The consolidated rural school

Preface

The value of co-operation in place of individualism is rapidly rising in the consciousness of the American people. For many reasons we are far more closely related to more people of the world than formerly and are more conscious of the relationship. This expansion of personality is ready to-day to conceive and to realize feelingly the brotherhood of man and both national and world citizenship. The adjoining farms or nearest small villages do not circumscribe the breadth of our interests, acquaintance, nor economic exchange. To-day we think more in terms of the county, the State, the nation, and the world, instead of provincially limiting ourselves to the farm and the little one-room school district.

The automobile, telephone, good roads, trolley cars, newspapers, magazines, and larger administrative participation tend greatly to widen the area of our social connections. The stupendous world war with its unprecedented stimulus to close national organization of railroads, agriculture, and manufacturing, with all their implications of sacrificing individualism to social efhciency, has sent the world, and especially America, a long way toward a desirable organization of all of each nation's forces. ,{ The -consolidated rural school is part and partner of this broader socialization and integration. It stands for educational efficiency in the interests of the nation and humanity by means of a greater degree of co-operation and organization over a wider area of territory.

Already thousands of such schools have displaced the little one-room structures of restricted neighborhoods and mental outlooks from sea to sea. Every State has done

IV PREFACE

something to develop such schools and a considerable body of literature has appeared in the form of reports, magazine accounts, and isolated chapters in books, describing more or less accurately this new and important type of educational advancement. Along with the larger, graded school, taking the place of as many as ten or more single-room schools of the pioneer type with transportation of pupils for long distances, frequently five or more miles from all directions, we find developing also at the consolidated-school centre such strategic factors as a school farm, a home for the principal teacher and his family, homes for other teachers and janitor on the school property, the integration of the village trading centre and farms, an increased use of the school as a community centre, especially where a good auditorium is provided, and a very much closer adaptation of the work of the school to definitely social and particularly rural needs.

These remarkable transformations are worthy of the closest study, interpretation, and publicity. Isolated reports, surveys, and single chapters fail to do justice to the theme and fail also in acquainting many people with this type of solution of the great rural-school problem. We greatly need a first-class, thoroughgoing book, based on investigation, nation-wide acquaintance with this type of school, and thoroughly and cautiously worked out and illustrated. Such a volume few busy educators have time to produce. Feeling the need, however, the editor has done his best in producing such a volume by the method of co-operation of specialists found successful in other volumes of this series. We do not hesitate to pioneer and open up the way for more thoroughgoing works in the future. Our purpose is practical, directed to immediate and wide publicity of a very worthy hypothesis for the solution of a very grave problem, how to secure better rural education in this democracy.

The volume is based on rather definite aims of education and on a social theory of the function of the rural public school. The general aim held is that of social efficiency

PREFACE V

while the subordinate aims under which may be grouped the principal needs of country people and the principal problems of life which they solve well or ill somewhat according to the nature of the schooling which they receive are analyzed as: (i) Vital efficiency, (2) vocational efficiency, (3) avocational efficiency, (4) civic efficiency, and (5) moral efficiency. These are the fundamental goals of each chapter and are treated explicitly in the chapters on the programme of studies. If the principal problems of life lie in these fields then it is the business of education to make minimal essentials those school activities which produce efficiency in solving them. How children may be changed physically and mentally by suitable methods to secure these five efficiencies of character is treated briefly in two chapters on the learning and teaching processes.

We have selected a few of the leading specialists and successful workers in this field to help in the production of a first volume on the consolidated rural school. This method of co-operation needs no defense. It has long been successfully used by the medical profession and others, and has demonstrated its utility in education by a number of good books, among which we may mention the volumes by Professor Paul Monroe and the lamented Professor Charles Hughes Johnston, and our own "Educational Hygiene" and "Teaching Elementary School Subjects." Another volume written by the editor alone, on "Rural School Hygiene," will in part also treat of the consolidated school.

The editor here expresses his warm appreciation for the assistance of the contributors, of the many who have furnished photographs and data from personal experiences, of Doctor Harold W. Foght while in the United States Bureau of Education, and of his wife, Frances Chandler Rapeer.

L. W. R.

Washington, D. C, January, 1920.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. National and Rural Consolidation .... i

By Louis W. Rapeer, M.A., Ph.D., Director, National School of Social Research, and President of Federation for American Childhood, Washington, D . C . Author of ' ' School Health Administration, " " The Administration of School Medical Inspection," Coauthor and Editor of "Educational Hygiene," "Teaching Elementary School Subjects," and "How to Teach the Elementary School Subjects"; Associate Editor of American Education and of the American Journal of School Hygiene.

Chapter I National And Rural Consolidation

1. What have been some of the principal effects on democracy of

the Great War?

2. What is a democracy and in what ways is it superior to autocracy?

3. What are some of the principal weaknesses of our democracy?

4. In what ways can public schools promote the best democracy?

5. What are the relative advantages and disadvantages of rural and

urban life?

6. What are some of the principal problems and needs of country

people as you know them? Classify these needs under the following headings: (i) Health and physical-development needs.

(2) Economic and vocational needs.

(3) Recreational and avocational needs.

(4) Civic and co-operative needs, (s) Moral and religious needs.

7. In what ways do the single-room schools help and fail to help sig-

nificantly in the solution of the above rural-life problems?

8. What is your present conception of a consolidated school? On

what is this conception based?

9. What is the best type of consohdated school of which you have

knowledge ? 10. To the solution and satisfaction of which of the above rural-life problems and needs might a first-class consolidated school be expected to contribute?

I. The Present Rapid Increase of Social Integration

National Consolidation. — The World War has worked unprecedented transformations in the organization of American life. Individualism and competition were the great economic and civic watchwords of the period before. Human brotherhood, universal democracy, world citizenship, a league of nations, and co-operation for social efficiency are the watchwords to-day. We have witnessed the interesting social anomaly of the Supreme Court of the United States prosecuting and fining corporations for co-operation and integration on a large scale and at the same time arranging with the individual members of the corporations for a greater and stronger co-operative organization and a more rigorous setting of prices than ever. The old Antitrust Sherman Law, on the one hand, and the organization of all the railroads of the country under a single government head, on the other, represent the rapid and inevitable change of view-point. The war has done for us in a few years what perhaps a century would not have accomplished in making us a united, organized, purposeful, and efficient nation.^

A tremendous centralization of government has suddenly taken place, never to decentralize to our former status. Our young men have been taken from their homes, their factories, and their farms, and have been sent by the hundred thousand to Europe *'to make the world safe for democracy"; the government has taken over many entire industries, nation-wide in scope, such as the railroads mentioned, and has integrated and ruled them as a unit and with a firm hand; prices have been set for all the principal commodities; and both production and consumption have been interfered with and regulated in the interest of national welfare to an extent formerly deemed utterly impossible except in a socialistic state. As the federal government has become entirely dominant and masterful in the nation, so, too, the individual State governments have drawn to themselves extensive powers formerly thought to be the posses-

1 See address by the late President Charles R. Van Hise on " Some Economic Aspects of the World War," as published in Science for January 4 and II, 1918, and his "Conservation and Regulation in the United States During the World War," published by the Food Administration, Washington, D. C.

si on of smaller governmental units or of individuals themselves. The nation and each unit of the nation, be it State, county, or township, has become to a large extent a mighty organized team of workers with a single purpose doing a great piece of work. Individuals joining such co-operative groups both lose and gain by the process. Usually they gain far more than they lose. In a democracy a fine balance between the individual and the state is maintained and its government ever comes from the consent and co-operation of the governed.

Becoming part of a great organization necessitates a knowledge of the whole co-operative enterprise and the part each plays in it; it necessitates trained habits of working co-operatively with broadened views and purposes; it requires of all that they use their initiative, originality, and energy for the promotion of the ideals and aspirations of the group. In such a world, with all the new and mighty engines and instruments of transportation and communication available, the social horizon of each person necessarily must be very much broader than in the days when the members of a family were practically all-sufhcing, producing and consuming all they needed, and finding little stimulus to wide acquaintance and social give-and-take. Then the world was vast and unknown, as in the time of Columbus and later, to the provincial individualists on the little farm living unto themselves. To-day the world is rapidly becoming smaller and nearer to us all and it may safely be affirmed that a large county, with its good roads, telephones, newspapers, rural delivery, larger market, varied interchange of products and specialization of labor even in farming, and better schools with their wider view is, for all practical purposes, much smaller to-day than was a township forty years ago. In fact, for many thousands of people, a state with its many counties is better and more intimately known than was the township for the same number a few generations back. The journey of a family of children to a consolidated rural school five miles away in a school-owned and controlled auto-bus or school-hack may be less of a journey with far less hardship and exposure and with possibility of far better attendance than the tramp through snow and mud, or even over good roads, to the single-room "district" school of the days gone by. As personality grows large and social the boundaries of the world recede until we become citizens of the little community of the world. Not to feel this closeness and kinship argues our own limited social development.

The City's Advantage. — The chief point of vigorous growth and development in the United States has, however, been not in the country but in the cities. It is in the cities in the last fifty years that we have seen most of the decided inventions and improvements in living. The best brains and brawn of the country have flown thither several hundred thousand strong each year. Arriving there these persons, naturally individualistic by farm-training and isolation, have at first worked for themselves or at most for the city at the expense of the country. Here practically all the noteworthy developments in government, in sanitation, in association, in recreation, in business, and in education have taken place. The city has steadily beaten the country in competition. The schools of the city have been the marvel of the rural regions, and one of the chief reasons of many people for "leaving the farm" has been to obtain the advantages of the superior city schools. As a consequence of so many absentee landlords of farms, we have the grave evil of wide-spread and rapidly increasing farm tenantry, the "renters." Strange as it may seem, city life has been made more attractive for millions than country life. Even in health, the great city of New York has surpassed the rest of the State with a lower death-rate. The city has procured this attractiveness by being open-minded, social, progressive, co-operative, alert and inventive. The country has stood still or moved more slowly because of the opposite of such qualities.

In the legislature, in the business deal, in enterprise, and in the schools the city has achieved a marked advantage over the country. The school buildings have been far more sanitary and attractive; the courses of study have been more closely related to the needs of life and more meaningful to the pupils; the principal additions to the ordinary schooling have nearly all been made in the city; the teachers have been much better trained, better paid, and have stayed in the profession in many more instances until they have learned to do well this most important work of modern democratic governments; the school years have been longer; attendance of pupils has been more punctual and regular; medical supervision, physical education, vocational and domestic education, art and musical education, have been made regular parts of the school activities. The teachers have not only been superior and more permanent but they have had excellent supervision and training, both before they have entered the schools and while in service — through principals, supervisors, and superintendents. The leaders of country children and youth, on the contrary, have been, for the most part, young untrained girls who have never seen superior teaching done, have never learned how to do it, and who do not have the age and breadth of view, nor remain in the work long enough to get to be much more than "bhnd leaders of the blind." ''The rural school has been a little house, on a little ground, with a little equipment, where a little teacher at a little salary, for a little while, teaches little children little things." Such teachers, who, according to Commissioner Claxton's figures in the next chapter, are the typical teachers of the nation's rural schools, cannot give pupils a wider view of life and the world to-day than they themselves possess. If their horizon does not extend beyond the adjoining farms the horizons of the children will not except by chance extend farther. Such teachers necessarily create ineffective provincials where they need to create socially efficient citizens of the world.

II. The Rural-Education Problem and the Consolidation Hypothesis

The Rural-Education Problem. — Some of the best minds of our nation and others have wrestled with the problem of how to improve rural education. The problem seems to break up principally into the following analysis:

1. How can we get better and more permanent teachers?

2. How can we get better and more needed subject-matter?

3. How can we get better and more supervision and administration?

4. How can we get better and more buildings and equipment?

These usually resolve themselves into the problem: How can we get more money for rural schools ? and its corollary, How can we get this money wisely spent?

The consolidated school is one hypothesis, or tentative solution, for this great problem of how to secure more effective rural education and thus a higher type of country life. The principal suggested solutions are, among others, the ten following:

1. Strengthen the state departments of public education.

2. Provide compulsory laws for minimum salaries, terms, attendance, etc.

3. Provide new sources of revenue for schools.

4. Provide a better distribution of the money now spent.

5. Strengthen the county departments of education in various ways, and provide for the county unit where absent.

6. Provide for extensive supervision of teachers in rural schools.

7. Provide consolidated schools in place of the many single- room schools.

8. Provide school-farms and a better living for the principal teacher.

9. Provide transportation of pupils to large schools.

10. Provide for high-school, normal-school, and other professional training for rural teachers.

Many different solutions in actual practice as schools are to be found scattered over the United States.^

Now all of these are good. Probably all are necessary. We can get fairly good schools without consolidation and its concomitants. County Superintendent Cook of Baltimore County, Maryland, has undoubtedly obtained fairly good schools without consolidation, through extensive and professional supervision and a number of the other nine factors. Consolidation is hard to secure in many places and in some spots it is probably undesirable. We should like to take the space and time to analyze the advantages and disadvantages of each of the ten typical solutions mentioned above and compare them with the aim of selecting the single solution or group of solutions which has most of advantage and least of disadvantages. Before proceeding further some definition may be desirable.

A consolidated rural school may be defined tentatively as a school produced by bringing together the pupils of two or more single-room or other schools in a graded school of at least two rooms and two teachers for the purpose of better educational advantages. It is of various types and increases in excellence as it adds various features. Such additions may be listed as follows:

1. Classrooms — from two to many.

2. With but the upper grades to an entire elementary school and high school.

3. From no assembly-room and study-hall to excellent ones.

4. From no rooms for agriculture and household arts to excellent ones.

5. From no laboratories for the sciences to one or more for each.

6. From no lunch-room to an excellent one.

7. From no gymnasium, shower-baths, and outdoor-play apparatus to full equipment.

8. From outdoor privies to best modern indoor flush toilets.

1 See Monahan's bulletin of the U. S. Bureau of Education on Consolidation and Foght's "The Rural Teacher and His Work" (Macmillan).

g. From no office for principal or teachers' retiring-rooms up to the best for both sexes and an excellent office with waiting-room.

10. From small grounds of less than an acre up to a site with fifty or more.

11. From no transportation of pupils up to the best, in exhaust-heated, glass-lighted auto-vans.

12. From no teachers' and principal's cottages, or teacherages, up to the best.

13. From no experimental and demonstration use of land up to best.

14. From no good ruralized course of study up to the best.

15. From poor, inexperienced, inadequately trained teachers up to best normal and college graduates.

The list might easily be extended as a class exercise.

The first-class consolidated school, serving an area requiring pupils to be en route either way no longer than an hour as a maximum when transported at public expense, seems to combine more advantages and fewer disadvantages than any other solution, covers more of the other solutions, and does so with greater economy for the results obtained than any other. For brevity, we list below some of its chief advantages and disadvantages which might easily be extended, expanded, and discussed at length.

III. Superior Consolidation and Its Advantages

Some Advantages of First-Class Consolidation. — i. It

greatly widens the acquaintance group, uniting several small or partial communities into one, and so broadens the individuals socially, and meets the imperative demand for a broadening of economic and social co-operation. Pupils who go to school together from an area ten miles or more in diameter for five to twelve years, through elementary and high school in many cases, will possess in adult life a neighborhood much larger and richer in its relationships than the narrow one produced by the one-room school. Where this consolidated area is a natural, economic, racial, transportational, and distributional unit, as it should be, we have an area as large as a Western township or larger developed into a neighborhood.

2. It provides inevitably for better educational, economic, and social leadership. The larger school with from one to several hundred pupils must be placed under strong management and wise leadership. It necessitates from the nature of the case a man or woman as principal teacher and supervisor, with a strong personality and good educational training. As soon as the strategic importance of this post is recognized, there will be the inevitable demand that the principal give his entire time, winter and summer, to the school and the community, and be an educational, agricultural, and social leader. This immediately involves a home for the principal on the school property and a school-farm. The free use of the teacherage and the farm will add something to what should be a good money salary, not less than a hundred dollars a month, twelve months in the year, and thus make it possible to obtain and retain a man with a family who has been trained in education, agriculture, rural economics and sociology, and in the elements of rural leadership, a man with at least a bachelor's degree from a good agricultural college. Since the farm and teacherage can be purchased at once or through bonds at the time the school building is erected, a fair share of the principal's pay has been provided for at the beginning without the usual annual financial agony. Under the one-room system there seems to be no way by which a sufiicient salary for each teacher can be secured when paid as annual or monthly wages. House-rent and the free use of the farm and its products may soon be taken as a matter of course, to which a good salary is to be added.

3. More professional teachers subordinate to the principal will be procured and developed. Such a principal will not be satisfied with young-girl novices, a new one each year, without education, experience, training, or vision, to praclO THE CONSOLIDATED RURAL SCHOOL

tise on the children. He will have an opportunity to convince the school board of the economy of superior teachers at any salary necessary to obtain them. His graded school with its better division of labor and opportunity for specialization by the department plan, each teacher teaching a few instead of many subjects, the contingent opportunity, growing out of the nature of the situation, of living at a good boarding-place in a house also erected on the school property for the use of the unmarried women teachers, and perhaps another for the single men teachers, the better social opportunities for recreation and association, and the fine opportunity to observe some good teaching and to get frequent and professional supervision and help in becoming a better teacher — these advantages add greatly to the value of the position for a teacher; and for seven to twelve hundred dollars a year real country-minded teachers can frequently be secured as able as those in cities obtaining larger annual salaries, although the consolidated school must usually equal at least the city salary and the attractions there.

The one-room school has been entirely unable to procure such teachers. Every consolidated-school teacher can be a normal-school graduate and equipped perhaps with a year or more of experience in a one-room school and in many cases with some college work. Weekly teachers' meetings, reading circles, a good school library, the presence of high-school teachers in the same building, the constant study of community and general social needs, and the interest and freedom obtained by a new type of school for adjusting the school to both the nature of children and society, will all prove stimuli to growth not available in a smaller school with an isolated teacher and children of all ages in all grades. That first-class consoHdated schools (not "cheap imitations of the real thing") can secure such teachers the statistics from many States, as indicated in succeeding chapters, show. Break the ice of tradition with such a school and people somehow release the grip on their purses and are

NATIONAL AND RURAL CONSOLIDATION II

more ready to purchase a genuine rural education for their children.

4. As suggested, high-school provisions may usually come at the beginning or develop with such a school. The larger area, the better attendance, the increased number of pupils passing through the grades, the better opportunity to give pubHcity to the desirability of secondary education, and the greater interest and stimulus coming from numbers, lead inevitably under good leadership to a vigorous high school closely adapted to community welfare. That consoHdation actually secures high schools and a vastly increased high-school attendance over the one-room-school plan has been amply demonstrated by reliable statistics. We believe that such a school is preferable to a county high school with dormitories for girls and boys as are found in Mississippi, North Carolina, and elsewhere. Daily rides in a school-bus are probably preferable to being away from home at this age. If we are to realize the slogan of the United States Bureau of Education and rise to the educational standard which the modern age is making imperative, a high-school education for every hoy and girl, no other plan seems to bring it more quickly and permanently in the country and village than the consolidated school with free transportation in school-owned vehicles.

5. Where such schools are established in large numbers in a State, as in several States already, the inevitable tendency will be for these high schools to increase the attendance and service of agricultural colleges and normal schools, both of which have a great dearth of students in comparison with State and national needs. The demand of the times for trained rural teachers and agriculturists and for real leaders in these two supremely important lines is at present either not met at all or but meagrely satisfied. Such schools more and more guide pupils back to rural service. The consolidated school, in our judgment, is the hope of these important and fundamental higher schools and thus the hope of the country. What they should do in encouraging the entrance of high-school graduates to their schools and courses we suggest in a later chapter.

6. A better programme of studies can be provided, based on social needs and the nature of mental and physical growth in children. The range and quality of educational activities in a one-room school are necessarily limited. Nearly every factor in the situation hinders enrichment and modernness here. Nothing is more fraught with promise fov* rural life than the many original experiments now being carried on in these consolidated schools from California to Maine and from Washington to Florida. Even the Philippines and Alaska have important contributions to suggest. Psychologically, a new country or a new type of social institution, such as the consolidated school, clears the ground of retarding tradition and opens the way for progressive experiment and adjustment. Another chapter by the editor enters more fully into the problem of the programme of studies and rural-school curriculums. A city school in the country is very far from our standard for this new country school. The needs of life as determined by intelligent surveys of actual life furnish the starting-point for real education, and rural needs are in many ways very different from city needs.

7. A much-needed and better social centre for the larger community is provided, or can be provided and made possible, through the consolidated school. An auditorium and gymnasium, or the two combined, are becoming standard features of such schools as of the best city schools. The playground is larger and has more drawing power on the community and pupils. The school-farm, however small, is a source of interest, comment, instruction, and communitymeeting-together for agricultural conference. A motion-picture show in the auditorium is one of the chief recreations of the people of many consolidated-school neighborhoods. A glimpse of one in Ohio is given in a later chapter. The

Country boys at practical work

Reproduced by courtesy of Diuision of Agricultural Listruclion, U . S. Dept. of Agriculture

Building a silo. A project in farm mechanics in Minnesota daily assembly in an auditorium can be made more valuable to many pupils than their knowledge of any subject, and may legitimately be considered an important subject of the curriculum. Indeed, auditorium activities succeed best where the principal, faculty, and students give as much time to preparation of this as to any one of the regular subjects. School fairs, athletic meets, debating and public-speaking societies, "literaries," agricultural and other exhibits, public voting, non-sectarian religious meetings, and many other social-centre activities naturally take place here in the single public building possessed by all the people. The post-ofhce is being located in a number of schools and parcel-post buying and selling, eliminating large middlemen profits, is being experimentally developed. This feature is also expanded in later chapters.

Many other advantages might profitably be discussed. The enlarged social mind of the modern countryman who gets about in his automobile over a wider range of territory than his fathers and who is in connection by other means with a great variety of persons and social activities easily adapts itself to the consolidated school. Some difficulty may be met in establishing such a school, but once established it quickly becomes a part of the community life, even as the motion-picture machine, the automobile, or any other clearly desirable creation of the modern age, as the following letter suggests: