The Challenge of the Country Part 16

CHAPTER VI

EDUCATION FOR COUNTRY LIFE

HOW EFFICIENT RURAL CITIZENs.h.i.+P IS DEVELOPED

I. Weaknesses in Rural Education.

It is easy to blame the one-room schoolhouse for the failures of rural life. It would be fairer to say the rural schools have not kept pace with the rising standards of their own communities. There remains a deal of sentiment about the "little red schoolhouse" of the olden time; yet, discounted in cash, it fails even to keep the building painted. A recent survey of social conditions in northern Missouri reports that in thirty miles of travel on country roads not one unpainted barn or farmhouse was observed, but every schoolhouse was out of repair.

It is evident, both from this neglect of the property and the meager appropriation for school support, that the farmer to-day has no special loyalty to the little red schoolhouse. In fact in some quarters there is great dissatisfaction with the schools as distinctly hostile to rural life, not in sympathy with rural ideals, and serving mainly as a "gang-way" to the life of the town. The Country Life Commission reports: "The schools are held responsible for ineffective farming, lack of ideals and the drift to town. This is not because the rural schools as a whole are declining, but because they are in a state of arrested development, and have not yet put themselves in consonance with the recently changed conditions of life."

The country people have a right to insist that their schools shall fit their boys and girls for country life, inculcate in them a genuine love for the country and an appreciation of rural values, with the natural expectation that most of them will be needed on the farm. Even if a third of the pupils should ultimately go to the city, it is unjust to the majority and to the community, to make the country school simply a preparation for city life.

_The Urbanized Country School_

"The education given to country children," says Sir Horace Plunkett, "has been invented for them in the town, and it not only bears no relation to the life they are to lead, but actually attracts them toward a town career."

From the beginning, doubtless, teachers have been largely city-trained.

Though country-bred perhaps, they have caught the city fever and it seems to be very contagious. They have brought city manners and styles in clothing, the city standards and ideals and the love for city life.

Unconsciously perhaps they have impressed the minds of children with the superiority of all things urban. Even the text-books are products of the city. The city curriculum has been adopted whole,--contrary to all reason.

The teaching material often, instead of being connected with the farm, echoes the distant city's surging life. It deals with stocks and bonds and commerce, rather than problems of the dairy, the silo or the soil.

The suggestive power of such books and teachers is very great with impressionable children. The lesson is quickly learned to honor commerce above farming, city speed above country thoroughness, superficial success above the homely virtues, and mere numbers, bigness, roar and hustle above the lasting joy of tested friends.h.i.+ps. With the young minds filled with the tales of the wonderful city, which rival the Arabian Nights in allurement, the wonder is, not that so many are dazzled and follow the flame, but that so many remain on the farm. Insofar as the schools do stimulate the two great disintegrating tendencies of rural life, the townward trend of the boys and girls and the increase of absentee landlords, the country folks have a right to complain. Let the schools train for the soil rather than away from the soil. Let them exalt rural ideals and develop rural interests. Let them open the eyes of the country boys and girls not for fault finding and discontent, but to see the beauty of the country, the privilege of country freedom and the vast possibilities of scientific farming and soil productiveness. Before this can be done, normal schools for rural teachers must move out of the city, or import, straight from the country, enough country sense and sympathy to fit the teachers personally for their tasks. Probably the latter. To meet this evident need, progressive Wisconsin has established county training schools which give prospective teachers distinctly the rural point of view; and more than sixty normal schools have established special departments for the training of teachers in country life and the essentials of a rural education. Meanwhile some serious problems handicap the rural school.[31]

_Inferior Equipment and Meager Support_

There are twelve million country school children in the United States and only half that number of children in cities. Yet the city has invested twice as much as the country in public school property and spends far more for school support each year. The average country boy's education costs but $12.52 a year; while the cities spend $30.78 annually on each pupil.

The question is a fair one, should the boy and girl be penalized for living in the country? Why should the boy who happens by the accident of birth to live in the country suffer a needless handicap? When our Puritan ancestors established the free public school system, the purpose was to maintain _equal rights for all_, the children of both rich and poor alike.

The welfare of a republic depends on the maintenance of this principle.

It was a significant way-mark of human progress when schools were established in every community, in city or country, where all children might have an equal chance before the law. But with the growth of great cities and the decadence of once prosperous rural communities, the country boy has been losing his share. The city's growth has in many ways cost the country dear. It is certainly but fair that in return the state as a whole should share the expense of the rural school.

_The Weakness of the District System_

A relic of pioneer days when rural life was closely organized within small communities, the district unit for school management still persists in most states to the present day. It originated in Ma.s.sachusetts, but that state was the first to discard it, thirty years ago. Long ago Horace Mann declared the law of 1789 which established the district system "the most unfortunate law on the subject of common schools ever enacted in the state."

The school district is too small a unit either for school management or taxation. It is democratic to a fault; but it is too easy for stingy individuals to control the situation and weaken the schools by their parsimony. Local jealousies and shameless favoritism also make the system bad. The loss of population has naturally aggravated this evil, leaving in many a once thriving school a little lonely group of children, devoid of any enthusiasm or school spirit. The towns.h.i.+p is the smallest possible unit for efficiency, and the county unit, so successful in Georgia and elsewhere in the South, is better still. Ultimately the state is likely to be the unit both of school taxation and administration. Only thus can reasonable uniformity and standard of efficiency be maintained, in city and country.

_Other Problems of the Country School_

Next to the blunder of the district unit, growing worse in the face of a shrinking population, is the serious difficulty of securing capable teachers and holding them long enough to gain real success. The problem of maintenance is crucial here. So small are the salaries, men are rapidly being crowded out of the ranks. In the North Atlantic states only one teacher in seven is a man; and less than one in four in all the country.

There can be no hope for better rural schools till the salary is made respectable. Maryland, North Dakota and other states have enacted minimum salary laws which have decidedly raised the standard.

The problem of supervision is a serious one, especially when complicated with politics as is often true of the county or state superintendency.

Professor H. W. Foght significantly suggests: "The man who supervises the schools should have at least as good an academic and professional preparation as the teacher working under him. _This is seldom the case._"

The incompetency of the school board, and the unwillingness of competent men to serve, still further complicates the problem. In many a community less earnest attention is given to the school which must train the boys and girls for life than is given to the problem of breeding horses and cattle.

In most rural communities the school building is still the little building of the "box-car type," unattractive without and bare within, and as devoid of practical utility in equipment as of aesthetic charm. Equipment is less essential than personality, but to accomplish results with such a handicap is heartbreaking work. Slowly the modern type of rural school is making its appearance along the country-side; and by its sheer attractiveness is winning back to the school something of local pride.

The great problem of what to teach, in order best to fit the pupils for a satisfying and successful country life, is only beginning to be faced frankly by many rural schools. In the past six years, however, the idea has been slowly gaining attention that the country school does not need the city curriculum, but requires a special program of its own. This involves much more than the technical study of rudimentary agriculture, but it must include that. By giving the reasons underlying the ordinary processes of farming and introducing the boys to the elements of the science as well as stimulating them to become proficient in the oldest of the arts, the school is able to arouse a real ambition to remain in country life and be a successful farmer on modern lines.

II. Modern Plans for School Improvement.

_Arguments for and Against Consolidation_

The centralization of country schools has been forced by the logic of circ.u.mstances. "Suppose you start to a creamery with 100 pounds of milk, and 45 pounds leak out on the way, could you make your business pay?" asks Dr. J. W. Robertson, a Canadian leader. "And still, of every 100 children in the elementary schools, 45 of them fall out by the way,--in other words, the average attendance is but 55%. But the consolidated schools in the five eastern provinces, with their gardens, manual training and domestic economy, now bring 97 of 100 children to school every day, and with no additional expense."

Consolidation is simply efficiency applied to the rural school situation.

Instead of perhaps eight separate schools, housed in badly ventilated and insanitary buildings, with very poor equipment, there is one central building, modern in construction and satisfactory in every detail. Instead of eight teachers wasting time over six to fifteen pupils each, with no enthusiasm, there are four teachers working splendidly in team-work, and a fine school spirit, the pupils attending regularly, partly because they no longer have to trudge two miles to school but are conveyed at public expense and partly because they are more interested in a really effective school. The saving of waste sometimes makes it possible to conduct such a school at an actual reduction in expense over the district system, as is the experience in South Carolina. The motive, however, is not economy but to furnish the children better teaching and better facilities for effective education.

While consolidation clearly spells greater efficiency, the plan is obviously impossible under certain conditions and sometimes undesirable.

In a widely scattered country the small district school is the only alternative to instruction at home, at least for children under high school age. There is a reasonable limit to the distance to which pupils should be carried. Opinions naturally will differ greatly in determining this reasonable limit. Furthermore weather conditions greatly complicate the problem, particularly where muddy roads are impa.s.sable or the northern climate prescribes deep snow drifts which prohibit transportation. Of course even the neighborhood school suffers under these conditions; but the consolidated school in a large towns.h.i.+p would be obliged to close during seasons of extreme weather.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Consolidated school at North Madison, Madison Towns.h.i.+p, Lake County, Ohio. Eight conveyances filled with children may be seen lined up in the foreground. (Courtesy of A. B. Graham, College of Agriculture, Columbus, Ohio.)]

[Ill.u.s.tration: The John Swaney School, District 532, McNabb, Illinois.

Irwin A. Madden, Princ.i.p.al.]

Moral and social objections must also be faced in this connection.

Granting, as everyone must, the efficiency argument for the centralized rural school, we must be careful that our teaching efficiency is not gained at too high a cost. It is a rather serious thing for small children to be far from home regularly through the day; and the usual viewpoint of the mother easily wins our sympathy. We have less consideration for the community pride which suffers when the district is abolished as a social unit. But when we are reminded of the actual moral dangers to which children are sometimes subjected in the privacy of the covered wagon, we cannot dismiss the objection lightly. The solution, however, is not in the direction of the inefficient district school, for that, too, has its moral dangers; but in thorough supervision of the transportation under trustworthy adults.

While the gospel of consolidation is rapidly gaining, all through the country, closing thousands of unnecessary schools every year, the movement often meets determined opposition, though advocated by all leading educational authorities. In time, however, in a disintegrating community, the scarcity of children forces centralization. The Indiana statute makes this automatic by its very sensible provisions. The law enacted eleven years ago permitted school trustees to close schools having less than 12 for an average attendance. The amended law of 1907 allowed the abandonment of schools with an attendance of 15 or less and made it compulsory if the number fell below 13. Consequently 679 rural schools in Indiana were abandoned in 1904, 830 in 1906 and 1,314 in 1908 and in the latter year 16,034 children were carried to school.

_Advantages of Purely Rural Centralization_

In a closely settled towns.h.i.+p the natural center for the consolidated school is the village, other things being equal. But if the center is a city or a large town, results are not ideal. It is not good for country children to be village or city commuters. If the driver is the right sort of a man, the drive itself need not be harmful; but distance from home, particularly in a village among strangers, day after day, is not a good thing for most children. Furthermore, to add the country children to the city or village school means one more method of exploiting the rural neighborhoods and urbanizing the children. From the country view-point it is not desirable. The town school does not pretend to fit for rural life, but is frankly based on city needs.

The purely rural type of consolidated school is gaining in favor. To this plan must country lovers look for a school which combines efficiency with real training for rural life and avoids many of the objections to village centralization. Professor Foght speaks of it with enthusiasm: "This is the ideal type. It contemplates the establishment of the school right in the heart of the rural community, where the child can dwell in close communion with nature, away from the attractions and allurements of the city. In such an environment establish the farm child's school. Build it good and large; equip it with all the working tools necessary to the greatest measure of successful work. Add broad acres for beautiful grounds and garden and experimental areas. _And surely the rural school problem will then be in a fair way to solution._"[32]

_A Thoroughly Modern Rural School_

The finest type of the modern rural school seems to have been at last reports the "John Swaney School" in Putnam County, Illinois, located in the open country two miles from the small village of McNabb. This school was reported to the Cleveland Convention of the National Education a.s.sociation, by a special committee on rural schools "as affording the best ill.u.s.tration of public sentiment, private liberality and wise organization combined, that the committee was able to find in any consolidated district in the United States." In making this report Prof.

O. J. Kern said further, "The building stands near the north side of a beautiful campus of twenty-four acres of timber pasture. This campus was donated by Mr. John Swaney, who is a farmer of moderate circ.u.mstances, a man who believes in better things for country children. His was a worthy deed in behalf of a worthy cause and should prove a suggestion and an inspiration to public spirited farmers in other communities. The consolidated school is an ill.u.s.tration of the fundamental fact that if country people want better schools in the country for country children, they must spend more money for education and spend it in a better way.

There is no other way."