose is the enlistment of practical men, who are not professional teachers, in the work of instruction, and their combination in such numbers, that a small contribution of time and labor from each shall make a sufficient aggregate to meet the object in view. The special necessity for such a system, in the case of the pursuit we are considering, grows out of the fact that there is much in agriculture which has not yet taken the form of science, and can only be acquired from practical men.' " 4. Such courses would be of value to the Faculty of the University in bringing them into contact with the classes whose needs and deficiencies they wish to supp'y, and thus giving them a more correct idea of practical education, and the drift of things outside the academic walls. Teachers need this, above all other teachers, in an Industrial University."

V. Personal observation of the farms of our best farmers, and the manufactories of our best mechanics, would be a valuable method of getting hold of the best practical methods in the varied pursuits of Agriculture and the Mechanic Arts; and through the medium of this report the result of such observations could be communicated to all who cared to know. Thus, in another way, the practices of our best grain, grass and stock growers could be communicated to all our farmers, and our methods of farming much improved. Visits to the orchards and vineyards of our best fruit growers, would give, as they already have given, new and better ideas of Horticulture. The workshops of our mechanics would doubtless furnish other valuable material for the study of our artisans. By such methods as these we may, I think, fairly hope to do a great and good work for our fair and fertile State, and make her as illustrious in the intelligence and wise economy of her industries, as she already is in her natural advantages and her political and military power. "W". C. F.