Arguments for and Against Consolidation
The centralization of country schools has been forced by the logic of circumstances. “Suppose you start to a creamery with 100 pounds of milk, and 45 pounds leak out on the way, could you make your business pay?” asks Dr. J. W. Robertson, a Canadian leader. “And still, of every 100 children in the elementary schools, 45 of them fall out by the way,—in other words, the average attendance is but 55%. But the consolidated schools in the five eastern provinces, with their gardens, manual training and domestic economy, now bring 97 of 100 children to school every day, and with no additional expense.”
Consolidation is simply efficiency applied to the rural school situation. Instead of perhaps eight separate schools, housed in badly ventilated and insanitary buildings, with very poor equipment, there is one central building, modern in construction and satisfactory in every detail. Instead of eight teachers wasting time over six to fifteen pupils each, with no enthusiasm, there are four teachers working splendidly in team-work, and a fine school spirit, the pupils attending regularly, partly because they no longer have to trudge two miles to school but are conveyed at public expense and partly because they are more interested in a really effective school. The saving of waste sometimes makes it possible to conduct such a school at an actual reduction in expense over the district system, as is the experience in South Carolina. The motive, however, is not economy but to furnish the children better teaching and better facilities for effective education.
While consolidation clearly spells greater efficiency, the plan is obviously impossible under certain conditions and sometimes undesirable. In a widely scattered country the small district school is the only alternative to instruction at home, at least for children under high school age. There is a reasonable limit to the distance to which pupils should be carried. Opinions naturally will differ greatly in determining this reasonable limit. Furthermore weather conditions greatly complicate the problem, particularly where muddy roads are impassable or the northern climate prescribes deep snow drifts which prohibit transportation. Of course even the neighborhood school suffers under these conditions; but the consolidated school in a large township would be obliged to close during seasons of extreme weather.
Consolidated school at North Madison, Madison Township, Lake County, Ohio.
Eight conveyances filled with children may be seen lined up in the foreground.
(Courtesy of A. B. Graham, College of Agriculture, Columbus, Ohio.)
The John Swaney School, District 532, McNabb, Illinois. Irwin A. Madden, Principal.
Moral and social objections must also be faced in this connection. Granting, as everyone must, the efficiency argument for the centralized rural school, we must be careful that our teaching efficiency is not gained at too high a cost. It is a rather serious thing for small children to be far from home regularly through the day; and the usual viewpoint of the mother easily wins our sympathy. We have less consideration for the community pride which suffers when the district is abolished as a social unit. But when we are reminded of the actual moral dangers to which children are sometimes subjected in the privacy of the covered wagon, we cannot dismiss the objection lightly. The solution, however, is not in the direction of the inefficient district school, for that, too, has its moral dangers; but in thorough supervision of the transportation under trustworthy adults.
While the gospel of consolidation is rapidly gaining, all through the country, closing thousands of unnecessary schools every year, the movement often meets determined opposition, though advocated by all leading educational authorities. In time, however, in a disintegrating community, the scarcity of children forces centralization. The Indiana statute makes this automatic by its very sensible provisions. The law enacted eleven years ago permitted school trustees to close schools having less than 12 for an average attendance. The amended law of 1907 allowed the abandonment of schools with an attendance of 15 or less and made it compulsory if the number fell below 13. Consequently 679 rural schools in Indiana were abandoned in 1904, 830 in 1906 and 1,314 in 1908 and in the latter year 16,034 children were carried to school.