In many places, three or four rural districts are uniting in this movement, the general plan being that of constructing a central building with ample working space for all, and then transporting the children to and from the school. The scheme is working well as a rule. Among the great advantages is that of a possible grading of the school so that the teacher may have time for each subject and more opportunity for specialization. Perhaps the most serious and difficult part of the plan is that of providing a safe and suitable means of conveyance to and from the school. Some excellent patterns of school wagons are already on the market, while manufacturers are constantly at work improving them. So we may expect better results as time goes on. It has already been shown very satisfactorily that the conveyance, when in charge of a well-trained driver, furnishes improved moral and physical safeguards for the child.
More high schools needed
Not only every county, but also every rural township, should have its well-equipped high school. It is a serious matter to send boys and girls in their middle teens away to college. Many lives are thus more or less ruined simply from too early loss of the personal restraints and influence of the parents. But with a first-class high school in easy reach the young people may at least return home for the Saturday-Sunday recess and thereby continue in the close councils of their parents. And then, the rightly-managed high school will bring the student into closer touch with the local rural problems that may not be possible in case of the distant institution.
Plate XV.
Figs. 17-21.—This magnificent consolidated school in Winnebago County, Illinois, was inspired by the excellent work of the well-known Superintendent O. J. Kern. The four little one-room buildings illustrated above gave way to it.
In the location of high schools intended to serve the rural interests there should be an effort to keep away from the towns and cities. In the latter places the allurements of the cheap theater and the snobbery that often invades the city high school are illustrations of the evils that serve to entice the young away from the substantial things of life. A good county or township high school located centrally and in the open country is ideal. At such a location it is vastly easier than in the city to center the attention of the students upon the rural problems, not to mention the greater availability of demonstrations on farm and garden plots.
Better rural teachers needed
The ideal preparation for a teacher in the rural school is a complete course in a first-class agricultural college, with the inclusion of a few terms’ work in the educational subjects. So long as we send into the district schools young teachers who have been taught merely in the common text-book branches, and whose training has been exclusively pedagogical, the practice of educating the boys and girls away from the farm will go on. The country school is, in its best sense, an industrial school; and only those teachers can do best work therein who have had the personal experience in industrial training and the changed point of view which only the agricultural college can give. So if the board of trustees in any rural district really wishes to unite in supporting an effective back-to-the-farm movement, let them offer to some country-reared graduate of the agricultural college a salary of about twice or three times the amount usually paid. After a few terms of school taught by such a person, the good effects on the rural uplift will most certainly reveal themselves. But so long as school trustees continue to try to drive a sharp bargain in the employment of teachers—securing the one with the passable county certificate who will teach for the least wages—the boys will continue to run off to town for “jobs” and the parents will continue to “move to town to educate their children.”