"My dear Miss McDonald:
"The rag-baby tester is causing a whole lot of excitement. We have tested one lot and this morning started another. We notice one thing in particular, the corn which was dried by stove heat sprouts perfectly, while that dried in granaries, etc., is not sprouting at all. Last fall papa saved his seed corn, selecting it very carefully, and hung it up in the granary to dry. I selected several ears from the same field and at the same time, and dried them on the corn tree at school. Upon testing them this spring papa"s corn does not sprout at all, while mine is sprouting just exactly as good as the Golden Glow sent out to the school children. This morning I am testing some more of papa"s, and if that fails he will have to buy his seed, a thing he has never had to do before. We tested the corn secured from four of our interested farmers last week and one lot germinated; the other three did not. This morning pupils from seven different homes brought seed to be tested. We had a package of last year"s seed left and tested several kernels of that, as well as some sent out this year, and we think last year"s seed is testing a little the better."
The new arithmetic, like the new English, deals with the country. It seems a little odd, just at first, to see boys and girls standing at the board computing potato yields, milk yields, the contents of granaries, the price of bags and the cost of barns and chicken houses; yet what more natural than that the country child should figure out his and perhaps his father"s problems in the arithmetic cla.s.s at school?
The geography is no less pertinent. Soil formation, drainage, the location and grouping of farm buildings, the physical characteristics of the township and of the county are matters of universal interest and concern. Every school in Berks County, Pennsylvania, is provided with a fine soil survey map of the county, made by the United States Geological Survey. What more ideal basis for rural geography?
Here and there a country school is waking up to the physical needs of country children. "Country boys are not symmetrically developed,"
a.s.serts Superintendent Rapp, of Berks County. "They are flat-chested and round-shouldered." That is interesting, indeed. Mr. Rapp explains: "It is because of the character of their work, nearly all of which tends to flatten the chest. Whether or not that is the explanation, the fact remains, and with it the no less evident fact that it is the business of the school to correct the defects. In an effort to do this we have worked out a series of fifty games which the children are taught in the schools." In May a great "Field Day and Play Festival" is held, to which the entire county is invited. Each school trains and sends in its teams.
Trolleys, buggies, autos and hay wagons contribute their quota, until five thousand people have gathered in an out-of-the-way spot to help the children enjoy themselves.
Mr. Rapp is a great believer in activity. Tireless himself, he has fifty teacher-farmers--men who teach in the winter and farm in the summer--an excellent setting for country boys and girls. He believes in activity for children, too. "If the school appealed as it ought to the motor energies of children, instead of having to drive them in, you would have to drive them out." To prove his point Mr. Rapp cites the instance of one man teacher, who, before the days of manual training in the schools, decided to have manual training in his one-room Berks County school.
"He did the work himself," Mr. Rapp says, "dug out the cellar and set up a shop in it. The only help he had was the help of the pupils, and the work was done in recess time and after school. They made their own tools, cabinets, book-cases, picture-frames, clock-frames, and anything else they wanted. And do you know, when it got dark, that man would send the children home from the school in order to be rid of them."
Consolidated schools help. They make rural education broader and easier, but the one-room country school, presided over by a live teacher, may be made worth while. Social events, sports, contests in farm work and domestic work, studies couched in terms of the country, may all prove potent factors in shaping the child and the community.
IV Repainting the Little Red Schoolhouse
Without, as well as within, the little red school-house may be transformed. The course of study may establish a standard in rural thought. The rural school-house may set a standard of rural architecture and landscape gardening.
How typical of old-time country schools are the lines:
Still sits the school-house by the road, A ragged beggar sunning.
Around it still the sumacs grow, And blackberry vines are running.
The unpainted, rough exterior of the little school vied with the unkempt school grounds. Both supplied subjects for artistic treatment. To the consternation of the poet and the romancer, the modern one-room school is painted, and the school yard, instead of being filled with a thicket of blackberry and sumac, is laid out for playground, flower-beds and gardens. The up-to-date country school, while far less picturesque, is much more architectural and more useful.
The State Superintendent of Education in Wisconsin furnishes free to local school boards plans of modern one-room schools. With a hall at each end for wraps, an improved heating and ventilating device, and all of the light coming from the north side, where there is one big window from near the floor to the ceiling, these buildings, costing from two thousand dollars up, provide in every way for the health and comfort of the children. The superintendent may go farther than to suggest in Wisconsin, however, for if a school building becomes dilapidated he may condemn it, and then state aid to local education is refused until suitable buildings are provided. The law has proved an excellent deterrent to educational parsimony.
Superintendent Kern, of Rockford, Illinois, has done particularly effective work in beautifying his schools. Within the schools are tastefully painted and decorated. Outside there are flower-beds, hedges, individual garden plots, neatly-cut gra.s.s, and all of the other necessaries for a well-kept yard. No longer crude and unsightly, the Rockford school yards are models which any one in the neighborhood may copy with infinite advantage. As the school becomes the center of community life local pride makes more and more demands. Could you visit some of the finer school buildings in Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin and Illinois you would be better able to understand why men boast of "Our School" in the same tone that they use when boasting of their corn yields.
V A Fairyland of Rural Education
You will perhaps be somewhat skeptical--you big folks who have ceased to believe in little people--when you hear that out in western Iowa there is a county which is an educational fairyland. Yet if you had traveled up and down the country, gone into the wretched country school buildings, seen the lack-l.u.s.ter teaching and the indifferent scholars, which are so appallingly numerous; if you had read in the report of the investigating committee which has just completed its survey of Wisconsin rural schools the statement that in many districts the hog pens were on a better plane of efficiency than the school houses; if you had seen the miserable inadequacy of country schools North, East, South and West, and had then been transported into the midst of the school system of Page County, Iowa, you would have been sure that you had pa.s.sed through the looking-gla.s.s into the queer world beyond. Yet Page County is there--a fairyland presided over by a really, truly fairy.
The schools in Page County, Iowa, which, by the way, is one of the best corn counties in Iowa, are little republics in which the children have the fun, do the work and grow up strong and kind. Each school has its song, its social gatherings, its clubs, and its teams. How you would have p.r.i.c.ked up your ears if you had driven past the Hawley School and heard a score of l.u.s.ty voices shouting the school song to the tune of "Everybody"s Doing It!"
December was the time of the Page County contests, when each school sent its exhibits of dressmaking, cooking, rope-splicing, barn-planning, essay-writing and its corn-judging teams to the county seat, where they were displayed and judged very much as they would be at a county fair.
Further, it was the time when the prizes were to be awarded to the boy having the best acre of alfalfa, of corn and of potatoes. (Queer, isn"t it, but last year a girl got the first prize for the best crop of potatoes.) December is a great month in Page County. This year more than three thousand exhibits were sent into Clarinda, the county seat. Every boy and girl is on tip-toe with expectancy, and after the awards the successful schools are as proud as turkey c.o.c.ks.
"We have never taken the thing seriously here before," explained a farmer who had left his work in mid-afternoon and come in to teach the boys of a school how to judge seed corn. "This year we"re going down there to Clarinda for all that"s in it." If he hadn"t meant what he said he would scarcely have been spending his hours in the school-room. If the Hawleyville boys had not been thoroughly in earnest they would not have been there, after school, learning how to judge corn.
The community around each school is agog with excitement while preparations are being made for the county contest. The men folk advise the boys regarding their corn-judging and their models of farm implements and farm buildings, while the women give lessons galore in the mysteries of country cooking, for it is no small matter to be hailed and crowned as the best fourteen-year-old cook in Page County, Iowa.
One Page County teacher conducts her domestic science work in the evening at the homes of the girls. On a given day of each week the entire cla.s.s visits the home of one of the girls, prepares, cooks and eats a meal. What an opportunity to inculcate lessons in domestic economy at first hand! What a chance to show the behind-the-time housekeeper (for there are such even in Page County) how things are being done!
Because Page County is a great corn county much school time is devoted to corn. In every school hangs a string of seed corn which is brought in by the boys in the fall, dried during the winter, and in the spring tested for fertility. A Babc.o.c.k milk-tester, owned by the county, circulates from school to school, enabling the children to test the productivity of their cows. Teams of boys, under the direction of the school, make their own road drags, and care for stretches of road--from one to five miles. The boys doing the best work are rewarded with substantial prizes. Do you begin to suspect the reason for the interest which the big folks take in the doings of Page County"s little folks? It is because the little folks go to schools which are a vital part of the community.
Three times a year there is, in each school, a gathering of the friends and parents of the children. Sometimes they celebrate Thanksgiving, sometimes they have a "Parents" Day." Anyway, the boys decorate the school, the girls cook cake and candy, and the parents come and have a good evening. The children begin with their school song, sung, perhaps, like this Kile School song, to the tune of "Home, Sweet Home":
1. What school is the dearest, The neatest and best, What school is more pleasant, More dear than the rest, Whose highways and byways Have charms from each day, Whose roads and alfalfa, They have come to stay.
_Chorus._ Kile, Kile, our own Kile, We love her, we"ll praise her, We"ll all work for Kile.
2. Whose corn is so mellow, Whose cane is so sweet, Whose taters are so mellow, Whose coal"s hard to beat, Whose Ma"s and whose Grandpa"s Are brave, grand and true, Their love for their children They never do rue.
There follows a program like the program of any other social evening, except that very often the parents take part as well as the children.
The things are interesting, too, like this little duet, sung at the Thanksgiving entertainment by two of the Kile girls:
1. If a body pays the taxes, Surely you"ll agree, That a body earns a franchise, Whether he or she.
_Chorus._ Every man now has the ballot, None, you know, have we, But we have brains and we can use them, Just as well as he.
2. If a city"s just a household, As it is, they say, Then every city needs housecleaning, Needs it right away.
3. Every city has its fathers, Honors them, I we"en, But every city must have mothers, That the house be clean.
4. Man now makes the laws for women, Kindly, too, at that, But they often seem as funny As a man-made hat.
The grand event of this fairyland comes in the summer, when the boys and girls from all of the schools go to the county seat for a summer camp, where, between attending cla.s.ses and lectures, playing games and reveling in the joys of camp life, they come to have a very much broader view of the world and a more intense interest in one another.
They are only one-room schools out there in Page County, but they have adapted themselves to the needs of the community, focusing the attention of parents and children alike on the bigger things in rural life, and the ways in which a school may help a countryside to appreciate and enjoy them. So the boys and girls of Page County have their fairyland, and are devoted to the good fairy, who, in the shape of a generous, kindly county superintendent, helps them to enjoy it.
VI The Task of the Country School
The teacher of a one-room school in Berks County was quizzing a cla.s.s about Columbus.
"Where was he born?" she queried.
"In Genoa."
"And where is Genoa, Ella?"
"On the Mediterranean Sea," replied Ella promptly.
"What was his business?" was her next question.
"He was a sailor," ventured a bright boy. "A sailor," chorused the cla.s.s.
"Why was he a sailor, Edith?" Edith shook her head.
"Yes, George."
"Why, because he lived on the sea."