I enjoyed speaking to a group of agricultural education students at Texas State University via Zoom on Monday. The topic was the History and Development of Agricultural Education. I was asked to provide some thought-provoking discussion questions in advance. The two questions I submitted were:
- Why was agricultural education needed in the early 1900s?
- How is agricultural education different today than it was in Era 1 – the 1920s and 1930s?
In response to the second question, the immediate answer given by the students was that the audience for agricultural education in the early days were boys. Today it is for both boys and girls. Since the class was all female, I thought this was a good observation and validated the answer. There has been a major u-turn in the type of students in agricultural education today. The majority of the students are still male, but the majority of the FFA officers are female.
