CHAPTER IX
VITALIZING RURAL EDUCATION
I The Call of the Country
There is a call of the land just as there is a call of the city, though the call of the city has sounded so insistently during the past century that men innumerable, heeding it, have cast in their lot with the throngs of city dwellers. Yet the city proves so unsatisfying that thousands are turning from its rows of brick houses and lines of paved streets to the fruit trees, dairy herds, market gardens and broad acres of the countryside. The call of the city is answered by a call which is becoming equally distinct—the call “Back to the Land.”
The ten-acre lot may not be any nearer paradise than the “Great White Way,” but there is about it a breadth of quiet wholesomeness which cannot make its presence felt in the bustle of the clanging cars and the rushing whirl of crowded streets. The unsmoked blue of the sky is over the country, as are the fragrance of flowers, woods and mown grass; the stars are brilliant by night, and by day the birds sing, and the cows and barnyard fowls talk philosophically together. The children have room to run and play between their periods of work, which is very near of kin to blessedness, because, aside from being instructive, it binds the child into the family group in a way that factory work can never do. The country cries health and enthusiasm to the world-weary soul as it does to the barefoot boy. Whittier was very near the heart of things when he wrote:
Blessings on thee, little man,
Barefoot boy, with cheek of tan!
With thy turned-up pantaloons,
And thy merry whistled tunes;
With thy red lips, redder still
Kissed by strawberries on the hill.
Despite the loneliness, isolation and overwork in some country places, the rural life is, on the whole, very rich in—
Sleep that wakes in laughing day,
Health that mocks the doctor’s rules,
Knowledge never learned of schools.
Country life holds a great promise for the future—a promise of vigorous manhood and womanhood, and of earnest, sane living. Through the rapidly progressing country school, more perhaps than through any other agency, this promise may be fulfilled. There are two possibilities in the development of the country school. On the one hand, several one-room schools may be consolidated into one central graded school, to which the children are transported at public expense; on the other hand, the old-time, one-room school may be reorganized and vitalized.