In the winter of 1886-87 I was teaching a little district school in Michigan and was about as unsuccessful as the average country school-teacher. A few of my pupils seemed to show an almost human interest in their studies, but with most of them study was merely a matter of going through the motions. When it finally dawned upon me that perhaps this deadly indifference was quite as much the fault of the system, the textbooks, and the teacher as of the pupils, I determined to see if I couldn't find out what the boys were really interested in and so meet them on their own ground.

"Boys," I said to them, "About the biggest thing in this country around here is corn. When anything threatens the corn crop you can read it in your father's face. And when a big crop of corn is harvested you begin to count on a fat Christmas and other good things at home. Now, it seems to me that we ought to look into anything as important to all our homes as corn and see what we can learn about it. Perhaps we could find something that might help your fathers to get a larger and surer crop. And because common sense teaches us that to get a good crop we must have good seed, let's have a little seed show of our own, right here in school. I'd like to have every boy ask his father to pick out the best ear of corn grown in his field. Then we'll get them together and talk it over."

The instant this proposal was made I saw a new light appear in the face of Dick, the dullest boy in school. He seemed to awaken suddenly. Book lessons were remote and unreal to him, but corn was tangible and interesting. Every boy brought an ear of corn, selected as being the best that the home farm had produced. It was the liveliest day that schoolhouse had ever seen. The dull boy was fairly tingling with interest. I judged those ears as carefully as I ever judged any corn later in life at any national corn show. The grading of each ear was explained in detail and discussed until every boy agreed that the decision was fair. To my great regret the awakened Dick had brought the poorest ear of all?and was more abashed over this failure than he had ever been when he flunked in reading, writing, or arithmetic.

For 17 years that school had not been visited by a parent or patron except on state occasions. But the next morning I had two callers. The first was Dick's father. He bolted in without knocking.

"Say," he exclaimed by way of introduction, "Dick says my ear's the poorest of any. I don't believe it."

We laid out all the corn on my desk, and I asked Dick to pick out his ear. He did so in a sheepish, shamefaced way.

"Well," commented the father, "It was kind of dark when I picked it out. I know I've got better corn in the crib than that."

Then we had a corn talk in which Dick spoke more words than had passed his lips in the classroom before. He had found himself--and what is more, I had found him and his father too.

From that moment I had the key to the situation. We improvised a very simple corn tester, and the results of the test were awaited with keener interest by every boy than had been any examination ever held in that schoolhouse. When the germinating period was finished, the boys were given a taste of a new kind of arithmetic--in fact they didn't know that it was arithmetic. First we made a test to compute the percentage of. germination.. Next we figured the loss from poor germination as compared with the tests of the best seed corn crop of the township.

The boys were open-mouthed at the results, and every one of them went home and demonstrated to his father how much he was losing on his corn every year by planting inferior seed. There were corn conferences in every household, and the final result was not only a great stride in the educational work in that school district but a decided improvement in the corn crop, owing to the better selection of seed corn and the testing of nearly all seed used in the district.

I think the effect of our seed-corn experiment in the classroom was as great upon myself as it was upon Dick, although he was transformed from the dullest boy in the school into one of the most earnest and interested of pupils.

As for myself, the disclosures of that experiment amounted to something like a revelation. That experience gave me a jolt that influenced my whole career. Instead of burying myself in books, I studied the boys of my district and spent every available hour of my time in their homes or working with them in the fields and barns, finding out in what they were interested. From these researches I framed the work in the classroom and made a consistent attempt to hook up all the lessons with the actual life of the pupils.
 

From: The Spirit and Philosophy of Extension Work