What Is Our Purpose

Having never been a student of agricultural education in high school, and upon entering my first high school teaching assignment, I was totally lost. However, in no time at all, I was able to function as a first year teacher of agriculture. Granted that I had obtained my B.S. and M. S. degrees prior to my first teaching assignment, I quickly realized that what I had learned in college was not really what I needed to or wanted to be teaching. I clearly remember one late fall afternoon sitting in my principal's office complaining that the curriculum I was teaching was boring, not only to me, but most likely to my students. The principal's response was pointed, yet on target. My principal responded: What are you going to do about it? Great question! I had no answer to provide as I was expecting my principal to tell me what I should be teaching; after all, he is the principal! During my holiday break that year in 1985, I began to think about what was the of my classroom instruction. Yes, I did have a core curriculum to follow, and yes, I did have the resources from the National FFA Organization, and the concept of SAE was still foreign to me. Sitting at home on my Apple IIe computer, I recall vividly how I began to piece together courses to teach. After my holiday break, in January, 1986, I approached the principal with what I perceived to be my solution to the boredom that I was facing in the classroom. I proposed eight different semesterized courses. I started to teach the curriculum to my students immediately! WOW ... what a difference it made...not only in my attitude towards teaching, but also in my student's attitudes towards learning. The agricultural education program, no excuse me, the vocational agriculture program, at my high school was thus transformed to serve what I believed was the purposes of my instruction. Anyone who lived through and taught in the 1980s, 1990s, can tell you that the two decades were full of challenges and forces in education and agriculture. As a result, the first revolutionary report on agricultural education was published in 1988 with the National Research Council's Understanding Agriculture: New Directions for Education. The purpose of the report was to offer recommendations regarding the goals for instruction in agriculture; the subject matter and skills that should be stressed in curricula for different groups of students; and, policy changes needed at the local, state, and national levels to facilitate the new and revised agricultural education programs in secondary schools. …