School land

“ Would it not be a good idea to establish country branches for city schools, providing for the older boys a winter course of study in the science of agriculture, together with the ordinary academic branches of secondary-school education, followed in the spring by practice in an agricultural training camp? ”

“ Consequently, Nature herself supplies us with an ascending scale or Alphabet of angles for half a degree up to 60 degrees, Specimens of which are placed in every Elementary School throughout the land. Owing to occasional retrogressions, to still more frequent moral and intellectual stagnation, and to the extraordinary fecundity of the Criminal and Vagabond Classes, there is always a vast superfluity of individuals of the half degree and single degree class, and a fair abundance of Specimens up to 10 degrees. These are absolutely destitute of civic rights; ”

“ The special problem of any type of school grows out of the nature and needs of the community which supports the school. Thus the city school, whose pupils are to live the industrial and social life of an urban community, confronts a different problem from that of a rural school, whose pupils are to live in a farming community. Each type of school must suit its curriculum, its organization, and its instruction to the demands to be met by its pupils. ”

“ Here, again, the consolidated school, with its attractive building, its improved equipment, its larger body of pupils, and its better teaching, appears as a solution of the difficulty. For it does what the present type of district school can never do—it makes school life interesting and attractive to its pupils, and this brings to bear upon them one of the strongest incentives to continue in school and secure an education. ”

“ They do not begin to represent all that is being done to-day to vitalize the school life of children. Schools with like traits may be found in every part of the country. Space has forced us to omit a very important movement—the reorganization of the rural school and the utilization of agriculture in education. But this movement shows the tendencies that mark the schools we have described; tendencies towards greater freedom and an identification of the child’s school life with his environment and outlook; and, even more important, the recognition of the rôle education must play in a democracy. ”

“ It contemplates the establishment of the school right in the heart of the rural community, where the child can dwell in close communion with nature, away from the attractions and allurements of the city. In such an environment establish the farm child’s school. Build it good and large; equip it with all the working tools necessary to the greatest measure of successful work. Add broad acres for beautiful grounds and garden and experimental areas. And surely the rural school problem will then be in a fair way to solution. ”

“ Elementary schools have been established in nearly every village, in spite of the poverty of the Government. If no school buildings can be secured, the classes meet in the open air. The scholars, far from playing truant, hardly raise their eyes from the books to notice a passing stranger or the flight of a bird. ”

“ Happy is he when he enters definitely into community life by taking his place in the district school. The schoolhouse may be at the village centre or it may stand aloof among the trees or stark on a barren hillside along the country road; physical environment is of small consequence as compared with the new social environment of the schoolroom itself. ”

“ Another great advantage has been the fact that this region was a kind of graduating school, into which the antecedent schools of pioneer-life could send skilled pupils, who, upon a fair and wide field, and in a virgin soil, could build a civil and social fabric, reflecting past experiences and embodying a multitude of separate results into a large and harmonious whole. ”

“ And if the school premises are now too small in extent to admit of such a use, let the pupils make an earnest plea for additional ground. As a general fact our school-grounds have been shamefully limited in extent and neglected as to their use and keeping. The school-house, in itself and in its surroundings, ought to be one of the most beautiful and attractive objects to be seen in any community. The approach from the street should be like that to any dwelling house, over well kept walks bordered by green turf, with trees and shrubs and flowers offering their adornment. ”

“ The redirection of rural education means that the school is to abandon its city ideals and standards, except as these are adaptable to rural as well as to city schools, and to develop its instruction with reference to its environment and the local interests and needs. ”

“ Give the consolidated school, in addition, the greatly enriched curriculum which it will find possible to offer its pupils, and the vexing question of the relation of the rural school to its pupils will be far toward solution. ”

“ There are nearly 30,000 of these schools, each of which has a garden attached to it, and the Minister of Public Instruction has resolved to increase the number of school gardens and that no one shall be appointed master of an elementary school unless he can prove himself capable of giving practical instruction in the culture of Mother Earth. ”

“ A real school, a real instrument of education, would take the place of the noisy congregation of uncontrolled boys and girls, who, in the country district-school, are apt to acquire less of valuable learning than of the minor viciousness that prevails among country children. ”

“ Enough ground can be added to provide for all these things, and a school garden besides. The building can be rendered more inviting through better architecture, and more attention to decoration and cleanliness. An adequate supply of books and other equipment can be provided. While the isolated rural school can never take the place of the consolidated school, while it should always be looked upon as only temporarily occupying a place later to be filled by a more efficient type of school, it can after all be rendered much more efficient than it is at present. ”

“ First of all, each school must supply a larger area and a greater number of people than at present. It is financially impossible to erect good buildings to the number of our present schools. Nor are there pupils enough in the small district as now organized to make a school, nor people enough successfully to use the school as a neighborhood center. ”

“ The proper teaching of geography requires an abundance of reading materials of the type that will permit pupils to enter vividly into the varied experience of all classes of people in all parts of the world. In the supplementary books now furnished the schools, only a beginning has been made. The schools need 10 times as much geographical reading as that now found in the best equipped school. ”

“ Let each township, or perhaps somewhat smaller area, select a central, well-adapted site and thereon erect a modern, well-equipped school building. But this building must not be just the traditional schoolhouse with its classrooms and rows of desks. For it is to be more than a place where the children will study and recite lessons from books; it is to be the place where all the people of the neighborhood, old and young, will [Pg 33] assemble for entertainment, amusement, and instruction. ”

“ The Use of School-buildings as Social Centers meets a very real problem. Halls for dancing and for entertainments, lectures and debates, rooms for games, even gymnasiums, could easily be brought within the reach of most of the people. Grown-ups, as [Pg 184] well as young people, would find them of value. This use of the schools, outside of the regular school hours, has greatly increased in the West, and the school plant has become an increased factor for good in the life of the community. ”

“ The effort toward diversification which has resulted in putting manual training into courses of study, in multiplying courses in high schools, in providing ungraded and other special rooms in elementary schools, in breaking grades up into groups for teaching and promotions, in keeping playgrounds and shops open afternoons and Saturdays, in opening the school buildings evenings for social centers or socialized evening schools,—which has resulted in all these changes and others that might be mentioned,—is simply an effort to make the schools like life. ”

“ The purely rural type of consolidated school is gaining in favor. To this plan must country lovers look for a school which combines efficiency with real training for rural life and avoids many of the objections to village centralization. ”

“ Coöperation Needed.—Educational movements and influences have spread downward and outward from above. The great universities of the world were established before the secondary and elementary school systems came into existence. Thought settles down from leaders who are in high places. We have shown in a former chapter that the state universities, the agricultural colleges, the normal schools, and the high schools have had a wonderful development within the last generation, while the rural school has too often lagged perceptibly behind. ”

“ There, perhaps more consistently than anywhere else in the United States, the school authorities are providing for the whole child in their schools. Many schools have manual training and domestic science; many schools have school gardens and playgrounds; many schools have nature work in the parks and squares; but in no school that I have visited did I find a more conscious effort to unite mental and physical, hand and head, and vocation and recreation, in one complete system. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ We should divide up each city into comparatively small units for investigation, the village communities, as it were, that make up the city. By taking the schools as the center of these communities and by studying the pupils—their personal and family history, their education, and their experiences in trade,—it would be possible to collect information which would give a sound basis either for reconstruction of the general school education or for the formation of a system of trade schools. ”

“ The state universities, agricultural colleges, and normal schools in almost every state are doing their utmost to carry instruction and education in a variety of forms to communities beyond their walls. ”

“ The survey report disclosed that not half of the teachers of the State ever had attended high school, nor had normal training. Rural schools were mere stepping stones for young teachers before securing positions in village and city schools, agriculture was scarcely taught, schools were without equipment, three-fourths of the buildings were twenty years old or older, unsanitary, poorly lighted, without ventilation and insufficiently heated. ”

“ The remoter rural schools which, on account of the poverty of their patronage perhaps, have to get on with one badly trained teacher and have to carry on four grades of instruction in one school-room, and other schools which employ only university graduates, which bring their scholars together in sumptuous buildings, afford them laboratories and libraries, and have all the wealth of a great city to back them—these schools cannot seriously enter into competition with each other. ”

“ The grounds surrounding the rural school building can easily be ample in area, and beautiful in outlook and decoration. Here will be the neighborhood athletic grounds for both boys and girls, shade trees for picnics, flowers and shrubs, and ground enough for a school garden connected with the instruction in agriculture. Nor is it too much to believe that the district will in the future erect on the school grounds a cottage for the principal of the school and his family, and thus offer an additional inducement for strong, able men to devote their energies to education in the rural communities. ”

“ In some states the agricultural colleges have inaugurated a movement to this end. In such colleges, agricultural high schools, and institutions of a similar kind in every state, a three-year course for teachers above the eighth year, specially designed to prepare them for rural school teaching, should be established. Such a school would furnish the proper atmosphere and the proper courses of instruction to suffuse the minds of these prospective teachers with appreciation and love of country life and rural school work. ”

“ The table on page 299, Chapter XIX, shows how much behind cities rural communities have been in the use of their school organization for this purpose. The encouraging thing is, however, that rural communities are beginning to find the means to use their schools in this way. ”