The work of the rural school

Front matter

Copyright N"..

COPYRIGHT deposit:

BOOKS FOR TEACHERS AND NORMAL SCHOOLS

CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION i

Growing interest in rural education — Decline in agricultural production — Agricultural census of 19 lo — Rural school controls national food-supply — Demand for scientific farming and socialization of rural life — Widening outlook of rural education — What rural workers have been doing — A record of achievement.

Chapter II

Community survey necessary basis of effective school program — Scope of community survey — Example of successful use of community survey — Rural surveys made by Presbyterian Church — Recreation facilities of the country — "What country people like" — Small cost of community surveys — Essential to intelligent rural leadership.

Chapter III

Children the nation's greatest asset — Fundamental importance of health — Exposing children to disease a social crime — Health and school progress — Country children less healthy than city children — Health movement versus anti-disease movement — Practical steps in medical inspection for rural schools — Sex hygiene — Atypical and mentally defective children — Profit and cost of medical inspection — The country doctor — ^Advantages of paid service — Conditions demand ira" mediate action,

CONTENTS

Chapter IV Page

SCHOOL GOVERNMENT AND THE COURSE OF STUDY 42

Democratic versus arbitrary discipline — Story of the ground - squirrel and the water - dog — Honor system the democratic system — The Round Table in school government — Discipline and the course of study at the Rock Hill Experimental School — Living the law.

Chapter V The Widening Outlook Of The Rural School 62

Vocational training — Advantages of rural over city schools — Experiments in Cincinnati, Fitchburg, Rochester, and Munich — Contributions of United States government to rural education — Extension work — Short courses at agricultural colleges — Domestic science and shop work— The "cultural tradition" — Cooperation between colleges and rural schools — Extension work through corn and garden clubs — School-gardens — Home - gardens — The school - farm — Beginning of Farmers' Cooperative Demonstration Work.

Chapter VI Cooperative Demonstration Work 86

Neighbor Brown and Neighbor Jones — Work of Seaman A. Knapp — Demonstration methods — Spread of demonstration methods through corn and garden clubs — Effect on agricultural production — Scientific marketing to supplement scientific production — Rural Organization Service of United States Department of Agriculture.

Chapter VII Demonstration Work Through The Rural School 104

Vocational training in the rural school — Practical not opposed to cultural — Demonstration compared with extension work — State aid in Minnesota — Experiment at Sparks, Maryland — Children love to do things like grown-ups — Does demonstration work commercialize? — Rebuilding the rural community through the rural school.

vi

CONTENTS

Chapter VIII Page

School-plant determined by school program — Minimum acreage for various types of schools — Provision for organized play — Convenience of location — Size of building — Correct schoolroom dimensions — Correct lighting — Heating — Ventilation — Decoration of schoolroom — Value of beauty — Correct seating and school progress — Blackboards — Cloakrooms — Lunchrooms.

Chapter IX Some Neglected Factors In School Equip- Ment 147

Insanitary rural schools — Filth destroys health and morals — Children's sanitary committees — The boy who was bumped — Clean outhouses — Needed, more outdoor schools, workrooms, school-cottages — The school-cottage and domestic science — Uses of the school-library — Selection of books — Values of leisure — Social-center work and the school -auditorium — Demand for architectural experts.

Chapter X Consolidation And Transportation .... 173

How do they work? — First-hand experience — Stock objections — Overcoming difficulties — Consolidation and community life — Cost — Wise spending versus wasteful thrift.

Chapter XI The Teacher Who Is The Citizen-maker . 193

The teacher makes the school — Demand for higher standards in rural teaching — Improved equipment and better salaries follow better teaching — Doing things that "cannot be done" — Drifting teachers — What the normal schools are doing — Demonstration work for teachers — Training teachers at work through improved supervision.

Chapter XII First Aid To The Citizen-maker 224

Shortage of trained teachers — Normal schools unable to meet the demand — Demonstration methods in the schoolroom

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CONTENTS

PAGE

— Spread of district supervision — County superintendents overburdened — Conference of district supervisors at Jacksonville — Plans for rural-school improvement — The trained teacher the key to rural-school problem.

Chapter XIII The Opportunity Op The County Superin- Tendent 246

Demand for rural leadership — Who are our county superintendents? — Overworked and underpaid — Training of county superintendents — The scholar who didn't get anywhere — The superintendent who woke the people up — Scholarship harnessed to common sense — Starting at nowhere with nothing and getting somewhere with something — What is rural leadership?

Chapter XIV The State Superintendent Of Public In- Struction 262

Political jobbery — Pork-barrel government and the public schools — Demand for an educational program — Scope of educational program — Taxation, land speculation, scientific production and marketing — Demand for an educational budget based on an educational program — "He must enter into the heart of the people's every-day experience" — The rural school of the future.

ILLUSTRATIONS

A Member of a Girls' Garden Club . . . . . Frontispiece

Two Ohio Community Centers Facing p. 70

a. School-building, Teachers' Residence,

Horse-sheds for the Neighbors. &. School-building and House for Teachers AND FOR Domestic-science Classes.

At the Rock Hill Experimental School .... " 74 -/ a. In the Garden. h. Consulting the Teacher.

A Demonstration by The Boys' Pig Club of Caddo

Parish, Louisiana " 106 v^

Types of Rural-school Buildings " 124

a. The Olden Time — Still Familiar. h. Built after State Plans at Yancey, Virginia c. Modern Consolidated Schoolhouse and Transportation-wagons in Indiana.

Common Interior Faults " 144

Bad Lighting and a Glassy Blackboard.

The School-library Is Essential " 150

Organizing Play *' 164

a. A Kansas Scene.

h. A May-pole Dance, Lake County, Ohio. c. A Children's Free-for-all Race, in Nebraska. (By the courtesy of the International Committee, Y. M. C. A.).

Training Rural-school Teachers through Weaving, University of Wisconsin " 218'

Cooking Equipment for One-room School in Virginia; Cost, Ten Dollars " 230 v^

Celebrating Washington's Birthday ..... " 254 v' "The People Turned Out by the Hundreds. They Cleaned the Schoolhouse and the School-yard."

A Lecture on Farm Sanitation in Iowa , , , , * * 272 v

DURING the past ten years the rural-school system of the United States has been in a condition of unprecedented ferment. Experiments looking to the fundamental reorganization of the rural-school program have been under way in practically all of the states. Modem school-buildings are springing up everywhere, transportation wagons by the thousands have been put in motion, and country roads are beginning to be improved to accommodate them. Normal schools, colleges and universities, educational associations, the United States Department of Agriculture, and the public press have been manifesting a fresh interest in the education of country children and the social and economic rehabilitation of rural commtmities. In 1912 a new division was created in the United States Bureau of Education for the specific purpose of advancing the interests of the rural school and country life. For the first time since our pioneer days, when the nation was predominantly agricultural and the little red schoolhouse was the favorite symbol of the democratic American spirit, the whole nation is turning with interested concern and constructive purpose to the rural school.

To what is this freshly awakened interest due? For an answer one must look to the facts of our agricultural development during the first decade of the twentieth century.

In the Quarterly Journal of Economics for November, 1912, Mr. J. L. Coulter, of the United States Bureau of the Census, epitomizes the findings of the Division of Agriculture of the Census of 19 10. The census shows that during the ten years from 1899 to 1909 agricultural production in the United States increased only 10 per cent, as compared with the preceding decade, while the population — the number of mouths to be fed — ^increased 2 1 per cent! And this failure of the food-supply to keep pace with the population was most serious in those staples upon which the elemental life of the nation most directly depends. To meet an increase of 21 per cent, in the population the aggregate production of wheat increased only 3.8 per cent., of orchard fruits only 1.8 per cent., while the production of corn actually decreased 4.3 per cent. The facts here brought to light make it plain that it is the menace of hunger that is turning the nation to the rural school as the only instrument capable of averting wide-spread disaster.

"We have now reached a stage in the history of this country," says Mr. Coulter, ''when farmers in average years do not produce much more of the raw materials used for food, forage, and clothing than is needed within the country. In poor years the production may not in future equal the demands of the consumers''

Here we have one of the important causes of the increased cost of living, of the grinding economic pressure that during recent years has perplexed the spirit of the nation and hampered the free onward motion of our national progress. When the farmers stop producing an abundant surplus our growing millions face not onlylowered standards of living, but in many cases actual want and starvation. When the harvests cease to be abundant the fires of our national life in cotmtry and city alike begin to bum low, the productive powers of the nation are checked — the entire economic and social organism suffers a kind of paralysis.

Confronted by this danger, the nation is turning to the rural school because, owing to the changes wrought by the last century in our economic and social life, and more especially in the economic and social conditions surrounding agricultural production, the rural school more than any other one instrument to-day controls the food-supply of the nation.

Not since the days when the one-room school followed the pioneer into the wilderness and through literacy kept open the channels of civilization, has so great a responsibility rested upon the rural school ; never before have the workers in rural education faced such momentous opportunities for patriotic service.

And everywhere the rural-school workers are earnestly striving to meet this national crisis. The practical measures which they are adopting point in two principal directions, the one toward increased production through the diffusion of scientific knowledge, the other toward the socialization of rural life, in order that through economic cooperation and the development of a new social conscience the benefits of increased production may accrue not only to the nation at large, but to the local commimities and the homes of the individual producers.

The need for development in both of these directions is revealed by the most cursory review of the history of agricultural lands and the evolution of social ideals in our rural commimities.

There used to be a song, very popular in the days when the universal cry was ''Go West, young man, go West," the 2 3 burden of which, recurring at the end of every verse, was, *'For Uncle Sam is rich enough to give us each a farm." At the time this pleasant family affluence did really exist in America. Uncle Sam did give us farms, hundreds and thousands of us, so that it is difficult for us to get out of our minds the fact that the days of his prodigality are over. But, alas, they are ! The records of the Bureau of the Census show that **the area available for agricultural purposes was very largely occupied between 1800 and 1900." The essential meaning of this fact from the national point of view is that the future development of agricultural production must come through the application of science and modern methods of business management to the land already occupied. The apprentice system, the handing down of tradition from father to son, is inadequate to the new needs of agriculture as it has long since proved inadequate to the needs of largescale machine production. The only effective way in which the rapidly growing science of cultivation, farm management, and marketing can be brought to bear upon agriculture is through the public school.

But the crudeness of inherited agricultural methods is not alone responsible for the failure of agricultural production to keep pace with our growth in population and our advancing standards of living. An equally important factor has been the lack of social ideals in rural life which has had a demoralizing effect upon the uses to which agricultural lands have been put. The mere increase in agricultural production will not solve the rural-life problem unless at the same time the workers in rural education can cure what a country clergyman has called "the tuberculosis of American farm life — individualism."

The spiritual evolution of the American country community has recently been traced in a delightful and scholarly book by Dr. Warren H. Wilson, Superintendent of the Department of Church and Country Life of the

Presbjrterian Board of Home Missions. Dr. Wilson divides the history of the American country community into four periods — the periods of the Pioneer, the Land Farmer, the Exploiter, and the Husbandman.

The Pioneer was a free-lance adventurer. He hunted and tanned, cleared the forest, plowed, harvested, and ground his grain — alone. ' ' He placed his cabin without regard to social experience," for he had no social experience to regard. His conception of democracy was a state in which every man was free to go his own way without reference to the ways of other men. His ideals were ideals of stark self-reliance and a jealous primitive independence. ''Self-preservation was the struggle of his life." He was a man without books, often without schools, usually without a consciousness of social obligation. By choice, he lived and died alone.

"The Land Farmer was the typical American countryman, who succeeded the Pioneer." He lived in a time of crude abundance. He swarmed across the country "seeking everywhere the first values of a virgin land." His thought for generations has been "to make his own farm prosperous, to raise some crop that others shall not raise, to have a harvest that other men have not, and to find a market that other men have not discovered, by which he and his farm and his family group may prosper. The Land Farmer has no idea of community prosperity."

The Exploiter is peculiarly the product of the last twenty years. He is the man who gets his money, not by tilling the soil, but by speculating in land. He is the ultimate product of that crass individualism which is "the tuberculosis of American farm life."

"The sign of exploitation is a rapid increase in the market value of farm lands, independent of any increase in essential value to the farmer, due to frequent sale and purchase." In his Agrarian Changes in the Middle West

Mr. J. B. Ross tells us that ''farms which from the original entry until 1890 had been owned by one family, or which had changed owners but once or twice, and whose owners were proud to assert that their broad acres had never been encumbered with mortgages, since 1890 have been sold as often as ten times, in more numerous cases four or five times, and a large part of the purchase price is secured by encumbering the estates."

This exploitation of land is extending all over the country. In the Gulf States and the Carolinas, in Tennessee and Kentucky,''prices of farm land have increased in the last five years from 2 5 to 1 00 per cent. ' ' Even in the most conservative centers of Pennsylvania the prices of farm land have increased in the same period from 20 to 25 per cent." Everywhere the increase in the market value of farm lands is largely independent of the increase in essential value to the farmer. In Indiana a net increase of 5 per cent, in the farmers' income had been attended by an increase in land values of more than 100 per cent.

This rise in the market price of land no doubt received its first impulse from the preemption of our free lands; but the Exploiter, taking advantage of normally rising values, has ''bulled" the market, until the buying and selling of land has taken on an unwholesome speculative character. Men buy land, not to cultivate it in the interest of the commimity, but to sell it for an unearned profit.

What are the results of this exploitation from the point of view of rural life and national economy? They are expressed in the terms "absentee-landlordism" and tenant farming. Surveys made by the experts of the Presbyterian Board show that in an area covering 1,764 square miles of the best farm lands of Illinois 53 per cent, of the farmers are tenants, and similar surveys in Missouri show that "in many parts of this state more than half of the farmers are renters." These are typical examples of a national tendency whose gravity is indicated by the fact that the farm lease throughout the United States generally is for one year only. The owner wishes to be free to sell on a rising market. Consequently the tenant takes as much out of the land as possible and puts as little as possible back into its permanent improvement. Dean Charles F. Curtiss, of the State College of Iowa, declares that "the American system of farm tenantry is the worst of which I have knowledge in any country."

All these facts mean that vast tracts of land are being held out of cultivation, and that other vast tracts are being undercultivated and "skinned." The census of 1900 showed that 49.4 per cent., or slightly less than one-half of all the land in farms in the United States, was improved. In spite of the rise in the market value of farm products, which during the last census period amounted on the average to 66.6 per cent., the improved lands in 1910 had risen to only 54.4 per cent, of the total available for agricultural purposes. At a time when the nation's need of food is acute land is being held out of use for purely speculative purposes.

Now, ethically and spiritually considered, the salient characteristic of the Exploiter, as of the Pioneer and the Land Farmer, is the crass individualism that distinguished the laissez faire period of our political economy. The good of that economy has been accomplished. It rediscovered the world, opened up new continents, vastly increased the world's aggregate wealth, produced railroads, telegraph and telephone systems, created new standards of living and new desires and wants that have become new necessities. But to-day we face the evils of that economy — the concentration of wealth and power in too few hands, the pressure of high prices upon the mass of the people, a too rapidly declining birth-rate, the spread of poverty in country and city alike. And it is these evils that the rural-school workers are striving to meet through the development of a new spirit, a new vision, in rural communities.

The expression of this new vision — this new social conscience — on the economic side is cooperation; on the social side, the new neighbor lines s. It is this social conscience that has given the rural-school workers their new slogan, "We must hitch education up with life!" with which they are leading us into the period of the Husbandman — the man who is wedded to the soil, who is master of the science of agriculture, and who has the wisdom to see that his own best advantage and that of his household is ultimately wrapped up in the best advantage of the community and the nation. To the husbandman scientific agriculture is not scientific production only, but scientific business methods in the management of his farm and in the marketing of his crops. And the impulse toward economic cooperation, as toward the larger social life which is the new neighborliness, he is deriving principally from the men and women who are putting new life and new purpose into rural education.

For in spite of all the thoughtless criticism that has been visited upon our public schools the workers in public education have not been heedless to the new demands of the times. Considering the baffling speed with v/hich the kaleidoscope of our modern life has rearranged the constituent parts of our social and economic organization, the schools have accomplished results in the adjustment of education to contemporary needs that call for unstinted praise. This is not to say, of course, that the schools have done all that they could or should. No teacher or principal or superintendent with living and growing ideals would claim that. But the extended use of the school plant in our cities and the far-reaching experiments in health conservation and vocational training show that the city schools have not been idle. And in the country the progress in the development and reorganization of public education promises to bring about a complete and most satisfactory revolution. The vitalizing of elementary instruction, the multiplication of consolidated schools, the extension of demonstration work into the every-day life of boys and girls, men and women, the drawing together of all the forces of constructive righteousness into community associations for the promotion of the general welfare, are inspiring signs that the workers in our rural schools have not been sleeping, that they have eyes for their momentous opportunities, and spirits resolute to bear the new responsibilities our changing generation has laid upon them.

Already, in fact, the outlines of a reorganized rural-school system can be traced in the successful experiments that have been conducted in all comers of the United States. This book is an attempt to trace these outlines. The materials out of which it is built have been collected in the course of years from the experience and through the courtesy of hundreds of rural-school workers. It is a record of achievements and the statement of a program for future work based upon these achievements. No attempt has been made to give a comprehensive review of all that has been done. There is no better proof of the vitality of the new rural -school movement than the fact that statistics of achievement which are correct to-day are incorrect, because incomplete, to-morrow. Typical instances alone have been cited. But no statement is made that is not based upon proved experience. It is oiu: hope that what we have set down here will serve as a bond of cooperation and helpfulness among the scattered thousands in the rural schools who are striving to relate their special local problems to the larger national movement that is receiving its impulse from the changing heart of the nation.

II

THE promise of our generation is in the growing faith that human life is sacred, and that the waste of Hfe or of the things from which it draws its sustenance is the great transgression. For the first time in history we are beginning to see that this earth is not a dismal accident, that himian life is not transitory. As science broadens our vision we begin to see that human life is the material God has given us to build a world with, that the civilization that each morning springs anew from the labor of our myriad hands is an integral part of the eternal process, that individually and collectively we who serve one another on farm and in factory, in the school and the varied activities of civic life, are co-workers with God in His creative purposes. Our business, we begin to understand, is not our individual salvation only, but the conservation and wise use of all life, the development through mutual aid of its worth and strength and beauty.

The opportunity of the rural school in the building of our civilization is summed up in the fact that it, more than any other one instrument, controls the food-supply of the nation — the foundation of our spiritual as well as of our physical life. From the point of view of the nation the work of the public school is to get a maximum product in efficient citizenship out of the community to which it is assigned, and the distinguishing mark of efficient citizenship in the rural community is skill in the production of

lO food. From the point of view of the local community by which the individual school is maintained the work of the school is to organize the community life, to inspire it with national and social ideals, to increase its social and economic well-being, and to bring to the community the benefits of modern invention, the most recent achievements in science and art. From the point of view of the children the work of the school is to conserve their health, to lead them into an understanding of civilization, and so to train their faculties that they may advance their individual welfare through efficient work in the service of their homes, their community, and the nation. From whichever of these points of view the rural school approaches its problem, it cannot succeed without a thorough knowledge of the local community, its resources and possibilities, its deficiencies and needs. The foundation of an effective school program must be a community survey.

In the early days, when the work of the public school was confined to the three R's, when the actual education of the children, their real preparation for life, went on in the field, the threshing-room, the barn, the workshop, and the kitchen, all that was needed was an itinerant pedagogue, or a building where the children could be housed during certain hours of the day, with a teacher capable of giving them their letters and a modicum of geography and arithmetic. But all this has been changed by the industrial revolution that has dragged agriculture into the world economy and undermined the apprentice system. The isolated homes no longer give the children an adequate preparation for life. This task has been shifted to the school, and if the school is to meet the new needs of to-day even as well as the apprentice system met the old needs of an earlier generation it must understand the opportunities and problems of each individual home and of all the homes together in their community relationships.

Six years ago a young man was put in charge of a

II country district in which there were three rural schools of the traditional cheese-box type. The community was a typical farming community. In spite of rich soils the value of agricultural production was not increasing so rapidly as the market value of land. Land speculation was rife, and tenant-farming was growing. In spite of the wealth of a certain number of individuals farm life had fallen into disrepute. Year by year an increasing number of the rising generation abandoned their ancestral farms for city life, selling outright or leasing their lands for short terms to immigrants. The social and spiritual life of the community was listless and anemic.

The problem that confronted this young man was precisely the problem which, in one form or another, confronts rural-school workers everywhere in the nation to-day. If he was to hold the children on the land he must make rural life economically, socially, and spiritually attractive to them. To make rural life attractive he must increase the general wealth of the community, and in order to increase the community's general wealth he must train the farmers and their children in modern methods of agriculture and business management, and in the principles of cooperative marketing — through the school.

How he solved his problem is recorded in a letter to a friend, which, because of its very informality, its straightforward candor, its freedom from self -consciousness, has an illustrative value superior to that of the usually stilted official report.

X — [he wrote] is in the trucking section of the Atlantic seaboard. Its people must market their crops in two weeks' time because they supply the market between South Carolina and New Jersey. If they are too early they cause an oversupply at the Carolina time; if too late, at the New Jersey time.

Being in this fix, they feel they must force their crops and raise always from two to three crops a year. They, therefore, use immense quantities of commercial fertilizer. They regard their soil as a place to transform commercial fertilizer into perishable produce, and not as a source in itself of food elements. Their close cultivation destroys humus in the soil, lowers its waterholding capacity, destroys helpful organic life, fosters insect pests, and, in the absence of crop rotation, poisons their land even against their single crop.

Being "truck mad," they neglect general agricultural necessities such as corn for their stock or hay for their horses and mules, or hogs to feed their families. They import from one-third to one-half of their corn and hay from the West, two-thirds of their hog meat and lard from the packers, get seveneighths of their milk from cans, four-fifths of their butter and all their cheese from the creameries.

Another thing: Our truckers are the greatest gamblers in the state. They depend too much on chance, the weather, an undersized measure, and the honesty . of commission men. Take the small trucker, Mr. B. L. D.: a fair year means that he has sold during the year $17,500 worth of produce. But —

His fertilizer bill is $ 6,000

His labor bill is 3j75o

His packing bill is 3j45o

His freight (railroad and water) bill is . . . 2,600

His commission bill is ijToo

What has he made? And in all probability he has been extravagant and gone in debt because handling so great a sum of money without proper bookkeeping has given him a false sense of financial security. There are dozens of his kind.

This, in part, was this young man's diagnosis of the unhealthy social and economic life of the community as the result of which the schools were down at the heel, the churches were without inspiration and influence, the boys and girls were emigrating as fast as they could. On the basis of this partial economic survey he sketched a community program which in turn determined the program of his public school: