The consolidation of rural schools
The first step in reorganizing the rural schools is consolidation. Our rural school organization, buildings, and equipment are a full century behind our industrial and social advancement. The present plan of attempting to run a school on approximately every four square miles of territory originated at a time of poverty, and when the manufacturing industries were all carried on in the homes and small shops. Our rural people are now well-to-do, and manufacturing has moved over into a well-organized set of factories; but the isolated little school, shamefully housed, meagerly equipped, poorly attended, and unskillfully taught, still remains.
Such a system of schools leaves our rural people educationally on a par with the days of cradling the grain and threshing it with a flail; of planting corn by hand and cultivating it with a hoe; of lighting the house with a tallow dip, and traveling by stage-coach.
The well-meant attempts to "improve" the rural school as now organized are futile. The proposal to solve the problem by raising the standards for teachers, desirable as this is; by the raising of salaries; or by bettering the type of the little schoolhouse, are at best but temporary makeshifts, and do not touch the root of the problem. The first and most fundamental step is to eliminate the little shacks of houses that dot our prairies every two miles along the country roads.
For not only is it impossible to supply adequate buildings so near together, but it is even more impossible to find children enough to constitute a real school in such small districts. There is no way of securing a full head of interest and enthusiasm with from five to ten or twelve pupils in a school. The classes are too small and the number of children too limited to permit the organization of proper games and plays, or a reasonable variety of association through mingling together.
Furthermore, it will never be possible to pay adequate salaries to the teachers in these small schools. Nor will any ambitious and well-prepared teacher be willing to remain in such a position, where he is obliged to invest his time and influence with so few pupils, and where all conditions are so adverse.
The chief barrier to the centralization of rural education has been local prejudice and pride. In many cases a true sentimental value has attached to "the little red schoolhouse." Its praises have been sung, and orator and writer have expanded upon the glories of our common schools, until it is no wonder that their pitiful inadequacy has been overlooked by many of their patrons.
In other cases opposition has arisen to giving up the small local school because of the selfish fear that the loss of the school would lower the value of adjacent property. Still others have feared that consolidation would mean higher school taxes, and have opposed it upon this ground.
But whatever the causes of the opposition to consolidation, this opposition must cease before the rural school can fulfill its function and before the rural child can have educational opportunities even approximating those given the town child. And until this is accomplished, the exodus from the farm will continue and ought to continue. Pride, prejudice, and penury must not be allowed to deprive the farm boys and girls of their right to education and normal development.
The movement toward consolidation of rural schools and transportation of the children to a central school has already attained considerable headway in many regions of the country.[1] It is now a part of the rural school system in thirty-two States. Massachusetts, the leader in consolidation, began in 1869. The movement at first grew slowly in all the States, not only having local opposition to overcome, but also meeting the problem of bad country roads interfering with the transportation of pupils.