Superphysics
How to Teach Agriculture
4 minutes • 642 words
But suppose you have created in someone’s soul a desire for your welfare, a deep concern to help you to achieve prosperity, and taught him how to manage the field to eagerly produce a rich harvest. That someone would be worth his weight in gold.
You said that it was most important to learn how to do husbandry.
So what you now command me is to teach the art itself of tillage, Socrates?
Yes, for now it looks as if this art were one which made the wise and skilled possessor of it wealthy, whilst the unskilled, in spite of all the pains he takes, must live in indigence.
This human art has a generous nature of. For is it not a proof of something noble in it, that being of supreme utility, so sweet a craft to exercise, so rich in beauty, so acceptable alike to gods and men, the art of husbandry may further fairly claim to be the easiest of all the arts to learn?
Noble I name it! this, at any rate, the epithet we give to animals which, being beautiful and large and useful, are also gentle towards the race of man.
I understand, according to your theory:
- how a bailiff must be taught
- how you make him kindly disposed towards yourself
- how you make him careful, capable of rule, and upright.
But in order to apply this diligence to tillage rightly, the careful husbandman must further learn:
- what are the different things he has to do
- how and when to do them.
If I am to focus on tillage then I must know the art of tillage.
- But the bare recognition of tillage does not make me a good farmer.
- I would be like a physician going on his rounds and visiting his patients without knowing what to prescribe.
To save me from the like predicaments, please teach me the actual work and processes of tillage.
It is not with tillage as with the other arts, where the learner must be well-nigh crushed (9) beneath a load of study before his prentice-hand can turn out work of worth sufficient merely to support him.
The art of husbandry is not so ill to learn and cross-grained; but by watching labourers in the field, by listening to what they say, you will have straightway knowledge enough to teach another, should the humour take you.
I imagine, Socrates (he added), that you yourself, albeit quite unconscious of the fact, already know a vast amount about the subject. The fact is, other craftsmen (the race, I mean, in general of artists) are each and all disposed to keep the most important features of their several arts concealed= with husbandry it is different.
Here the man who has the most skill in planting will take most pleasure in being watched by others; and so too the most skilful sower. Ask any question you may choose about results thus beautifully wrought, and not one feature in the whole performance will the doer of it seek to keep concealed.
To such height of nobleness (he added), Socrates, does husbandry appear, like some fair mistress, to conform the soul and disposition of those concerned with it. (8) “Nay, if you will but listen, Socrates, with husbandry it is not the same as with the other arts.”
The proem to the speech is beautiful but hardly calculated to divert the hearer from the previous question.
A thing so easy to be learnt, you say?
Then, if so, do you be all the readier for that reason to explain its details to me. No shame on you who teach, to teach these easy matters; but for me to lack the knowledge of them, and most of all if highly useful to the learner, worse than shame, a scandal.
