RURAL EDUCATION IN THE NEW SOUTH
The Conference for Education in the South, meeting in Richmond April 15–18, brought together more than 2300 men and women. Farmers and business men, college presidents and country school teachers, men interested in local credit associations, men bent upon improving tax systems, and ministers of churches—all met together to tell what they themselves out of their experience had gathered of the ways to make life better.
The coming ambassador to the Court of St. James, a southern man, and a freckled, sunburned Virginia boy stood in the great auditorium at Richmond before thousands. Walter Page, the ambassador, introduced Frank Brockman, the boy, who told slowly and carefully how he had raised 167 bushels of shelled corn on one acre of Virginia land, how he had made $175 upon that acre thereby breaking the corn growing record of a state. He had listeners who understood and appreciated. In front of the boy sat southern farmers, teachers, demonstration leaders and superintendents of schools. Behind him, upon the platform sat the men who have made possible his work and the success of thousands like him in southern states. The men on the platform, like the boy, told their story simply and slowly to the men on the floor.
The immediate aim of the conference, as its name implies, was to stimulate progress in the South, but the speakers were not drawn from the South only. From New York and Ohio, Minnesota and Canada, men had come to bring their expert knowledge of improved farming, of co-operative agencies for buying and selling, and of more efficient schools. The men and women whose names were on the program talked not theories but facts which they themselves knew and had demonstrated and about the value of which they were intensely enthusiastic.
One humorous illustration of this came one morning during a session on co-operation. A. V. Nelson, a Swede from Minnesota, was telling of the farmers’ co-operative enterprise in his home town. As he proceeded, with enthusiastic impetuousness, faltering now and then in his use of English and then plunging on again, someone in the audience called out “Take your time!” Someone else at the same time asked him a question. “But dey von’t let me take any time,” he exclaimed ruefully, looking at the chairman who stood firm for the time limits of his program—“but I tell you vat I do! I stay here till tomorrow morning if you want to ask questions—I did not come here yust to talk, but to get you to go home and do somethings too!”
A third fact about the conference was the great emphasis it laid upon the present opportunities for life in the country. The long program contained only incidental references here and there to city conditions. No addresses in the whole conference were listened to with more attention than the earnest account by Frank Brockman of the way he raised his prize-winning crop of corn and the stories by two girls of how they won their prizes for growing and canning tomatoes. Their enthusiasm gave an added human interest to all the other discussions in the conference of how the work on the farm can be made more profitable and attractive.
Men and women from the rural schools gave actual instances in which the schools are being conducted to fit boys and girls for intelligent citizenship in their own country communities; school superintendents told of the new emphasis which is being laid on the proper training of teachers for the rural work; physicians detailed the activities of boards of health and of the Rockefeller Commission in fighting typhoid, the hookworm and other diseases. Still others told of the ways in which, by labor saving devices and by the promotion of a closer social life, the drudgery for women in the country homes can be alleviated. Business men from the cities told how chambers of commerce, railroads and other organizations centering in the city could help to stimulate the prosperity of the country. Throughout the conference the chief emphasis was not so much upon benefits for individuals, but upon the chance for individuals to work together for the benefit of whole communities.
What may be called the religious spirit of the gathering was not confined to this general ideal of co-operation. There were well-attended and enthusiastic conferences on the opportunities of the country church. Without dissent it was assumed that the church is concerned with every agency which makes for the finer development of country life—with better schools, better system of land ownership, better health, better recreation, a closer knit and happier society. It was recognized that the country minister, as a natural leader in his community, has an almost unequalled chance to promote co-operation for community good. He must be, as one speaker put it, “a man of piety walking with God, a man of humanity walking with men.”
During the conference there was an exhibit in the old high school building. Here the kind of progress in rural education which the speakers in the conference had talked about was visualized by pictures and charts and whole rooms full of the work turned out in the manual training and domestic science classes.