3 Review(s)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: in JAPANESE FARMING AND FARMER FOLK I WENT yesterday to the Agricultural College of the Imperial University of Japan, situated at Komaba, near Tokyo, where I had an appointment with Director Matsui. My purpose was to get further information concerning the general condition of Japanese farmers and Japanese farming, but the biggest fact my researches brought out was not in regard to rice or barley or potatoes or taro, or any other field product of the Mikado's empire. Rather it was a fact with regard to what is in every land the most important of all crops â the crop of boys and girls. And the big fact I discovered was simply this: These brown Mongolian farm children, whose land we opened to civilization but fifty years ago, and whom we thought of but yesterday as backward "heathen" â they are getting, as a general proposition, just twice as much schooling as is furnished pupils in many of our American rural districts: their parents are providing, in their zeal for their children's welfare, just twice as good educational facilities as we are giving many of our white farm boys and girls â boys and girls who have in their veins the blood of a race which has carried the flag of human progress for a thousand years, and whom we are expecting to continue leaders in civilization and enlightenment. In other words, so Doctor Matsui told me (and I went today to the Japanese National Department of Education to verify the fact), the Japanese farm boys and girls are getting ten months' schooling a year, while the farm boy or girl inmy own state is getting only five or six months â and when I was in a country school fifteen years ago, not nearly so much as that! Do you wonder that I avoided telling the Japanese educational officer just how our provision for farm boys and girls comp...