MASTER FARMER
TEACHING SMALL FARMERS MANAGEMENT
BRUCE M. LANSDALE
WESTVIEW PRESS 1986
PART II
Acknowledgments by Bruce Lansdale
Two generations of American Farm School staff and both Greek and US trustees have shown patience, understanding, and a willingness to share their wisdom with me since I first arrived there at the age of 21. “Growing old I keep learning,” Plato quoted Solon as saying, and I am grateful to those friends who have been my mentors for almost 40 years.
A true teacher always finds time to offer insights and recognizes that his interruptions are his work. It is impossible for me to acknowledge individually the many institutional administrators, extension workers, home economists, teachers at all levels, and village men and women on five continents who have been so generous with their knowledge and their time.
One indispensable contributor to this book, who is believed to have been born between the 13th and 15th centuries, has so many names that he is difficult to identify. In Iran and much of the Arab world he is known as Mulla Nasredin, in Egypt as Goha, and in Turkey (where he is reputed to have been buried) as Nasredin Hodja. He is quoted by Muslims, Hindus, Christians, and Jews, often with the conviction that his tales are part of their own religious tradition.
Children delight in Hodja’s amusing stories, adults are impressed by his wisdom, teachers are interested in his philosophy, and theologians seek to understand his mysticism. His tales have taught me to laugh at myself in the most frustrating situations – a vital lesson for any development worker. But reading Hodja stories is a poor substitute for listening to them beside the hearth in a peasants hut or exchanging them for hours in a village coffee shop: experiences that are slowly disappearing in Greece along with the vanishing peasant. It is my hope that a sampling of his tales will arouse the reader’s interest in learning more about him. To that end I have included a listing of interesting books about Hodja at the end of the Notes section.
The drawings by Bill Papas of Hodja and Greek peasants who have been so much a part of his life express the love and compassion that they deserve. I would like to thank him for illustrating this book in a way that recreates peasants in their natural environment far more effectively than can the written word.
Nasredin Hodja, peasants, and teachers around the world inspired a myriad of disjointed ideas that are the basis of this book. I am particularly grateful to Marguerite Langford, who has helped me organize them in a form that I hope does not require Hodja’s turban to be understood.
Hodja story #1
One day an illiterate neighbor brought Hodja a badly scribbled letter to read for him. When Hodja complained that it was illegible the man accused him of being unworthy of the “turban of wisdom” that he wore. Hodja was furious at the insult and slammed the turban on his neighbor’s head. “Here,” he shouted, “you wear it and see if you can read the letter!”
PART ONE: MANAGING THE TRAINING
Training peasants to be well-rounded managers is one of the most difficult aspects of the development process. Greece’s success in this area should provide inspiration to those attempting to teach management in rural development programs in the Third World, and the means by which development workers in Greece have achieved this success should prove informative. In a Greek agricultural community, the nikokiris (nee-ko-kēē-rees) is the capable manager of the farm; his wife, the nikokira (nee-ko-kee-rā), is in charge of the household and often the farm accounts. Neither term, when used to describe the peasant as master farmer, has a close equivalent in English.
Correspondingly, the word management has no equivalent in Greek. It is variously translated as administration, direction, and organization. Management consultants and others are thus obliged to use a transliteration of the English, pronounced “manatzment.” Ita Hartnett, supervisor of farm and home management in County Cork, Ireland, defined management among rural families as the skill of “doing what you want with what you’ve got” a phrase easily understood by peasants. In more sophisticated terms, the process can be described as “balancing objectives with available resources.”
A network of well-managed agricultural schools and training centres has provided the backbone for development in many countries of Europe and North America. The graduates of these institutions have played a key role in the growth of agriculture and the improvement of rural living in their countries. The influence on development of the folk high schools in Denmark, agricultural institutes in Holland, and Future Farmers of America chapters in US high schools has been enormous.
In developing countries, however, rural training institutions have been viewed with considerable scepticism. Coursework tends to be theoretical rather than practical, primarily because instructors lack hands-on experience. The cost per student is considered disproportionately high, and the required investment in land and buildings, too great. Graduates of these programs are eager to use their training in urban situations rather than return to their farms or seek jobs in occupations related to agriculture. Failure to clarify objectives results in poorly organized instruction; thus the graduates from these institutions are often inadequately prepared.
Although there is considerable validity in these criticisms of agricultural schools, often the problem lies in the failure of school administrators to organize and operate their institutions effectively. Politicians who are impatient to see immediate returns from their investments in education have discovered that they receive more direct return from expenditures in extension work and community development than from long-term investments required for training farm youth. Yet there is an urgent need for technicians in agriculture who have both practical and theoretical training in either secondary agricultural schools or rural training centers. If developing countries are to make maximum use of their potential, doing what they want with what they have, they must find ways to distribute available resources to extension and community development and to institutions that train the leaders needed in these programs.
In Part One of this book, the problems of training farmers in developing countries are explored, along with the general educational principles and specific contributions that can be made by agricultural schools and training centers.
Chapter 1: Training Master Farmers
- What kind of training do peasants need?
- What should be the goals of agricultural education in a developing society?
- What are the shortcomings of educational systems in developing nations?