The weakness of the common schools in American rural communities shows itself in their failure to educate the marginal people of the community, in their failure to train average men and women for life in that community, in their robbing the community of leadership by training those on whom their influence is strongest, so that they go out from the community never to return; and in their general disloyalty to the local community with its needs and its problems.

It is the boast of the people of the country school district that their school has "sent out" so many people of distinction. On a rocky hillside in a New England town there stands, between a wooded slope and a swamp, an unpainted school building. Within and without it is more forbidding than the average stable in that farming region. But the resident of that neighborhood boasts of the number of distinguished persons who have gone forth from the community, under the influence of that school. This is characteristic of country places and country schools. The influence of the school, so far as it has any, is that of disloyalty to the neighborhood. It robs the neighborhood of leadership. It does nothing to cultivate a spirit of sympathy with the life that must be lived there. For every one whom it starts upon the exodus to other places it leaves two at home uninspired, indifferent and mentally degenerate.

Another fault of the one-room country school, which makes it a weak support of the country community, is its lack of professional support. Among four hundred teachers in such schools, throughout the country, not one in a hundred expects to remain as a country schoolteacher for a lifetime. There is no professional class devoted to the country school. Its service is incidental in the lives of men devoted to something else. It is a mere side issue.

Besides, its building is inadequate. Too many needs, impossible to satisfy, are assembled in a single room. Too many grades must be taught there for any one child to receive the intense impression necessary for his education.

The third great fault of the country school is its total lack of intelligent understanding of the country. Its teaching is suited to prepare men for trade, but not for agriculture. Instead of making farmers of the sons of farmers, the majority of whom should expect to follow the profession of their fathers, the country school prepares them for buying and selling, for calculation and for store keeping. It starts the stream of country boys in the direction of the village store, the end of which is the department store or clerical occupation in a great city.

The improvement of the one-room rural school is possible within narrow limits only. A recent book[33] gives most sympathetic attention to this problem of improvement, while asserting that reorganization alone will be adequate to the situation. But there are improvements which, within the limitations of the one-room school, are possible. The supervision of these schools may be made closer and more efficient. By bringing to bear upon them the oversight of experts in education the grade of teaching may be elevated. The important principle is to discover the proper unit of supervision. The town is too small and the county unit too large. It is probable that with some rearrangement the county can be made the proper unit of supervision, but the school should determine its problems on a principle independent of political divisions. The first need of the country school at the present time is to be adapted, by such supervision of the district as shall correlate the country school with the units of population resident in the country. In some places the district to be supervised by one superintendent should be not much larger than a township, in other places it might approach the bounds of a county, but in all instances the supervising officer should have the relation of an employed expert to the problems of the country. It is not enough that untrained farmers or tradesmen occasionally visit the school in an indifferent manner. Their indifference is the natural attitude of men untrained in the task assigned to them. The officer who supervises should be well adapted to his task and should visit with frequency, criticize with trained intelligence, and train his teachers in a constructive educational policy suitable to the district.

Another improvement in rural schools may be had in a better normal training of the teachers. At the present time the normal schools are inadequate to the task of supplying teachers and beyond the supplying of teachers for the city, they stop short. The training of teachers for country schools must become a part of the normal provision for the states.

The minimum salary for teachers is a most important consideration. A primary difficulty in the present situation is that the country school teacher is ill paid. It is therefore impossible to secure and to retain in the country persons of adequate mental and cultural value. In order to secure funds for better payment of teachers, a readjustment of the taxation in the various states is probably necessary, but this will be slow of accomplishment. Some results may be effected in another way by a minimum salary for teachers throughout the State. In this manner a better grade of teachers can be secured for all schools.

The most important improvement, however, in the country schools is almost impossible in the one-room school. It is the teaching of the gospel of the land. Out around the country school lies the open book of nature. First of books the pupils should learn to read the book of nature. The life of the birds and animals, so familiar to the children yet so little known; the growth of plants, their beauty and their use, and the nature, the tillage and the maintenance of the soil, are all lessons easy to impart to those who are themselves instructed, yet the present system of shifting teachers makes such instruction impossible. It is the opinion of expert educators that the study of agriculture is impossible in the one-room country school. With this opinion the writer agrees, yet so great is the necessity of this very improvement and so slow will be the changes which look to consolidation of schools, that effort should be made at once by those in charge of the country school to teach the children the lesson of the soil, of plant life, of animal and bird life and of the world about them. These lessons are necessary to their economic success. They are the very beginning of their happiness in the country and of love for the country. In teaching them the country school can best perform its duty to the present generation.

The centralizing of country schools is the adequate solution of the present situation. By this means the children from a wide area are brought to a modern school building suitably placed in the country. When necessary they are transported to and from the schools in wagons hired for that purpose, in charge of reliable drivers. In this consolidated school building, which has taken the place of three, five or even seven one-room district schools now abandoned, there shall be at least two and it may be five teachers. This group of teachers forms a permanent nucleus and a center for the life of the country. The children are assembled in a sufficient number to provide a large group, and their social life is enjoyable as well as mentally stimulating. The weaknesses of the one-room district school are in this institution corrected. There is permanence in the teaching force, professional service, cumulative influence, and the interests of the community find in the school a loyal center of discussion. The consolidated rural school is an institution for the first time adequate to the task of building up the whole population.

The first use to which the centralized rural school is adapted is to halt the exodus from the country. The country community has now no check upon the departure of its best people. The sifting of the country community is done, not by the community itself, but by outside forces, unfriendly and unintelligent as to the interests of the country. The centralized rural school will retain in the country those who should be interested in the country community. This will be accomplished by the study of agriculture, which can adequately be taught only in a graded school in the country. But much can be done even by the supply of an adequate system of education in the country community.

At Rock Creek, Illinois, the retirement of farmers to the cities and towns had gone so far in 1905 that the intelligent and devoted members of the community, who did not desire to leave the place where their grandfathers had first broken the prairie sod, took counsel as to the welfare of the community. The superficial fact of most consequence was the presence of tenant farmers in the community. These tenants, however desirable personally as neighbors, were of a short term of residence. From one to five years was their longest term on one farm. The social life of the community and its religious interests were beginning to suffer. The sons of the early settlers, therefore, laid their plans by which to control the selection of tenants.

Their first plan was to form a farmer's union or syndicate, which should undertake to run the farms of those who were retiring from the land. This plan seemed promising and the makers of it congratulated themselves upon controlling the future of the community. But reflection showed that this method would have the effect of retiring more farmers from the land and turning over the hiring of tenants to the few remaining loyal owners, who would come in a short time to constitute the local real estate agencies; while the majority of the owners would enjoy themselves in towns and villages round about.

The result was that the farmers undertook not to control the tenancy, but to build up the community itself. They deliberately undertook the reconstruction of the schools. Three school districts were merged in one. An adequate building in which a group of teachers is employed was erected. The children are transported in wagons hired for that purpose. The grounds about the school building are made pleasant; and the school, located near the manse and the church which had most influenced the change, forms now a strong community center for a wide region.

The result is all that could be desired. The retirement from the farms has been checked; the neighborhood has become specially desirable for residence. Farmers who had gone to the town find now that as good or better schools are to be had in the community where their property lies and where they pay their taxes. The rental price of land has increased and it is difficult for tenants to come into the community unless they are willing to pay an added rental in return for better school privileges. The whole countryside has received an impetus and the depression of country life has for this community departed. Mr. R. E. Bone, "the fourth red-headed Presbyterian elder Bone in the Rock Creek Church," takes great pride in the building up of the community which has been effected through the consolidated school.

A more mature example is the John Swaney Consolidated School in Illinois. Here the leadership and generosity of John Swaney, a member of the Society of Friends, have effected the consolidation of four school districts at a point two miles from the village of McNab. This purely rural consolidation was not effected without a contest. Indeed the McNab school has had to fight for the gains it has made from the very beginning. The school-house stands by the roadside, not even surrounded by a group of residences. The grounds are peculiarly beautiful, being shaded by great trees and extending in ample lawn about the building. In the rear are stables for the horses which transport the children daily from the outer bounds of the consolidated district.

The school building contains four class-rooms with physical and chemical laboratories. In one room are apparatus for cooking and sewing. In the basement is a well-lighted shop where benches for manual training are placed at the use of the boys. In the third story is an auditorium so ample as to accommodate a basket-ball game and about two hundred spectators. Frequent gatherings occur here in a simple spontaneous way. This common school has all the social and intellectual power of the old-fashioned country academy which once was so useful in the Eastern States. A principal and four women teachers form the faculty of the John Swaney school. The number of scholars in 1910 was one hundred and five, the number of boys slightly exceeding that of girls. Of these about half were in the primary and the grammar grades and about half in the high school. Of the latter some twenty-five were tuition pupils from outside of the district, so that the actual school group of the McNab consolidated school, the children of the tax-payers, was in that year eighty in number.

The difference between the social life of eighty young people and eight or eighteen young people, which one may find in a one-room school in the country anywhere, is very great. Needless to say that the John Swaney school has athletic teams, tennis tournament, baseball games, literary and debating contests and is a strong aggressive force lending life and vitality to the whole countryside. The older families of the neighborhood are Quakers. The newer half of the population is of Germanic stock. The influence of the school is upon all its pupils. The high school retains practically all the sons of the Quaker families and some of the newer population whose interest in education is less.

But the crowning distinction of the John Swaney school is in its study of agriculture, or broadly speaking in its industrial training. For with agriculture must be classed manual training and domestic science. By John Swaney's generosity twenty acres of land were presented to the State for an experiment farm. This land adjoins the school grounds and a regular part of the curriculum for the young men is the study of agriculture. The result of this interpretation of country life in forms of scholarship is that substantially all the graduates of the high school annually go to the State University for training in scientific agriculture, expecting to return to the farms and become rural residents of Illinois. At the present time no more profitable training could be given these young men and women. But aside from this economic consideration, the social and moral value to the community in the return of these young men and women to their own soil and the scenes of their childhood is beyond estimation. The Quaker Meeting in this community is not "laid down;" the church is not abandoned. Indeed all the activities of the community are built up and the best of the community perpetuated through the medium of this modern consolidated school.

To sum up this chapter, the improvement of the one-room common schools is possible, but for the satisfaction of the needs of the modern country community that improvement is inadequate. The one-room country school is an institution which in itself cannot be made to minister to modern community life. It is simple and modern life is complete. It is casual and irregular while the forces with which it has to deal are steady-going and cumulative in their power. It is inexpert and served by no specialized professional class, while modern life calls for the service of experts in every direction. It has no social value, while modern life is always social in its forms of action and requires social interpretation for its best effects.

A closing word should be said for a type of schools which has been perfected in Denmark. They are known as the "Folk High Schools." These are popular schools, adapted to the teaching of adults to get a living. Denmark has an adequate supply of technical schools, and these latter are not established to train scholars or scientists. Their use is to fit men and women to meet the issues of life, at home, hand in hand, with skill and enthusiasm. They use few text-books and have no examinations, and six months are sufficient for a course of study. The schools are religious and their foundation was the work of Rev. N. F. S. Grundtvig. In songs and in patriotic exercises, all their own, they idealize country life and the work of the mechanic.

The academies of earlier days in rural America were centers of a similar influence. But with the growth of the public-school system these have been generally abandoned. It is a question whether some of them would not serve a need which is felt today, if only they would train men for modern country life with the same success which they once had in training leaders for a former period.

Then all the people lived in the country. Now only a third of the people are concerned with the farm. So that the education of the modern country boy or girl would require to be carried on in a different manner, in order to retain the best of them in the country. The example of the "Folk Schools" offers an analogy to what might be done in American country life, if the academy could be transformed into an institution for the education of the young in the country.

All observers testify that the "Folk High Schools" have been the first influence in transforming Denmark in the past forty years, from a nation economically inferior to a nation rich and prosperous. This change has been wrought through the betterment of the farmers and other country people, by means of education in country life; and this education has been economic, patriotic, co-operative and religious. So perfect has it been that it is hard to analyze; but the acknowledged center of it has been a system of schools in which the problem of living is taught as a religion, an enthusiasm and a culture.