There is a call of the land just as there is a call of the city, though the call of the city has sounded so insistently during the past century that men innumerable, heeding it, have cast in their lot with the throngs of city dwellers. Yet the city proves so unsatisfying that thousands are turning from its rows of brick houses and lines of paved streets to the fruit trees, dairy herds, market gardens and broad acres of the countryside. The call of the city is answered by a call which is becoming equally distinct—the call “Back to the Land.”

The ten-acre lot may not be any nearer paradise than the “Great White Way,” but there is about it a breadth of quiet wholesomeness which cannot make its presence felt in the bustle of the clanging cars and the rushing whirl of crowded streets. The unsmoked blue of the sky is over the country, as are the fragrance of flowers, woods and mown grass; the stars are brilliant by night, and by day the birds sing, and the cows and barnyard fowls talk philosophically together. The children have room to run and play between their periods of work, which is very near of kin to blessedness, because, aside from being instructive, it binds the child into the family group in a way that factory work can never do. The country cries health and enthusiasm to the world-weary soul as it does to the barefoot boy. Whittier was very near the heart of things when he wrote:

Despite the loneliness, isolation and overwork in some country places, the rural life is, on the whole, very rich in—

Country life holds a great promise for the future—a promise of vigorous manhood and womanhood, and of earnest, sane living. Through the rapidly progressing country school, more perhaps than through any other agency, this promise may be fulfilled. There are two possibilities in the development of the country school. On the one hand, several one-room schools may be consolidated into one central graded school, to which the children are transported at public expense; on the other hand, the old-time, one-room school may be reorganized and vitalized.

II Making Bricks with Straw

Even the doughtiest son of the soil must needs admit that the farmer of the past, living secluded in his house or village, was provincial, narrow, bigoted and individualistic. Times are rapidly changing, however, and out of the old desolation of rural individualism there is arising the spirit of wholesome, virile co-operation, which has transformed the face of many a country district almost in the twinkling of an eye. Nowhere is this co-operative spirit better expressed than in the consolidated country schools, which are organized, like the city school, by subjects and grades.

Considered from any viewpoint, the consolidated school is superior, as a form of organization, to the district school. Rather, the consolidated school permits organization, and the district school does not. Wherever it has been tried the testimony in favor of consolidation is overwhelming.

“Comparison,” cried one county superintendent in consternation. “Comparison! There is no comparison. The old one-room school, like the one-horse plough, has seen its day. The farmers in this country, after figuring it out, have reached the conclusion that the one-room school is in the same class with a lot of other old-fashioned machinery—good in its day, but not good enough for them. That is why over eighty per cent of our schools have been consolidated. You see it’s this way: The farmers need labor badly, and rather than see their sons go to a school where they are called on once or twice a day by a sadly overworked teacher they would put them to work on the farm. The consolidated school wins them with its good course of study and the boys stay in school.”

That is the first, and perhaps the most vital, advantage of the consolidated school—it permits the enlargement of the course of study. Sewing, cooking, agriculture, manual training, drawing and music, have all been introduced, because the teachers have time for them. High school work has been added, too. The consolidated school, in so far as the course of study is concerned, is very nearly on a par with the graded school of the city.

Have you ever attended a one-room country school? If you have not you can form but the faintest idea of what it means to the teacher. Her day is so split up with little periods of class work that she can never do anything thoroughly. Here, for example, is an average schedule of work for a one-room class in Indiana:

Daily Program

FORENOON

Appalling, do you say? What other word describes it adequately? There are twenty-one teaching periods in the morning; twenty-four in the afternoon. Forty-five times each day that teacher must call up and teach a new class. The college professor is “overloaded” with fourteen classes a week. This woman had two hundred and twenty-five. Will any one be so absurd as to suppose that she can do them or herself justice?

Consolidation, among its many advantages, reduces the number of classes per day, and increases the time which the teacher may devote to each class. Note the contrast between that schedule of a one-room teacher and the teaching schedule of a consolidated school teacher in the same county:

Teacher’s Daily Program

FORENOON

The “district,” or one-room, schools in Montgomery County, Indiana, have twenty-three pupils per teacher, scattered over six grades. The consolidated schools in the same county show sixteen pupils per teacher, in three grades. While the teacher in the district school averages twenty-seven recitations a day, the teacher in the consolidated school has eleven; but the time per recitation is: district, thirteen minutes; consolidated, twenty-nine minutes. The number of minutes which the district teacher may give to each grade is fifty minutes; the consolidated teacher has one hundred and seventeen minutes per grade. Badly sprinkled with figures as that statement is, it gives some idea of the increased opportunities for effective teaching in the consolidated school. No teacher can do justice to twenty-seven classes per day, and an average recitation period of thirteen minutes is so short as to be almost unworthy of mention.

Most consolidated schools, in addition to the ordinary rooms, have an assembly room in which lectures, festivals, socials, public meetings, and farmers’ institutes are held. Acting as a center for community life, the consolidated school takes a real place in the instruction of the community. The big brick or stone building, well constructed and surrounded, as it usually is, by well-kept grounds, furnishes the same kind of local monument that the court house supplies in the county seat. People point proudly to it as “their” public building. It is an experience of note in traveling across an open farming country to come suddenly upon a splendidly-equipped, two-story school, set down, at a point of vantage, several miles away from the nearest railroad.

The consolidated school at Linden, Montgomery County, Indiana, for example, situated in a town of scarcely three hundred inhabitants, is equipped with gas from its own gas-plant; with steam heat; ample toilet accommodations; an assembly room; and halls so broad that the primary children may play some of their games there in bad weather.

One of the most widely discussed among consolidated schools is the John Swaney Consolidated School, of Putnam County, Illinois.[22] The John Swaney School occupies a twenty-four acre campus, lying a mile and a half from the nearest village, and ten miles from the nearest town. The agitation for consolidation in Putnam County led John Swaney and his wife to give twenty-four acres as a campus for a local consolidated school. Hence the name and much of the success which has attended the work of the school.

The school cost $15,000, equipped. It is of brick with four class-rooms, two laboratories, a library, offices, a manual training shop, a domestic science kitchen, and a basement play-room. The building is lighted, heated, and ventilated in the most modern fashion. The John Swaney School thus came into existence with an equipment adequate for any school and elaborate for a school situated far from the channels of trade and industry.

The course of study organized includes all of the modern specialized work which the effective city school is able to do. Securing good teachers and possessing unique facilities, the school carries boys and girls through a series of years, in which intellectual, experimental, manual, recreational, and social activities combine to make the school the center of community life and community influence.

The school campus is used as a laboratory and a play ground. The trees provide subject matter for a course in horticulture. The fertile land is turned to agricultural use, and the broad expanse of twenty-four acres furnishes additional space for games and sports.

The social life of this school is no less effective than is its location and equipment. The teachers’ cottage, an old school building converted for this purpose, furnishes a center for the life of the teaching staff, and makes a background for the social life of the entire school. There are two strong literary societies, including all of the pupils in the school. Each year plays are presented on the school stage. There are musical organizations, parents’ conferences, entertainments, and community gatherings of all descriptions. In every sense, the John Swaney School is a community center.

Prosperity has followed in the wake of this educational development. The John Swaney School is known far and wide, and consequently farm renters and farm buyers alike seek the locality because of the educational opportunities which the school affords for their children, and because of the social opportunities which the community around the school affords for them.

The movement for school consolidation, like many another good movement, originated in Massachusetts. From that state it has spread extensively to Indiana, Minnesota, Iowa, Kansas, Idaho, Washington, and a number of other states,—East, West, and South. In every progressive rural community, wherever prosperous farmers and comfortable farm homes are found, there the consolidation movement is being discussed, agitated, or operated.

The movement toward consolidation has been particularly active during the past few years in the South. The Southern States are, for the most part, largely agricultural communities. The rural population far outnumbers the urban population, and it is in these districts, therefore, that the consolidated school can have its greatest influence. By 1912, the state of Louisiana alone was able to report over 250 consolidated county schools. Georgia, Florida, and North Carolina show themselves almost equally active in forwarding this generally accepted progressive educational movement.

The difficulties involved in consolidation may be summed up under two heads. There is, first of all, the conservatism and prejudice of those people who believe that the things which were good enough for their fathers, are still good enough for them. Secondly, there are the technical difficulties involved in transporting pupils from distant localities to the school center. Roads are bad at certain times of the year. Wagons are costly. Desirable drivers are difficult to secure. These factors, taken together, make the administrative difficulties of the consolidated school far greater than those of the old-time one-room country school.

The forces operating to overcome these difficulties are destined ultimately to triumph. The widespread acceptance of an agricultural education that followed upon the work of experiment stations, universities and high schools, has convinced even the most reactionary of the old-time group that there are, at least, certain things in the new generation which surpass, in their economic and social value, the like things of the old. The inroads of scientific agriculture have played havoc with agricultural tradition and conservatism. The obvious merits of the new scheme are destined to overcome the prejudices which the long continuance of the old scheme created.

The technical difficulties of transportation are being met in a number of ways. Wagon builders in various parts of the country are devoting themselves to the designing and building of wagons which will be cheap and effective. State and local authorities are actively engaged in the improvement of roads. The near future promises a standard of transportation facilities that will far surpass any that the consolidation movement has thus far enjoyed. The details of transportation administration are being worked out variously in different communities, and always with a view to the particular needs of the community involved.

While the disadvantages of consolidation lie mainly in the overcoming of prejudice and the solution of administrative problems, the advantages of consolidation seem to be primarily educational and social. The consolidated school is the only method thus far devised for giving graded school and high school privileges under adequately paid teachers to the inhabitants of rural communities. Again the consolidated school is the only method of securing a school attendance sufficiently large to provide the incentive arising from competition and emulation for pupils of each grade or age. Furthermore, the consolidated school, standing out as the most distinctive feature of a rural landscape, is readily converted into a center of rural life and activity where young folks and old folks alike find a common ground for social interests.

The advantages of the rural school are thus summed up by Mabel Carney,[23]—“For the complete and satisfying solution of the problem of rural education and for the general reconstruction and redirection of country life, the consolidated country school is the best agency thus far devised.” The reasons for this statement are summed up under seven heads. In the first place, the consolidated school is a democratic, public school, directly in the hands of the people who support it. Secondly, it is at the door of farm houses and is wholly available, even more available, when public transportation is provided, than the present one-teacher school. Third, every child in the farm community is reached by it. All children may attend because of the transportation facilities afforded. Fourth, the cost of the school is reasonable. Fifth, it accommodates all grades, including the high school. The country high school, by excluding the younger children, denies modern educational facilities to any except pupils of high school grade. Sixth, it preserves a balanced course of study. While educating in terms of farm-life experience, it does not force children prematurely into any vocation, although it prepares them generally for all vocations. Lastly, the consolidated school is the best social and educational center for the rural community that has been thus far organized.

However just may be the judging of a tree by its fruit, the fruit of the consolidation movement seems uniformly good. First, because the children get to school; and second, because after they get there they are taught something worth while.

When the schools of a district are consolidated, transportation must be furnished for the students. Union Township, Montgomery County, Indiana, covering one hundred and six square miles, has replaced thirty-seven district schools with six consolidated schools. Some of the children are brought as far as five miles in wagons, or on the interurban electric cars. The wagon calls at stated hours, and the children must be ready. Tardiness is therefore reduced, until one county reports ten hundred and ninety-one cases of tardiness in its district schools (for 1910-11) and ninety-two cases in consolidated schools, although in this county there are more children in the consolidated than in the district schools.

Then, too, the children stay later in the consolidated schools. In Montgomery County, Indiana, the children who have not finished the eighth grade and who are staying away from school constitute twenty-nine per cent. of the population in the consolidated schools, as against sixty-three per cent. in the district schools. The Vernon consolidated school in Trumbull County, Ohio, has enrolled nearly nine-tenths of the children of school age. Before the consolidation only three-fifths were in school.

Theoretically, the introduction of agriculture, manual training, and other applied courses which are found in most consolidated schools, should have some effect on the lives of the children. In order to show its extent Superintendent Hall, of Montgomery County, Indiana, asked one thousand children (five hundred in district schools and five hundred in consolidated schools) what they proposed to do after they left school. Arranged according to the kind of school in which the children were, the answers showed as follows:

Agricultural studies—stock-breeding and farming—and mechanics show up strongly in the consolidated schools, at the expense of teaching, business and law in the district schools. While such figures do not prove anything, they indicate the direction in which the minds of consolidated school children are moving.

Eli M. Rapp, of Berks County, Pennsylvania, voices the spirit of the consolidation movement when he says:

“The consolidated school furnishes the framework for a well-organized, rural education. Its course of study is broader, its appeal is stronger, its service to the community more pronounced, and, best of all, it holds the children. Progressive rural communities have wakened up to the fact that unless their children are educated together there is a strong probability that they will be ignorant separately.”

III Making the One-Room Country School Worth While

The brilliant success of the consolidated schools reveals the possibilities of team-work in rural education, but it cannot detract from the wonderful work which has been done, and is still being done, by the one-room rural school. Always there will be districts so sparsely settled that the consolidated school is not feasible. In such localities the one-room school, transformed as it may be by enlightened effort, must still be relied upon to provide education. Nor is this outcome undesirable. The one-room country school bristles with educational possibilities. Under intelligent direction, even its cumbersome organization may yield a plenteous harvest of useful knowledge and awakened interest.

The droning reading lesson and the sing-song multiplication table are heard no more in the progressive country school. In their place are English work, which reflects the spirit of rural things, and the arithmetic of the farm. Here is a boy of thirteen, in a one-room country school, writing an essay on “Selecting, Sowing and Testing Seed Corn,” an essay amply illustrated by pen and ink drawings of growing corn, corn in the ear and individual corn kernels. Mabel Gorman asks, “Does it pay the farmer to protect the birds?” After describing the services of birds in destroying weed seeds and dangerous insects and emphasizing their beauty and cheerfulness, she concludes: “The question is, does it pay the farmer to protect the birds?” The only answer is that anything that adds to the attractiveness of the farm is worthy of cultivation. Happily a farmer who protects the birds secures a double return—increased profit from his crop and increased pleasure of living. Viola Lawson, writing on the subject, “How to Dust and Sweep,” makes some pertinent comments. “I think if a house is very dirty, a carpet sweeper is not a very good thing. A broom is best, because you can’t get around the corners with a sweeper.” Note this hint to the school board: “We spend about one-third of our time in the school house, so it is very important to keep the dust down. The directors ought to let the school have dustless chalk. If they did there wouldn’t be so much throat trouble among teachers and children. Then so many children are so careless about cleaning their feet, boys especially. They go out and curry the horses, and clean out the stables, and get their feet all nasty. Then they come to school and bring that dust into the schoolroom. Isn’t that awful?” Viola is thirteen.

Over in eastern Wisconsin Miss Ellen B. McDonald, County Superintendent of Oconto County, has her children engaged in contests all the year round—growing corn, sugar beets, Alaska peas and potatoes; the boys making axe handles and the girls weaving rag carpet. During the summer Miss McDonald writes to the children who are taking part in the contests suggesting methods and urging good work. One of the letters began with the well-known lines:

“How are you getting along with the contests?” continues the letter. “Are you taking good care of your beets, peas, corn or garden? Remember that it will pay you well for all the work you do upon it.” In reply one girl writes: “My corn is a little over five feet high. My tomatoes have little tomatoes on, but mamma’s are just beginning to blossom. My beets are growing fine. I planted them very late. My lettuce is much better than mamma’s. We have been eating it right along.” Mark the note of exultation over the fact that her crop is ahead of her mother’s.

Sometimes the school child brings from school knowledge which materially helps his father. Here is a Wisconsin English lesson, and a proof of the saying, “Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings,” all in one.

These country boys and girls take an interest in English work, because it deals with the things they know. Miss Ellen B. McDonald, County Superintendent of Schools in Oconto County, Wisconsin, publishes a column of school news in each of the three county newspapers. Here is one of her contributions, in the form of an English lesson and a counting lesson combined: (A “rag-baby tester” is a device for determining the fertility of seed corn before it is planted.)

The new arithmetic, like the new English, deals with the country. It seems a little odd, just at first, to see boys and girls standing at the board computing potato yields, milk yields, the contents of granaries, the price of bags and the cost of barns and chicken houses; yet what more natural than that the country child should figure out his and perhaps his father’s problems in the arithmetic class at school?

The geography is no less pertinent. Soil formation, drainage, the location and grouping of farm buildings, the physical characteristics of the township and of the county are matters of universal interest and concern. Every school in Berks County, Pennsylvania, is provided with a fine soil survey map of the county, made by the United States Geological Survey. What more ideal basis for rural geography?

Here and there a country school is waking up to the physical needs of country children. “Country boys are not symmetrically developed,” asserts Superintendent Rapp, of Berks County. “They are flat-chested and round-shouldered.” That is interesting, indeed. Mr. Rapp explains: “It is because of the character of their work, nearly all of which tends to flatten the chest. Whether or not that is the explanation, the fact remains, and with it the no less evident fact that it is the business of the school to correct the defects. In an effort to do this we have worked out a series of fifty games which the children are taught in the schools.” In May a great “Field Day and Play Festival” is held, to which the entire county is invited. Each school trains and sends in its teams. Trolleys, buggies, autos and hay wagons contribute their quota, until five thousand people have gathered in an out-of-the-way spot to help the children enjoy themselves.

Mr. Rapp is a great believer in activity. Tireless himself, he has fifty teacher-farmers—men who teach in the winter and farm in the summer—an excellent setting for country boys and girls. He believes in activity for children, too. “If the school appealed as it ought to the motor energies of children, instead of having to drive them in, you would have to drive them out.” To prove his point Mr. Rapp cites the instance of one man teacher, who, before the days of manual training in the schools, decided to have manual training in his one-room Berks County school.

“He did the work himself,” Mr. Rapp says, “dug out the cellar and set up a shop in it. The only help he had was the help of the pupils, and the work was done in recess time and after school. They made their own tools, cabinets, book-cases, picture-frames, clock-frames, and anything else they wanted. And do you know, when it got dark, that man would send the children home from the school in order to be rid of them.”

Consolidated schools help. They make rural education broader and easier, but the one-room country school, presided over by a live teacher, may be made worth while. Social events, sports, contests in farm work and domestic work, studies couched in terms of the country, may all prove potent factors in shaping the child and the community.

IV Repainting the Little Red Schoolhouse

Without, as well as within, the little red school-house may be transformed. The course of study may establish a standard in rural thought. The rural school-house may set a standard of rural architecture and landscape gardening.

How typical of old-time country schools are the lines:

The unpainted, rough exterior of the little school vied with the unkempt school grounds. Both supplied subjects for artistic treatment. To the consternation of the poet and the romancer, the modern one-room school is painted, and the school yard, instead of being filled with a thicket of blackberry and sumac, is laid out for playground, flower-beds and gardens. The up-to-date country school, while far less picturesque, is much more architectural and more useful.

The State Superintendent of Education in Wisconsin furnishes free to local school boards plans of modern one-room schools. With a hall at each end for wraps, an improved heating and ventilating device, and all of the light coming from the north side, where there is one big window from near the floor to the ceiling, these buildings, costing from two thousand dollars up, provide in every way for the health and comfort of the children. The superintendent may go farther than to suggest in Wisconsin, however, for if a school building becomes dilapidated he may condemn it, and then state aid to local education is refused until suitable buildings are provided. The law has proved an excellent deterrent to educational parsimony.

Superintendent Kern, of Rockford, Illinois, has done particularly effective work in beautifying his schools. Within the schools are tastefully painted and decorated. Outside there are flower-beds, hedges, individual garden plots, neatly-cut grass, and all of the other necessaries for a well-kept yard. No longer crude and unsightly, the Rockford school yards are models which any one in the neighborhood may copy with infinite advantage. As the school becomes the center of community life local pride makes more and more demands. Could you visit some of the finer school buildings in Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin and Illinois you would be better able to understand why men boast of “Our School” in the same tone that they use when boasting of their corn yields.

V A Fairyland of Rural Education

You will perhaps be somewhat skeptical—you big folks who have ceased to believe in little people—when you hear that out in western Iowa there is a county which is an educational fairyland. Yet if you had traveled up and down the country, gone into the wretched country school buildings, seen the lack-luster teaching and the indifferent scholars, which are so appallingly numerous; if you had read in the report of the investigating committee which has just completed its survey of Wisconsin rural schools the statement that in many districts the hog pens were on a better plane of efficiency than the school houses; if you had seen the miserable inadequacy of country schools North, East, South and West, and had then been transported into the midst of the school system of Page County, Iowa, you would have been sure that you had passed through the looking-glass into the queer world beyond. Yet Page County is there—a fairyland presided over by a really, truly fairy.

The schools in Page County, Iowa, which, by the way, is one of the best corn counties in Iowa, are little republics in which the children have the fun, do the work and grow up strong and kind. Each school has its song, its social gatherings, its clubs, and its teams. How you would have pricked up your ears if you had driven past the Hawley School and heard a score of lusty voices shouting the school song to the tune of “Everybody’s Doing It!”

December was the time of the Page County contests, when each school sent its exhibits of dressmaking, cooking, rope-splicing, barn-planning, essay-writing and its corn-judging teams to the county seat, where they were displayed and judged very much as they would be at a county fair. Further, it was the time when the prizes were to be awarded to the boy having the best acre of alfalfa, of corn and of potatoes. (Queer, isn’t it, but last year a girl got the first prize for the best crop of potatoes.) December is a great month in Page County. This year more than three thousand exhibits were sent into Clarinda, the county seat. Every boy and girl is on tip-toe with expectancy, and after the awards the successful schools are as proud as turkey cocks.

“We have never taken the thing seriously here before,” explained a farmer who had left his work in mid-afternoon and come in to teach the boys of a school how to judge seed corn. “This year we’re going down there to Clarinda for all that’s in it.” If he hadn’t meant what he said he would scarcely have been spending his hours in the school-room. If the Hawleyville boys had not been thoroughly in earnest they would not have been there, after school, learning how to judge corn.

The community around each school is agog with excitement while preparations are being made for the county contest. The men folk advise the boys regarding their corn-judging and their models of farm implements and farm buildings, while the women give lessons galore in the mysteries of country cooking, for it is no small matter to be hailed and crowned as the best fourteen-year-old cook in Page County, Iowa.

One Page County teacher conducts her domestic science work in the evening at the homes of the girls. On a given day of each week the entire class visits the home of one of the girls, prepares, cooks and eats a meal. What an opportunity to inculcate lessons in domestic economy at first hand! What a chance to show the behind-the-time housekeeper (for there are such even in Page County) how things are being done!

Because Page County is a great corn county much school time is devoted to corn. In every school hangs a string of seed corn which is brought in by the boys in the fall, dried during the winter, and in the spring tested for fertility. A Babcock milk-tester, owned by the county, circulates from school to school, enabling the children to test the productivity of their cows. Teams of boys, under the direction of the school, make their own road drags, and care for stretches of road—from one to five miles. The boys doing the best work are rewarded with substantial prizes. Do you begin to suspect the reason for the interest which the big folks take in the doings of Page County’s little folks? It is because the little folks go to schools which are a vital part of the community.

Three times a year there is, in each school, a gathering of the friends and parents of the children. Sometimes they celebrate Thanksgiving, sometimes they have a “Parents’ Day.” Anyway, the boys decorate the school, the girls cook cake and candy, and the parents come and have a good evening. The children begin with their school song, sung, perhaps, like this Kile School song, to the tune of “Home, Sweet Home":

1. What school is the dearest,
The neatest and best,
What school is more pleasant,
More dear than the rest,
Whose highways and byways
Have charms from each day,
Whose roads and alfalfa,
They have come to stay.
Chorus.
Kile, Kile, our own Kile,
We love her, we’ll praise her,
We’ll all work for Kile.
2. Whose corn is so mellow,
Whose cane is so sweet,
Whose taters are so mellow,
Whose coal’s hard to beat,
Whose Ma’s and whose Grandpa’s
Are brave, grand and true,
Their love for their children
They never do rue.

There follows a program like the program of any other social evening, except that very often the parents take part as well as the children. The things are interesting, too, like this little duet, sung at the Thanksgiving entertainment by two of the Kile girls:

1. If a body pays the taxes,
Surely you’ll agree,
That a body earns a franchise,
Whether he or she.
Chorus.
Every man now has the ballot,
None, you know, have we,
But we have brains and we can use them,
Just as well as he.
2. If a city’s just a household,
As it is, they say,
Then every city needs housecleaning,
Needs it right away.
3. Every city has its fathers,
Honors them, I we’en,
But every city must have mothers,
That the house be clean.
4. Man now makes the laws for women,
Kindly, too, at that,
But they often seem as funny
As a man-made hat.

The grand event of this fairyland comes in the summer, when the boys and girls from all of the schools go to the county seat for a summer camp, where, between attending classes and lectures, playing games and reveling in the joys of camp life, they come to have a very much broader view of the world and a more intense interest in one another.

They are only one-room schools out there in Page County, but they have adapted themselves to the needs of the community, focusing the attention of parents and children alike on the bigger things in rural life, and the ways in which a school may help a countryside to appreciate and enjoy them. So the boys and girls of Page County have their fairyland, and are devoted to the good fairy, who, in the shape of a generous, kindly county superintendent, helps them to enjoy it.

VI The Task of the Country School

The teacher of a one-room school in Berks County was quizzing a class about Columbus.

“Where was he born?” she queried.

“In Genoa.”

“And where is Genoa, Ella?”

“On the Mediterranean Sea,” replied Ella promptly.

“What was his business?” was her next question.

“He was a sailor,” ventured a bright boy. “A sailor,” chorused the class.

“Why was he a sailor, Edith?” Edith shook her head.

“Yes, George.”

“Why, because he lived on the sea.”

“Of course. Now think a minute. Do many of the boys from this country become sailors?”

“No’m,” from the class.

“What do they become?”

“Farmers,” cried the class, hissing the “f” and flattening the “a.”

Certainly, the boys in a farming community, brought up on the farm, naturally become farmers, yet in the interim, between babyhood and farmer life, they go to school. How absurdly easy the task of the school—to determine that they shall be intelligent, progressive, enthusiastic, up-to-date farmers. The girls, too, marry farmers, keep farmers’ homes and raise farmers’ sons. How simple is the duty of seeing that they are prepared to do these things well!

The task of the city school is complex because of the vast number of businesses, professions, industrial occupations and trades which children enter. In comparison the country school has the plainest of plain sailing. What are the ingredients of successful farmers and farmers’ wives? What proportion of physical education, of mental training, of technical instruction in agriculture, of suggestions for practical farm work, of dressmaking, sewing and cooking, enter into the making of farmers’ boys and farmers’ girls who will live up to the traditions of the American farm? To what extent must the school be a center for social activity and social enthusiasm? How shall the school make the farm and the small country town better living places for the men and women of to-morrow?

The duty of the country school is simple and clear. It must fit country children for country life. First it must know what are the needs of the country; then, manned by teachers whose training has prepared them to appreciate country problems, it will become the power that a country school ought to be in directing the thoughts and lives of the community.

CHAPTER X