synthesis is better, both for potatoes and for boys. In good time,
if the boy is kept growing, he will have outgrown his stone-bruises,
his chapped hands, his freckles, his warts, and his physical and
spiritual awkwardness. The weeds will have disappeared.

The potato-patch is your true pedagogical laboratory and
conservatory. If one cannot learn pedagogy there it is no fault of
the potato-patch. Horace must have thought of _in medias res_ while
hoeing potatoes. There is no other way to do it, and that is
bed-rock pedagogy. Just to get right at the work and do it, that's
the very thing the teacher is striving toward. Here among my
potatoes I am actuated by motives, I invest the subject with human
interest, I experience motor activities, I react, I function, and I
go so far as to evaluate. Indeed, I run the entire gamut. And then,
when I am lying beneath the canopy of the wide-spreading tree, I do a
bit of research work in trying to locate the sorest muscle. And, as
to efficiency, well, I give myself a high grade in that and shall
pass _cum laude_ it the matter is left to me. If our grading were
based upon effort rather than achievement, I could bring my aching
back into court, if not my potatoes. But our system of grading in
the schools demands potatoes, no matter much how obtained, with scant
credit for backaches.

We have farm ballads and farm arithmetics, but as yet no one has
written for us a book on farm pedagogy. I'd do it myself but for the
feeling that some Strayer, or McMurry, or O'Shea will get right at it
as soon as he has come upon this suggestion. That's my one great
trouble. The other fellow has the thing done before I can get around
to it. I would have written "The Message to Garcia," but Mr. Hubbard
anticipated me. Then, I was just ready to write a luminous