The Massachusetts Home Project Plan of Vocational Agricultural Education

You are doubtless asking yourselves whether the Massachusetts plan of vocational agricultural education has been thoughtfully undertaken and whether it is yielding practical results. It is a big subject. I have over four hundred and fifty slides on it. Those which I am going to show you are a very short set, selected almost at random; and I hope you will believe me when I say that they are not in any sense the best slides. They are simply a set of slides selected to fit the time assigned. The most I can hope for is to give you a quick flight over the field-merely a bird's-eye view of our plan and some of the results. First, I invite you to consider a little symbolism which I have been using for the past four or five years in the effort to keep my own thinking straight on this subject of vocational education. Remember, we are considering a type of education presumably for pupils over fourteen years of age, namely, the secondaryschool age. We are considering a type of secondary-school training. The typical high school of ten years or more ago was a classical high school, a general school devoting itself to cultural subjects. This we might symbolize by a capital C. We have looked up to it, and justly so. Because that type of school met the needs of relatively few, there were those who thought we ought to have a different type of education of secondary grade for those who desired direct preparation for life. Because, again, there were so many cases where the boys did not go to the high school because they saw in the high-school courses nothing that would be of use to them, as they viewed it, there have been those who have made new ventures in the field of secondary education in what has been called "vocational training." This we may symbolize by a capital V.