Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 261, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 November 1910 — PASSING OF THE DISTRICT SCHOOL [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

PASSING OF THE DISTRICT SCHOOL

THE district school mußt go. The familiar little structure at the country crossroads Is doomed to extinction. Two hundred thousand of them, spread from ocean to ocean and from border and border, are marked by the hand of progress. The keys have already been turned in the/doors of several thousand, to be opened no more to the purposes of education for the country youths. » The half dozen families who sent their children to the district school each morning, who watched them trudge down the country roads In all kinds of weather, and who gathered on Friday afternoons in the little schoolroom to hear the “speaking,” have come to realize that what they could not do by themselves they can do In co-operation with the families of the next district and the surrounding districts. The one-room neighborhood school, with one teacher, Is passing away. In its place is coming a new factor In country life, a school six or eight times as large, with three or four teachers of training and ability; a school prepared to bring to the country boy or girl an education that promises to revolutionize the rural development of America. The country school has passed the point where it constitutes a playroom for the country lad when there Is no work to be done on the farm. It has taken on more Importance than as a rendezvous for bobsled and hayrack parties, box suppers and Ice cream festivals. Education for the Farm. A remarkable movement is under way in the United States, almost unnoticed by the general public and little appreciated by many of the farming communities themselves, but destined to play a most Important part in the education of the 7,000,000 country children of schobl ago, and of the generations that are to follow them along the devious road of learn lng. Yesterday the country boy tolled through indifferent roads and across plowed fields to the district school. Today a big carryall, full of rollicking children and drawn by excellent horses, rolls up to the farmhouse gate each morning with the regularity of the rural mail carrier. The children pile In. the van moves on to the next farmhouse and accumulates more children Through the winding roads of a district, often forty miles square, a half-dozen of these big wagons, maintained at public expense, are bringing hundreds of children every day to a two-story sehoolhouse, such as the country cupils of a few years ago never dreamed of. At night the wagons roll back over the morning’s route, depositing children at their own doorsteps. The country Is thus solving the “back to the farm” problem. It has found the means to stop the great outpouring of sturdy hoys and girls to the city schools, where they have been educated "away from the country.” It has succeeded In bringing into the country, almost to the farmhouse floor, an education for the country youth equal In Its general features to that of the city school, and supplemented by a vocational training for permanent life on the farm. It is an education for the farm, not for the pilgrimage to the city. New Consolidated School. The new sqhool Is known for want of a better name as the “consolidated rural school.” The name fails to describe this great new institution of rural life. It is more than a consolidation of country schools. It 1b a graded school, a high school, a manual training school, agricultural school, domestic science school, almost a miniature university. It is ah institution that is turning out country pupils "finished” as to education, and fitted to do greater and better work on the farm. It is a social center about which the interests of an entire township are beginning to revolve. It is a model experimental farm, a dairy farm, a forestry school, a horticultural school. It is an institution whose keynote of education is: “Educate the country youth for the

world; but give him at least an equal education for the farm. Teach him the interesting and important things of farm life, and he will generally choose the farm as his home.” In nearly 800 communities, chiefly in Indiana, Massachusetts, Ohio, Florida and North Dakota, the new schools are besieged dally by the scores of children tumbling from the incoming carryalls. Several thousand of the little district schools, unable to offer a reasonable excuse for existence In the face of the new competition, have yielded their prerogatives to the united Institution, and have been gathered under its spacious roofs. It Is a powerful force that Is aligned against the “little schoolhouse in the lane." Prof. Willet M. Hays, assistant secretary of agriculture and a leader In the new education movement says: "The desolate rural school, standing on the bleak plain, is too un-Amer-ican to endure the changes of the times. It must be transformed into a part of our beautiful outdoors, and it must he made more efficient in general studies, In culture, and in vocational training for country life." Soil Analysis and Btock Judging. So education seems to have taken on a new meaning for the parents of the country children. The new system teaches all that the old one did, all the Important studies that the city school offered; all the phases of literature, art, history and science needed to round out the American citizen. But it does much more. It adds to these audios, the "vocational training for the farm.” The new schoolhouse, Instead of standing on a barren lot at a wind-swept four corners, is surrounded by a carefully platted farm of ten acres or so. In the more advanced of the schools experimental buildings have been erected, small fruit and forest tracts laid out, miniature dairy and poultry plants constructed, and experimental work of all launched. The boys are taught stock judging, breeding, crop rotation, scientific analysis of the soil, the keeping of farm accounts, and kindred subjects. Contests are organized between rival groups of students to see what results can be obtained In the experimental plats, and also In practical work on the farm at home. The boy carries away from the school not a confused mass of information that he cannot apply to his dally affairs, but a specific idea that certain things can be evolved from the piece of land he kas been working on for years. He becomes Intensely interested In his work and studies, and hiß eyes are opened not only to the "knowledge” of the world In the ordinary sense but to the great possibilities of the land with which he is most familiar and in daily contact. The new school has 200 pupils, instead of 20. It has a lecture hall where spelling bees, class programs, and amateur plays are carried out and where the neighboring farmers’ families gather for “community” meetings, lectures, and entertainments. The whole neighborhood, often embracing 200 farms, becomes an immense laboratory for the school. In the experimental farm surrounding the building plats are laid out to resemble the leading farm of the neighborhood. Great co-operative enterprises, such as creameries, bakerieß, laundries, as well as the churches and the township buildings, it is predicted, will in the near future be located about the school grounds. In many sections the farmers and their children furnish the conveyances to carry the neighbors’ children to school; but in the majority of tricts it has been possible to establish regular carryall service, maintained at public expense. Indiana leads. the way at present in the progress of the new school movement. In almost every county In the state the school wagons are bringing crowds of children daily to the central buildings, and the “Hoos*ler schoolmaster” Is of a different type than a generation ago. Massachusetts is second, Ohio third, and Florida and North Dakota contest for fourth place. In almost every state, with the exception of some of the sparsely settled western ones, the fanning districts ale either experimenting with the new system, or have proven it a complete sucoese.