4c

can be different types of interactions between the audience (farmer)

and the deliverer of the message (extension system). If an agricultural

policy is designed to benefit the urban populations, the extension system

would select and deliver information, inputs, credit, and market controls

to increase production and assure extraction of commodity grain (to assure

food supply to urban populations) and cash crops for export (to provide

foreign exchange for urban consumption and investment). These needs can

frequently be met by the small portion of larger, progressive farmers. The

rest of the rural population is irrelevant, except to the extent it is

needed to provide labor on plantations, in mines, in urban factories, etc.

This approach can be called-the "colonial extension system."'

 A second type of interaction occurs when the system is designed

 to change the rural values and social structure in a manner deter-

 mined by forces outside the rural setting. Government leaders may

 want peasants, to modernize, to give up superstitions, to change

 their patterns of consumption and investments, to change their con-

 ditions of health and sanitation, to change the pattern of inter-

 group relations. The urban leaders may feel such changes will benefit

 the rural people in the long run, and this may be true; but the ulti-

 mate values spring from urban cultures. In a sense this is like a

 "cultural invasion" of the rural areas by a foreign value system.2

 Such an approach to extension can be called a "rural stimulation

 system."3


 Akhter Hameed Khan, Ten Decades of Rural Development--Lessons
 from India (East Lansing: Michigan State University, Department of
 Agricultural Economics, 1978).
 Paulo Freire, Education for Critical Consciousness, pp. 111-127.
 3George Axinn, "Agricultural Research Extension Services and
 Field Stations," in International Encyclopedia of Higher Education
 (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1978), p. 243.