ABSTRACT
Since the studies of the economic value of schooling and higher education are generally restricted to non-farm males, it may seem that education as a form of human capital is sex-specific, and that it is of value only to males who are not engaged in farm work. Then, too, the abundant crop of economic growth models with few exceptions leave agriculture out, and thus seemingly, the formation of capital and the employment of labour matters only when it occurs in sectors other than in agriculture. It is, of course, a fact that farm people are a tiny fraction of the population of the United Kingdom and the United States. It is also a fact that the literature in both education and economics is mainly produced by urban oriented scholars. Poets, however, continue to cherish the virtues of rural living and some ecology minded urban youth are rich enough to afford communes and organic gardens. But the people for whom agriculture is a way of life, upwards of half of the population of the world, are not rich. Nor do they have illusions about nature; for they know its harshness.
