FOOTNOTES:

FOOTNOTES:[21]Much of this material appeared originally in Educational Foundations.

[21]Much of this material appeared originally in Educational Foundations.

On the west side of Cincinnati, separated from the main part of the town by railroad yards, waste land and stagnant water, surrounded by factories and a myriad of little homes, stands the Oyler School. “Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?” queried a doubter. Answers, in bell tones, the philosopher, “If a man can build a better house or make a better mousetrap than his neighbor, though he fix his home in the woods, the world will find a path to his door.” Because Oyler has built a better school in a better community the world sits at Oyler’s feet to learn of its experiment in social education.

The first time that I went to the Oyler School I encountered a Committee of Manufacturers. A Committee of Manufacturers in a public school during business hours! These men had met to talk with the school principal over the location of a library, which the entire community had worked to secure. When the time came to go before the Park Board over in the center of the city, to secure a playground near the Oyler School, the local bank furnished automobiles, and dozens of business men, leaving their offices, took the opportunity to endorse the work of the school, and to second its demands that play space be given to West End children. The manufacturers have become interested because in less than a decade the Oyler School has changed the face of thecommunity, creating harmony out of discord, and order out of chaos.

The struggle of Oyler is the story of a man, a delivered message, a thriving, enthusiastic school and a reborn neighborhood. Many years ago—about twenty to be exact—a young man named Voorhes was made first assistant in a West End school. Like other young men who go into school work he applied himself earnestly to his tasks, but unlike most of them he did some hard thinking at the same time. Among other things he thought about the relation between the school and the community, wondering why the two were so completely divorced from one another. Then the problem was focused on one concrete example—a boy named John, nearly sixteen years old, who had succeeded in getting only as far as the eighth grade. John, who had never taken kindly to language or grammar, began thinking pretty seriously toward the end of his last year in the grammar school. He tried, he struggled, but the syntax was too much for him. After all, it was not his fault, and he complained bitterly against a punishment in the form of “leaving down” for something which he could not help. His training was so inadequate that he was entirely unable to pass the high school examinations which, in those days, were like the laws of the Medes and the Persians.

“I am safe in saying that he did not know the difference between a verb and a preposition,” said Mr. Voorhes, “but during the grammar lesson he could make a drawing of the face of the teacher that was in no sense a caricature. This phase of his ability gave me a cue to what might be done for him. Knowing both the superintendent and the principal of the Technical School, I talked the situation over with them, begging them, with all the persuasive power at my command, totake the boy, forgetting his shortcomings, and magnifying his peculiar talents, which I felt sure were considerable along mechanical lines. They acceded to my request, giving John a place in the school, to which he walked three miles back and forth daily for three years. For many years John has been superintendent of the lighting plant of a large city, and his experience has always stood out before me as a terrible rebuke to the then dominant educational regime, which could offer John nothing but a sneer. These facts took such a vital hold on me, seeming to reinforce so fully the thought that the industrial abilities which I had acquired back on the farm proved of incalculable value to me, that the resolution to promote industrial education became a fixed part of my educational creed. The memory of that lesson in educational equity kept the need for industrial training constantly in my mind, till I had opportunity to give it expression in the Oyler School.”

John bespoke the needs of the community by which Oyler was surrounded. It was so different from other communities. There were the ugly straggling factory buildings, the miserable homes, their squalid tenants, and worst of all there were the rough, boisterous, over-age, uninterested, incorrigible boys and girls, who flitted from school to home, to street, to jail, and then, gripped by the infirm hand of the law, in the form of a Juvenile Court probation officer, or a truant officer, they came back to school unwillingly enough to begin the cycle all over again.

“As for discipline,” remarked one of the city school officials, “the school hadn’t known it for years, the probation officer couldn’t keep the children in school and the Juvenile Court couldn’t keep them out of jail. Even the majesty of the law is lost on children, youknow.” The children taunted the police; the police hated the children; the home repelled; the factory called, grimly; child labor flourished, and the school despaired.

Such were the conditions when Mr. Voorhes became school principal. Grinding factories, wretched homes, parental ignorance, social neglect, educational impotence—few men could enter such a field of battle with a light heart, but Mr. Voorhes did.

What, think you, was his first move? He addressed to the heads of all of the factories in the neighborhood a letter, suggesting the establishment of a manual training department in connection with the grade work of the Oyler School. “As I become more and more familiar with existing conditions in our school district,” he wrote, “I am convinced that a Manual Training Department would be of vital importance to the school and to the general welfare of the community. Such departments are being looked upon to-day as necessary adjuncts to modern school equipment.

“Our school is being drained constantly of its life force by the adjacent factory demands, and if we could send pupils forth with trained hands as well as trained minds they could render a much more useful service, which, in time, would not only show itself in more profitable returns to employers, but must also tend toward a higher standard of culture in the neighborhood, and a longer continuance in school by our pupils.

“I know of no other section of the city where the actual need should make a stronger appeal for support than here. Anything you may do will be greatly appreciated.”

“You can imagine my surprise,” says Mr. Voorhes, “when during the next few days my mail brought me a hearty response of checks and pledges amounting to nearly a thousand dollars.” Manual training was assured! No! Not yet. The Board of Education reached the conclusion that manual training in the grades was undesirable. “With the exception of $85 which I was told to use as I saw fit the checks and pledges were alike returned to the donors. That $85 gave a piano to our kindergarten.”

That failure back in 1903 was the seed-ground of later success. The community was interested to the extent of a thousand dollars at least. The manufacturers were not only interested in education, but were willing to support it financially. There was a change of administration. Mr. F. B. Dyer became Superintendent of Schools and at once met the situation by establishing a manual training center in the Oyler School.

The end was not yet, however. The truant officers and the Juvenile Court were still busy keeping Oyler children out of mischief and in school. The conventional type of manual training—one period per week in the sixth, seventh and eighth grades—was not holding the pupils.

“The children were not getting enough manual work to establish either habit or efficiency,” Mr. Voorhes comments, “besides, this work reached only to the sixth grade. At this time there were in the school fifty boys and girls below the fifth grade who were from two to five years behind their normal classes. That is to say, they were—most of them—of that unfortunate class that has seen more trouble in a few years than most ofus see in a lifetime. I was constantly asking myself: ‘Where do these folks come in?’ ‘What is our school doing to help their function in life?’ ‘Are we really of any assistance to them after all?’ ‘Is it worth their while to come to our school?’ My sympathy for the pupils was constantly growing, and I went at last in desperation to the superintendent with a plan for a revolution in the organization of my school, a revolution that I was sure would meet the needs of the community and one upon which I was willing to stake my reputation if I had any.”

At this point it is worth remembering, parenthetically, that Cincinnati school men have a habit of going about their school problems in very much that spirit, beginning by sizing up the needs of the community, continuing by becoming imbued with an idea of the community needs and ending by presenting this idea to the school authorities and getting—within bounds—carte blanche to make their schools serve the locality in which they are situated.

This was Mr. Voorhes’s experience. He was told to go ahead and make good—a permission of which he availed himself in an astoundingly short space of time by introducing a system of applied education, aimed to meet the needs of the children who attended the Oyler School.

“There is a peculiar situation,” said Mr. Dyer, “and it needs peculiar handling. You have only one problem to solve—that of the west end. Go ahead!” Mr. Voorhes did go ahead with a plan under which all children in the sixth and seventh grades were given three periods a week in laboratories and shops. Subnormal pupils in the third, fourth and fifth grades were to have four and one-half hours (one school day) for applied workeach week. In order to give special help to backward pupils they were sent in small groups to the seventh and eighth grade teachers while their classes were doing applied work. Below-grade children go to the eighth grade teacher for special work in arithmetic and geography, and the seventh grade teacher for English and history. In this way the backward children from the lower grades have special training by the best equipped teachers in the school.

The eighth grade pupils give one-fifth of their time to applied work. During the year the boys have, in addition to the shop-work, twenty lessons in preparing and cooking plain, substantial meals. To make this “siss” work palatable to the sterner sex much of it takes the form of instruction in camp life—cooking in tin cans and other handy home-made devices. In a community where boys have always been trained to regard home work as menial, but where the absence of servants makes a “lift” from the husband or brother such a Godsend to the wife at odd times, the value of giving grade boys a taste for cooking can hardly be over-estimated.

The boys also receive twenty lessons in the simpler forms of sewing—darning, hemming, sewing on buttons. At the same time the girls are taught the use of simple tools.

Beginning with the second grade the girls have domestic science while the boys are at manual training. This domestic science has a truer ring to it than most of the teaching which passes under that name. The children at Oyler have a peculiar need for domestic science, because in many of the homes mother works out, and even when she is not away her knowledge of domestic arts is so rudimentary that she can impart little to her daughters. So it comes about that the Oyler School seeks to teach the girls all that they would have under intelligent direction in a normal home.

Once each week they cook and once they sew, devoting from one-eighth to one-fifth of their entire time to these activities. By way of preparation for both cooking and sewing they are carefully trained in buying. They must make the dollar go a long way—buying in season the things cheapest at that time and preparing them in a way to yield the maximum of return. For example, they are called upon in January to buy a 50 cent dinner for six persons. Laura Wickersham’s cost list is:

Soup meat$0.20Can of tomatoes.10Spaghetti.05Cheese.05Bread.05Butter, etc..08——$0.53

Gus Potts, a mere boy, makes this suggestion:

Meat$0.20Potatoes.05Cabbage.05Bread.05Milk.04Butter.05Coffee.05——$0.49

In their cooking laboratory they learn to cook simple foods, one thing at a time, until they reach the upper grades, where they must prepare entire meals on limited allowances.

The sewing is equally practical. The girls learn to patch, darn, hem and make underclothing and dresses. Then, going into homes where no intelligent needlework has ever been done—where frequently a darning needle is unknown—they teach the mother and older sisters how to sew, until whole families, under the influence of one school child, improve their wardrobe and reduce their cost for clothing. Certain sewing days in school, called darning days, are sacred to the renovation of worn-out garments which the girls bring from home.

The Oyler system may not turn out artists in dress design—it has no such aim. The children who come to its class-rooms are ignorant of the simplest devices known to civilization for the making of comfortable homes. The domestic science courses are organized to take care of their children by teaching them to be intelligent home-makers.

No less practical is the work of the boys in the shops, since the great majority of them will enter factories. The shop-work is designed to familiarize them with the ideas underlying shop practice. Instead of making useless joints and surfaces the boys turn out finished, marketable products. The eighth grade boys, with the aid of the instructor, have built a drill-press from the scraps of machinery which were found lying about. Now they are at work on an engine. Elaborate products you will say, for eighth grade boys, yet these boys are likely interested, they do their task with zest, and linger aboutthe shop after school hours are over—anxious to complete the jobs which the day’s work has begun.

Boys in grades two to six made three dozen hammer handles for use in the high school machine shops. Of forty-two pieces of rough stock there were produced thirty-six handles, a record which some commercial shops might envy. These same boys made a book and magazine rack, of rather elaborate design, and an umbrella rack for each of the schools in Cincinnati. These racks, displayed in the offices of the various principals, would stand comparison with a high grade factory product. The boys are now engaged in making a desk book-rack (a scroll saw exercise) for every school teacher in Cincinnati. When they have finished there will be more than a thousand.

Besides these routine class exercises the Oyler boys are privileged to make anything which appeals to them and for which they can supply the material. The school machines are theirs, subject to their use at any time. Taking advantage of this, the boys sharpen the home knives and hatchets, make axe handles, umbrella racks, hall stands, stools, sleds, cane chairs, and repair or make any product which fancy or home necessity may dictate.

Let no one infer that the academic branches are neglected at Oyler. Far from it, they are taught with consummate skill by a corps of teachers who enjoy the work because they find the children interested. Strange to relate, an interest in school came in at the front door with Mr. Voorhes’ new plan for applied education. The wild boys and dishevelled girls of the West End, who had erstwhile hated school, came now to participate inschool activities with an interest seldom surpassed in public or private schools.

“You see,” Mr. Voorhes remarked, “a day a week in the shop or laboratories is just about enough to keep down the high spirits of the older ones, and at the same time give them an applied education of which they feel the value. That one day of practical work did the trick. It made the other four days of academic work taste just as good as pie.”

Mr. Voorhes’ plan arrived. It won the interest of the children and later with the assistance of the Mothers’ Club and the kindergarten it won the sympathy of the community.

Like all of the other school centers in Cincinnati, Oyler has a kindergarten and a Mothers’ Club, around which the change in community feeling has centered, until Mr. Voorhes describes them as “the most important influence that ever came into our school.” Yet the kindergarten here, as elsewhere, has had a life and death grapple for existence. In the West End, dominated by its conservative, German atmosphere, the pleas for kindergartens fell on deaf ears. At last, after much preparation, a meeting of mothers and children was held for the purpose of forming an organization; at the meeting there were thirteen children and five mothers, and all antagonistic, or at best suspicious.

“I went around and played with every one of those children,” said Mr. Voorhes, “talking to the mothers, and trying to persuade them that this was not failure, but merely the forerunner of success. The next day I went into every grade, saying to the children:

“‘What was the matter? Mother did not come to the Mothers’ Meeting yesterday.’

“‘Oh, she couldn’t leave the baby.’

“‘Leave the baby! Why, of course not. No one expected her to leave the baby. Tell her to come and bring the baby along.’”

So another meeting was held, and another to which the babies were brought—some women bringing as many as three, who were too young to go to school. At one Mothers’ Meeting, after the club had been well organized, there were twenty women, listening, discussing and nursing babies, all at once.

If the beginnings of the experiment were discouraging the results have more than offset the original disappointment. At the last meeting (in January) seventy of the eighty-five paid up members were present, intelligent, eager, interested, participating heartily in the discussions. It has cost years of labor, but these mothers have reached the point where they can talk intelligently about the children and their needs.

“Only yesterday,” said Miss Phelps, Kindergarten Director, “one mother said to me: ‘I used to be the most impatient woman with my children—I simply couldn’t stand it when they refused to do what I told them. The other day my mother said to me, “You’re about the most patient woman I ever saw. What’s done it?” And I said to her: “Well, mother, I do not know of anything except those folks at the kindergarten, which all helped me to look at children in a very different way.”’”

Through the Mothers’ Meetings the mothers have come to feel that they are co-operating with the teacher and the school. Those mothers who have children in the upper grades as well as in the kindergarten go to the grade teachers too, seeking advice, or making suggestions. They have learned to feel that they are an essential part of the educational plan, and their enthusiastic interest tells of the advantages gained by this co-operation.

The Oyler Mothers’ Club has been the center of the movement to clear up the community. Through them and through the grades refuse has been cleaned and kept from the streets. The club maintains, out of its fund, a medicine chest at the school, which is used by the visiting nurse. It has cleaned up the children, and that is no small item.

“Back in 1904,” says Mr. Voorhes, “I had five hundred of the children vaccinated in my office, and such dirt and vermin I never saw! Nearly every child had the high water mark on his wrist, and their clothes and bodies were filthy. They didn’t know a bathtub from a horse trough; they don’t now for the matter of that, because there are scarcely a dozen houses in this section that have bathtubs, but the children are clean.”

Each year the old members of the Mothers’ Club bring in the new mothers, saying to Miss Phelps: “This is my mother, I brought her,” “This is mine!” with a delighted satisfaction in having added something to the club. The kindergarten, filling two rooms, is thriving, and the kindergarten teachers, visiting and advising in the home, are cordially welcomed everywhere.

“Discipline,” smiled Mr. Voorhes, “no, we don’t mention the word any more. Five years ago the discipline problem in this school was more serious than in any school in town. We couldn’t handle it, not even with a club. To-day the discipline looks after itself.”

The disciplining of an undisciplined school may sound like an immensely difficult task. Wrongly essayed itwould be. Rightly directed it becomes the merest child’s play. The teachers have disciplined the school—disciplined it through kindness—and here, again, the inspiration may be traced to the Mothers’ Club and the kindergarten, for it was in the kindergarten that the first real attempt was made to bring this school into closer relations with the home by home visiting. Little by little the example told on the grade teachers, who went to see the children when they were absent; nor was it long before a custom grew up in the school, by virtue of which a teacher who wished to visit one absent child, might pick her own time to make her visit. If perchance the psychological moment was during school hours, she went then, while another teacher or the principal took her place.

Among the many illustrations of the efficiency of this system one stands out strongly. A boy had been away for a week, sick with rheumatism, when his teacher decided to call and see him. She went hesitatingly, however, for this boy had been rough and troublesome all through school, but particularly to her. At last her mind was made up. She visited the boy and came away radiant, overjoyed at the cordial reception he had given her. Again she went, and the mother, opening the door with a glad face, said:

“Come right in, Tom’s been looking for you.”

“Is he better?” the teacher asked.

“Yes, pretty much, but he said that he would get well right quick when you came to see him again.”

Does anyone wonder that the boy should feel so kindly over attentions to which he was not accustomed? Is it strange that he should have come back to school with a firm resolve to be decent to his teacher?

Discipline? There is no longer a problem of discipline. The teachers are enthusiastic over the work, because they can see its results in the changed homes and lives about them. The children engaged in occupations which they enjoy and sensing the efforts of the school in their behalf, discipline themselves by being frank and hearty in work or in play.

Mr. Voorhes is not surprised at this transformation. The plan on which he staked his reputation was a simple one, based on the idea of serving a community which he had studied carefully, by providing for it an education that met its needs. Though revolutionary from an educational viewpoint, the plan succeeded because it was socially sound—because it linked together the school and the community, of which the school is a logical part.

Oyler has a motto, a very shibboleth, “The school for the community and the community for the school.” Not only do its principal and teachers believe that the school must center its activities about the needs of the community in which it is located, but they put their belief into practice, studying the community diligently and seeking to find an answer for every need which it manifests. Out of this spirit of service has grown up a warmth of feeling and interest among the teachers seldom surpassed anywhere.

“When I came to Oyler I felt about it as Sherman felt about war,” says Mr. Voorhes. “Now I would not trade places with any school man in Cincinnati. The teachers feel the same way. Never yet have we had a teacher who wanted to leave. Each one has her class, that is enough. We have no problem of discipline now. The children and their parents are working for the school.["]

Sometimes people get the idea that Mr. Voorhes does not do very much. One visitor spent half a day observing, and then sitting down in his office she said:

“Mr. Voorhes, I have been here half a day and I haven’t seen you around at all. What do you do?”

“Madam,” answered Mr. Voorhes, “I am a man of leisure. All I do is to sit here at this desk, ready to get behind any one of my teachers, with two hundred and fifty pounds from the shoulder, in order to prevent anybody or anything from getting in the way of her work.”

Small wonder that the teachers like to stay. Small wonder that the work which the school does commands the respect of the people of Cincinnati. In the school, as well as in the neighborhood, each person has a task and a fair chance to do it well.

From its position as “the worst school in Cincinnati” Oyler has risen, first in its own esteem, and then in the esteem of the city, until it is looked upon everywhere as a factor in the life of the west end, and an invaluable cog in the educational machinery of the city. Its tone has changed, too. Mr. Roberts, who came, a total stranger, to assist in the work while Mr. Voorhes was sick, says, “I have never heard a word of discourtesy or a bit of rudeness since I came to this school.” That is strong testimony for a new man in a new place. Splendidly done, Oyler!

Mr. Voorhes has not stopped working. On the contrary, he is at it harder than ever, shaping his school to the ever-changing community needs. He has stopped disciplining, though, and he has stopped wondering about the success of his experiment. Time was when Oyler looked upon high school attendance much as a New York gunman looks at Sunday School. Last year of the thirty-three children in the eighth grade,eighteen—more than half—went to high school. The tradition against high school has been replaced by a healthy desire for more education. “One day a week in the shops,” Mr. Voorhes says, “means interest and enthusiasm. Our children compete in high school with the children of grammar schools from the well-to-do sections, and with the best our boys and girls hold their own.”

The community is interested. Parents and manufacturers alike come to the school, consult, advise, suggest, co-operate. The school boy is no longer sneered at by “the gang.” The school has made its place in the community, and “the gang” is enthusiastically engaged in school work. The complexion of the neighborhood has changed, too. It is less rough, the police have less to do. Houses are neater, children better clothed and cared for. Oyler has won the hearts of its people, improved the food on their tables and the clothes on their backs, sent the children to high school, and their mothers to Mothers’ Clubs; and the people who once uttered their profanity indiscriminately in every direction now swear by Oyler.

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-wearysoul 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 stillKissed 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.

Even the doughtiest son of the soil must needs admit that the farmer of the past, living secluded in his house or village, was provincial, narrow, bigoted and individualistic. Times are rapidly changing, however, and out of the old desolation of rural individualism there is arising the spirit of wholesome, virile co-operation,which has transformed the face of many a country district almost in the twinkling of an eye. Nowhere is this co-operative spirit better expressed than in the consolidated country schools, which are organized, like the city school, by subjects and grades.

Considered from any viewpoint, the consolidated school is superior, as a form of organization, to the district school. Rather, the consolidated school permits organization, and the district school does not. Wherever it has been tried the testimony in favor of consolidation is overwhelming.

“Comparison,” cried one county superintendent in consternation. “Comparison! There is no comparison. The old one-room school, like the one-horse plough, has seen its day. The farmers in this country, after figuring it out, have reached the conclusion that the one-room school is in the same class with a lot of other old-fashioned machinery—good in its day, but not good enough for them. That is why over eighty per cent of our schools have been consolidated. You see it’s this way: The farmers need labor badly, and rather than see their sons go to a school where they are called on once or twice a day by a sadly overworked teacher they would put them to work on the farm. The consolidated school wins them with its good course of study and the boys stay in school.”

That is the first, and perhaps the most vital, advantage of the consolidated school—it permits the enlargement of the course of study. Sewing, cooking, agriculture, manual training, drawing and music, have all been introduced, because the teachers have time for them. High school work has been added, too. The consolidated school, in so far as the course of study is concerned, is very nearly on a par with the graded school of the city.

Have you ever attended a one-room country school? If you have not you can form but the faintest idea of what it means to the teacher. Her day is so split up with little periods of class work that she can never do anything thoroughly. Here, for example, is an average schedule of work for a one-room class in Indiana:

Daily Program

FORENOON

TimeClassGrade8:30Opening ExercisesAll8:40ReadingPrimary8:45ReadingFirst8:50ReadingSecond8:55ReadingThird9:00ReadingSixth9:10GrammarFourth9:20GrammarFifth9:30GrammarSixth9:40GrammarSeventh9:50GrammarEighth10:00ReadingFourth10:10ReadingSeventh10:20RecessAll10:30ReadingPrimary10:40ReadingFirst10:50NumbersSecond11:00NumbersThird11:05ArithmeticFourth11:15ArithmeticFifth11:25ArithmeticSeventh11:35ArithmeticEighth11:50ReadingFifthNoonNoonAll

Appalling, do you say? What other word describes it adequately? There are twenty-one teaching periods in the morning; twenty-four in the afternoon. Forty-fivetimes each day that teacher must call up and teach a new class. The college professor is “overloaded” with fourteen classes a week. This woman had two hundred and twenty-five. Will any one be so absurd as to suppose that she can do them or herself justice?

Consolidation, among its many advantages, reduces the number of classes per day, and increases the time which the teacher may devote to each class. Note the contrast between that schedule of a one-room teacher and the teaching schedule of a consolidated school teacher in the same county:

Teacher’s Daily Program

FORENOON

TimeClassGrade8:30Opening ExercisesAll8:45Desk1-B8:50Phonetics1-A9:00Phonetics1-B9:15Reading1-A9:30ReadingSecond9:45Rest ExerciseAll10:00NatureAll10:15RestAll10:30Words1-B10:50Words1-A11:10NumbersSecond11:30History1-A

The “district,” or one-room, schools in Montgomery County, Indiana, have twenty-three pupils per teacher, scattered over six grades. The consolidated schools in the same county show sixteen pupils per teacher, in three grades. While the teacher in the district school averages twenty-seven recitations a day, the teacher inthe consolidated school has eleven; but the time per recitation is: district, thirteen minutes; consolidated, twenty-nine minutes. The number of minutes which the district teacher may give to each grade is fifty minutes; the consolidated teacher has one hundred and seventeen minutes per grade. Badly sprinkled with figures as that statement is, it gives some idea of the increased opportunities for effective teaching in the consolidated school. No teacher can do justice to twenty-seven classes per day, and an average recitation period of thirteen minutes is so short as to be almost unworthy of mention.

Most consolidated schools, in addition to the ordinary rooms, have an assembly room in which lectures, festivals, socials, public meetings, and farmers’ institutes are held. Acting as a center for community life, the consolidated school takes a real place in the instruction of the community. The big brick or stone building, well constructed and surrounded, as it usually is, by well-kept grounds, furnishes the same kind of local monument that the court house supplies in the county seat. People point proudly to it as “their” public building. It is an experience of note in traveling across an open farming country to come suddenly upon a splendidly-equipped, two-story school, set down, at a point of vantage, several miles away from the nearest railroad.

The consolidated school at Linden, Montgomery County, Indiana, for example, situated in a town of scarcely three hundred inhabitants, is equipped with gas from its own gas-plant; with steam heat; ample toilet accommodations; an assembly room; and halls so broad that the primary children may play some of their games there in bad weather.

One of the most widely discussed among consolidated schools is the John Swaney Consolidated School, ofPutnam County, Illinois.[22]The John Swaney School occupies a twenty-four acre campus, lying a mile and a half from the nearest village, and ten miles from the nearest town. The agitation for consolidation in Putnam County led John Swaney and his wife to give twenty-four acres as a campus for a local consolidated school. Hence the name and much of the success which has attended the work of the school.

The school cost $15,000, equipped. It is of brick with four class-rooms, two laboratories, a library, offices, a manual training shop, a domestic science kitchen, and a basement play-room. The building is lighted, heated, and ventilated in the most modern fashion. The John Swaney School thus came into existence with an equipment adequate for any school and elaborate for a school situated far from the channels of trade and industry.

The course of study organized includes all of the modern specialized work which the effective city school is able to do. Securing good teachers and possessing unique facilities, the school carries boys and girls through a series of years, in which intellectual, experimental, manual, recreational, and social activities combine to make the school the center of community life and community influence.

The school campus is used as a laboratory and a play ground. The trees provide subject matter for a course in horticulture. The fertile land is turned to agricultural use, and the broad expanse of twenty-four acres furnishes additional space for games and sports.

The social life of this school is no less effective than is its location and equipment. The teachers’ cottage, anold school building converted for this purpose, furnishes a center for the life of the teaching staff, and makes a background for the social life of the entire school. There are two strong literary societies, including all of the pupils in the school. Each year plays are presented on the school stage. There are musical organizations, parents’ conferences, entertainments, and community gatherings of all descriptions. In every sense, the John Swaney School is a community center.

Prosperity has followed in the wake of this educational development. The John Swaney School is known far and wide, and consequently farm renters and farm buyers alike seek the locality because of the educational opportunities which the school affords for their children, and because of the social opportunities which the community around the school affords for them.

The movement for school consolidation, like many another good movement, originated in Massachusetts. From that state it has spread extensively to Indiana, Minnesota, Iowa, Kansas, Idaho, Washington, and a number of other states,—East, West, and South. In every progressive rural community, wherever prosperous farmers and comfortable farm homes are found, there the consolidation movement is being discussed, agitated, or operated.

The movement toward consolidation has been particularly active during the past few years in the South. The Southern States are, for the most part, largely agricultural communities. The rural population far outnumbers the urban population, and it is in these districts, therefore, that the consolidated school can have its greatest influence. By 1912, the state of Louisiana alone was able to report over 250 consolidated county schools. Georgia, Florida, and North Carolina showthemselves almost equally active in forwarding this generally accepted progressive educational movement.

The difficulties involved in consolidation may be summed up under two heads. There is, first of all, the conservatism and prejudice of those people who believe that the things which were good enough for their fathers, are still good enough for them. Secondly, there are the technical difficulties involved in transporting pupils from distant localities to the school center. Roads are bad at certain times of the year. Wagons are costly. Desirable drivers are difficult to secure. These factors, taken together, make the administrative difficulties of the consolidated school far greater than those of the old-time one-room country school.

The forces operating to overcome these difficulties are destined ultimately to triumph. The widespread acceptance of an agricultural education that followed upon the work of experiment stations, universities and high schools, has convinced even the most reactionary of the old-time group that there are, at least, certain things in the new generation which surpass, in their economic and social value, the like things of the old. The inroads of scientific agriculture have played havoc with agricultural tradition and conservatism. The obvious merits of the new scheme are destined to overcome the prejudices which the long continuance of the old scheme created.

The technical difficulties of transportation are being met in a number of ways. Wagon builders in various parts of the country are devoting themselves to the designing and building of wagons which will be cheap and effective. State and local authorities are actively engaged in the improvement of roads. The near future promises a standard of transportation facilities that will far surpass any that the consolidation movement hasthus far enjoyed. The details of transportation administration are being worked out variously in different communities, and always with a view to the particular needs of the community involved.

While the disadvantages of consolidation lie mainly in the overcoming of prejudice and the solution of administrative problems, the advantages of consolidation seem to be primarily educational and social. The consolidated school is the only method thus far devised for giving graded school and high school privileges under adequately paid teachers to the inhabitants of rural communities. Again the consolidated school is the only method of securing a school attendance sufficiently large to provide the incentive arising from competition and emulation for pupils of each grade or age. Furthermore, the consolidated school, standing out as the most distinctive feature of a rural landscape, is readily converted into a center of rural life and activity where young folks and old folks alike find a common ground for social interests.

The advantages of the rural school are thus summed up by Mabel Carney,[23]—“For the complete and satisfying solution of the problem of rural education and for the general reconstruction and redirection of country life, the consolidated country school is the best agency thus far devised.” The reasons for this statement are summed up under seven heads. In the first place, the consolidated school is a democratic, public school, directly in the hands of the people who support it. Secondly, it is at the door of farm houses and is wholly available, even more available, when public transportation is provided, than the present one-teacher school. Third, every child in the farm community is reached by it. Allchildren may attend because of the transportation facilities afforded. Fourth, the cost of the school is reasonable. Fifth, it accommodates all grades, including the high school. The country high school, by excluding the younger children, denies modern educational facilities to any except pupils of high school grade. Sixth, it preserves a balanced course of study. While educating in terms of farm-life experience, it does not force children prematurely into any vocation, although it prepares them generally for all vocations. Lastly, the consolidated school is the best social and educational center for the rural community that has been thus far organized.

However just may be the judging of a tree by its fruit, the fruit of the consolidation movement seems uniformly good. First, because the children get to school; and second, because after they get there they are taught something worth while.

When the schools of a district are consolidated, transportation must be furnished for the students. Union Township, Montgomery County, Indiana, covering one hundred and six square miles, has replaced thirty-seven district schools with six consolidated schools. Some of the children are brought as far as five miles in wagons, or on the interurban electric cars. The wagon calls at stated hours, and the children must be ready. Tardiness is therefore reduced, until one county reports ten hundred and ninety-one cases of tardiness in its district schools (for 1910-11) and ninety-two cases in consolidated schools, although in this county there are more children in the consolidated than in the district schools.

Then, too, the children stay later in the consolidated schools. In Montgomery County, Indiana, the children who have not finished the eighth grade and who are staying away from school constitute twenty-nine percent. of the population in the consolidated schools, as against sixty-three per cent. in the district schools. The Vernon consolidated school in Trumbull County, Ohio, has enrolled nearly nine-tenths of the children of school age. Before the consolidation only three-fifths were in school.

Theoretically, the introduction of agriculture, manual training, and other applied courses which are found in most consolidated schools, should have some effect on the lives of the children. In order to show its extent Superintendent Hall, of Montgomery County, Indiana, asked one thousand children (five hundred in district schools and five hundred in consolidated schools) what they proposed to do after they left school. Arranged according to the kind of school in which the children were, the answers showed as follows:

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