In Minnesota, a law was passed recently to the effect that school officers within a county may attend one educational convention a year upon call of the county superintendent. They receive therefor, three dollars for one day's services and five cents mileage each way for attendance. Already a number of very successful conventions have been held, wherein all school districts in the counties have been represented.
The county institutes in Pennsylvania are largely attended by the public and are designed to reach patrons as well as teachers.
In Kansas, county superintendents have organized school-patrons' associations and school-board associations, both of which definitely purpose to bring together the school and the home and the officers of the school into one body and to co-operate with individuals for the purpose of bettering the school conditions.
Doubtless other states are carrying on similar methods.
An interesting movement wholly independent of the Hesperia plan has recently been put into operation under the leadership of Principal Myron T. Scudder of the State Normal School, New Paltz, N. Y. He has organized a series of country-school conferences. They grew out of a recognized need, but were an evolution rather than a definite scheme. The school commissioner, the teachers, and the Grange people of the community have joined in making up the conference. An attempt is also made to interest the pupils. At one conference there was organized an athletic league for the benefit of the boys of the country school. The practical phases of nature-study and manual training are treated on the programme, and at least one session is made a parents' meeting. There is no organization whatever.
Dr. A. E. Winship, of the Journal of Education, Boston, had the following editorial in the issue of June 21, 1906:
It is now fourteen years since D. E. McClure spoke into being the Hesperia movement, which is a great union of educational and farmer forces, in a midwinter Chautauqua, as it were. Twelve miles from the railroad, in the slight village of Hesperia, a one-street village, one side of the street being in one county and the other side in another, for three days and evenings in midwinter each year, in a ramshackle building, eight hundred people from all parts of the two counties sit in reserved seats, for which they pay a good price, and listen to one or two notable speakers and a number of local functionaries. One-half of the time is devoted to education and the other to farm interests.
It is a great idea, well worked out, and after fourteen years it maintains its lustiness, but I confess to disappointment that the idea has not spread more extensively. It is so useful there, and the idea is so suggestive, that it should have been well-nigh universal, and yet despite occasional bluffs at it, I know of no serious effort to adopt it elsewhere, unless the midwinter meeting at Shelby, in one of these two counties, can be considered a spread of the idea. This child of the Hesperia movement, in one of the two counties, and only twenty miles away, had this year many more in attendance than have ever been at Hesperia.
This work of uniting more closely the interests, sympathies, and intelligence of the teachers and patrons of the rural school has had a test in Michigan of sufficient length to prove that it is a practicable scheme. No one questions the desirability of the ends it is prepared to compass, and experience in Michigan shows not only that where the educators have sufficient enterprise, tact, enthusiasm, and persistence the necessary organizations can be perfected, but that substantial results follow. For the sake of better rural schools, then, it is sincerely to be hoped that the "Hesperia movement" may find expression in numerous teachers and patrons' associations in at least the great agricultural states.