Excerpt from The Macdonald Funds for Manual Training and the Improvement of Rural Schools: Evidence of James W. Robertson, Commissioner of Agriculture and Dairying, Before the Select Standing Committee on Agriculture and Colonization, 1903I have quoted freely from that report. I am greatly indebted to it. I consider it peerless even among parliamentary blue-books for the thoroughness of its information.At that time, 1898 - 99, in fact before that, Sir William C. Macdonald had been most anxious to help to improve rural schools in Canada, and he came to me for some help in the way of plan-making and administration. I said that in my judgment the first thing to do was to give object lessons of manual training in the elementary schools of cities and towns so as to educate public Opinion in favour of better methods of education in places where newspapers were published and'to which the country people looked for guidance. He rather demurred, saying the city and town schools were al ready too good in comparison with the country schools and tended to draw people in from the country to the towns in order to get education for their children. After wards when he saw it would be a means of helping the rural schools, he said, All right. We will carry on the manual training in some town schools.' The man in the rural district imitates the man who lives in town. The man who lives in town has the best chance of being a leader, and the man in the country would not be willing to take a lower grade of education for his boy than a town or city man. It was important to get the leaders from the cities to recognize improvement by means of practical educa tion. That was the reason for the Macdonald Manual Training Fund and its work. Manual training was the first step in this plan. The rural school was not an after thought, it did not come out of the movement was -a step towards the Hitherto the wealth and wisdom of little rural school has been left without help.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.