It is an honor to serve as your County Superintendent of Schools. Search for:. The importance of agricultural education Dr. James J. An agriculture leader should understand why agriculture is important and how to improve and also maintain a good status agriculturally.
With a society that boasts a high literacy rate, we can also create jobs in Sri Lanka for people to continue to teach these things and learn more about upcoming technologies. The program can help teach people in Sri Lanka to become advisors for farmers on what to plant more of or less of depending on the market in order to reduce waste and increase.
Open Document. Essay Sample Check Writing Quality. As this industry grows and expands agriculture is not just farming. With such an evolving industry, education is key to make sure everyone is up to speed with the newest knowledge and technology. Agricultural education, plays a huge role in educating the people within the industry along with people that benefit from it.
However this is far from the truth. This young discipline is much more than sows, cows, and plows. If you like to eat or have clothing you like to wear we need to educate people about the process of producing the food and fiber and how to get it to market. Being able to learn beyond the formal setting is crucial to making achieving our goal.
Not only educating the people in the industry but also educating people that benefit from the industry. We love sharing our story about how we contribute to the industry and how we work so hard to provide the world with a safe and wholesome product.
It is so important that everyone understands the basis of agriculture. To understand where your food comes for is a right that everyone has and we are more than happy to educate everyone on how and why we do certain things to produce the food and.
If you don't follow the rules , your comment may be deleted. User Legend: Moderator Trusted User. To meet increasing demand for water in Colorado and deal with the ongoing drought, we need to take advantage of every opportunity to increase water storage. One possibility with existing reservoirs is to rehabilitate dams….
Support Local Journalism Donate. Community Agriculture Alliance: Meeting demand for water To meet increasing demand for water in Colorado and deal with the ongoing drought, we need to take advantage of every opportunity to increase water storage. The purposes of this act were:. According to the Smith-Hughes Act, the main purpose of vocational education was to make young people fit for employment on the farm or in the farm home. The bill also stated that all secondary schools with agricultural education needed to provide directed or supervised practice in agriculture.
The Smith-Hughes Act allocated federal funds to the states for the purpose of agricultural education. These funds were to be matched by state and local funds, and were to be used for the training and salaries of teachers, supervisors, and directors of agriculture, and for programs in home economics, agricultural economics, and industrial subjects. The act also provided for a Federal Board for Vocational Education. To receive these monies, each state had to submit a plan detailing how they would spend it.
The act also required that all students were to participate in a work experience focusing on livestock and crop projects outside of the regular school day.
This was certainly not a new idea. Rousseau and Pestalozzi had advocated supervised educational practice in Europe as early as the eighteenth century. More recently this practice has been discussed by Froebel, Dewey, Warmbrod, Lamar, and others.
Not all educators, however, agreed that vocational agriculture education was a good use of money, and there was both public and political debate regarding the value of vocational agricultural education.
In fact, the balance between purely academic and vocational education remains a continuing debate. The National Vocational Education Act, passed in , broadened the scope of the original Smith-Hughes Act by adding flexibility, providing for career counseling and employment training, expanding the age groups covered, and providing for the needs of people with special educational needs.
The objectives of this new act were:. It is difficult to get a precise sense of what philosophy was at the root of these various Congressional acts. The role that the federal government played seems to have been one of providing money for the training of farmers and farm wives in practical skills, and for training teachers in agricultural and home economics education.
Little mention was made of socializing skills until the later congressional acts. To gain a deeper understanding of exactly what the philosophy of agricultural education was during those times, writings of a different sort must be examined, specifically, writings by people involved directly, as educators, with agricultural education. At its onset agricultural education was part of a broad-based approach to rural education. The idea of making rural improvement a national issue was brought before President Roosevelt in As a result, the Country Life Commission was appointed in August The commission listed several factors that negatively affected rural families.
Chief among them was the need for education. As early as the importance of relevant education was being discussed, as was the idea of rural-life development.
For example, Liberty Hyde Bailey began his book The Training of Farmers with the lines: "The so-called rural problem is one of the great public questions of the day. It is the problem of how to develop a rural civilization that is permanently satisfying and worthy of the best desires" p. In the preface to Aretas Nolan's The Teaching of Agriculture , an author named Davenport wrote "That measure [success] is found in the performance of those who actually go to the land, live there, and succeed; for, after all, the fundamental purpose of our great system of agricultural education is to insure a better agriculture and make a country life as nearly perfect as possible" p.
Bailey was fairly articulate about the role of education. He believed that education should "assist the farmer to rely on himself and to be resourceful, and to encourage him to work with other farmers for the purpose of increasing the profitableness of farming and of developing a good social life in rural communities.
According to Bailey, proper education is needed for this to happen; education, which must start at the elementary level. He felt that education began "with the child's world and not with the teacher's world, and we must use the common objects, phenomena and activities as means of education. Nolan, writing nine years after Bailey, added that the aims of vocational agricultural education should be to give the student "preparation for wholesome and successful farming and country life" p.
He also explained that agricultural education should be part of a larger educational picture that would produce "an educated country gentleman who works with his hands and gathers about him all the best things which civilization afford. Good education depends on good teaching, which depends, in turn, on good teachers.
The well-educated vocational agricultural teacher, according to Nolan, must be a thorough scientist and a technically trained agriculturalist. He should also have studied rural sociology, agricultural economics, public speaking and "other work to liberalize his general training" p. This is because the teacher's "influence and activities extend outside of the school to the rural life of the community" p.
Nolan devoted an entire chapter of his book to nature study, because it was his belief that studying nature in the field teaches observation and helps students understand the conservation of natural resources. Nolan believed the teaching of agriculture must result in the wise use and conservation of these natural resources. Eaton agreed on the importance of "a philosophy of social purpose in organization, and an organization contributing to the achievement of that purpose" p.
For example, his book includes a discussion of socialism versus democracy. He also connects Bailey's idea of environment and conservation to John Dewey's environment ideal, writing that the "environment is, perhaps, as Dewey tells us, best defined as consisting in those situations which affect the conduct, thoughts, emotions and attitudes of men" p. Eaton goes on to outline four general purposes for education: 1 the adjustment of the individual to his environment, 2 social efficiency, 3 self-realization, and 4 individual growth.
He believed that there were three fundamental principles that governed education. These were: 1 education is modification—all education consists in changes in the mode of action, thought, and feelings of human beings; 2 the business of the educator is the making of stimulus-response bonds in the "educand" student —the main problem for the educator is deciding which bonds the student should make; and 3 education is about being able to transfer newly acquired skills.
Philosophically, Eaton saw education in a dualistic and hierarchical manner. This view reflected the philosophy of Watson, Thorndike, and the other behavioralists. He thus defined education as "the formal process of interaction between the conscious and purposeful manipulator of environment, the 'educator,' at one pole, and the conscious, but so far as the aim of education is concerned, not purposeful 'educand' at the other pole" p.
By the time of Eaton's writing in , the philosophy of agricultural education was becoming complex, drawing elements from several different sources.
The importance of socialization was carried over from earlier times, and a humanistic focus on the development of the individual was also stressed. Elements from Dewey's pragmatic education theory were included, such as the ideas of education as change and transfer. Finally, aspects of behavioral theory were being added, which stressed the dualistic and hierarchic nature of education. Eaton also discussed the importance of both supervised work on farms and supervised employment in agricultural education.
In his discussion Eaton claimed that supervised work needed to be complimented with classroom work that was balanced between academic and vocational classes. From the above writings, one can begin to get a sense of the philosophy of the founders of agricultural education. Farm settlers were an individualistic lot, separated by significant distances and bad roads. But the nation was growing, and agricultural production needed to catch up with the rest of the country.
For this to happen, the infrastructure of rural life needed to be improved, along with agricultural production methods.
A change in philosophy was beginning at this time, as the writings of Thorndike and the early behavioralists began to influence the psychology of education. Agricultural education during the first third of the twentieth century was, for the most part, seated in the humanistic and pragmatic philosophy of John Dewey.
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