FOOTNOTES:

Chosen ProfessionDistrictSchoolsConsolidatedSchoolsTeaching151122Business12373Farming92129Law5521Mechanics4886Medicine139Ministry124Stock-breeding341Miscellaneous3—15—Total500500

Agricultural studies—stock-breeding and farming—and mechanics show up strongly in the consolidated schools, at the expense of teaching, business and law in the district schools. While such figures do not prove anything, they indicate the direction in which the minds of consolidated school children are moving.

Eli M. Rapp, of Berks County, Pennsylvania, voices the spirit of the consolidation movement when he says:

“The consolidated school furnishes the framework for a well-organized, rural education. Its course of study is broader, its appeal is stronger, its service to the community more pronounced, and, best of all, it holds the children. Progressive rural communities have wakened up to the fact that unless their children are educated together there is a strong probability that they will be ignorant separately.”

The brilliant success of the consolidated schools reveals the possibilities of team-work in rural education, but it cannot detract from the wonderful work which has been done, and is still being done, by the one-room rural school. Always there will be districts so sparsely settled that the consolidated school is not feasible. In such localities the one-room school, transformed as it may be by enlightened effort, must still be relied upon to provide education. Nor is this outcome undesirable. The one-room country school bristles with educational possibilities. Under intelligent direction, even its cumbersome organization may yield a plenteous harvest of useful knowledge and awakened interest.

The droning reading lesson and the sing-song multiplication table are heard no more in the progressive country school. In their place are English work, which reflects the spirit of rural things, and the arithmetic of the farm. Here is a boy of thirteen, in a one-room country school, writing an essay on “Selecting, Sowing and Testing Seed Corn,” an essay amply illustrated by pen and ink drawings of growing corn, corn in the ear andindividual corn kernels. Mabel Gorman asks, “Does it pay the farmer to protect the birds?” After describing the services of birds in destroying weed seeds and dangerous insects and emphasizing their beauty and cheerfulness, she concludes: “The question is, does it pay the farmer to protect the birds?” The only answer is that anything that adds to the attractiveness of the farm is worthy of cultivation. Happily a farmer who protects the birds secures a double return—increased profit from his crop and increased pleasure of living. Viola Lawson, writing on the subject, “How to Dust and Sweep,” makes some pertinent comments. “I think if a house is very dirty, a carpet sweeper is not a very good thing. A broom is best, because you can’t get around the corners with a sweeper.” Note this hint to the school board: “We spend about one-third of our time in the school house, so it is very important to keep the dust down. The directors ought to let the school have dustless chalk. If they did there wouldn’t be so much throat trouble among teachers and children. Then so many children are so careless about cleaning their feet, boys especially. They go out and curry the horses, and clean out the stables, and get their feet all nasty. Then they come to school and bring that dust into the schoolroom. Isn’t that awful?” Viola is thirteen.

Over in eastern Wisconsin Miss Ellen B. McDonald, County Superintendent of Oconto County, has her children engaged in contests all the year round—growing corn, sugar beets, Alaska peas and potatoes; the boys making axe handles and the girls weaving rag carpet. During the summer Miss McDonald writes to the children who are taking part in the contests suggesting methods and urging good work. One of the letters began with the well-known lines:

Say, how do you hoe your row, young man,Say, how do you hoe your row,Do you hoe it fair, do you hoe it square,Do you hoe it the best you know?

“How are you getting along with the contests?” continues the letter. “Are you taking good care of your beets, peas, corn or garden? Remember that it will pay you well for all the work you do upon it.” In reply one girl writes: “My corn is a little over five feet high. My tomatoes have little tomatoes on, but mamma’s are just beginning to blossom. My beets are growing fine. I planted them very late. My lettuce is much better than mamma’s. We have been eating it right along.” Mark the note of exultation over the fact that her crop is ahead of her mother’s.

Sometimes the school child brings from school knowledge which materially helps his father. Here is a Wisconsin English lesson, and a proof of the saying, “Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings,” all in one.

These country boys and girls take an interest in English work, because it deals with the things they know. Miss Ellen B. McDonald, County Superintendent of Schools in Oconto County, Wisconsin, publishes a column of school news in each of the three county newspapers. Here is one of her contributions, in the form of an English lesson and a counting lesson combined: (A “rag-baby tester” is a device for determining the fertility of seed corn before it is planted.)

“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, whilethat 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.”

“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, whilethat 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 class 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 thephysical needs of country children. “Country boys are not symmetrically developed,” asserts 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 itgot 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.

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 grass, 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.

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-luster 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 passed through the looking-glass 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 pricked up your ears if you had driven past the Hawley School and heard a score of lusty 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 cocks.

“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 class 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 Babcock 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 fivemiles. 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 bywaysHave 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’sAre brave, grand and true,Their love for their childrenThey 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 funnyAs 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 classes 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.

The teacher of a one-room school in Berks County was quizzing a class 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 class.

“Why was he a sailor, Edith?” Edith shook her head.

“Yes, George.”

“Why, because he lived on the sea.”

“Of course. Now think a minute. Do many of the boys from this country become sailors?”

“No’m,” from the class.

“What do they become?”

“Farmers,” cried the class, hissing the “f” and flattening the “a.”

Certainly, the boys in a farming community, brought up on the farm, naturally become farmers, yet in the interim, between babyhood and farmer life, they go to school. How absurdly easy the task of the school—to determine that they shall be intelligent, progressive, enthusiastic,up-to-date farmers. The girls, too, marry farmers, keep farmers’ homes and raise farmers’ sons. How simple is the duty of seeing that they are prepared to do these things well!

The task of the city school is complex because of the vast number of businesses, professions, industrial occupations and trades which children enter. In comparison the country school has the plainest of plain sailing. What are the ingredients of successful farmers and farmers’ wives? What proportion of physical education, of mental training, of technical instruction in agriculture, of suggestions for practical farm work, of dressmaking, sewing and cooking, enter into the making of farmers’ boys and farmers’ girls who will live up to the traditions of the American farm? To what extent must the school be a center for social activity and social enthusiasm? How shall the school make the farm and the small country town better living places for the men and women of to-morrow?

The duty of the country school is simple and clear. It must fit country children for country life. First it must know what are the needs of the country; then, manned by teachers whose training has prepared them to appreciate country problems, it will become the power that a country school ought to be in directing the thoughts and lives of the community.

FOOTNOTES:[22]An extensive reference to this school will be found in “Country Life and the Country School,” Mabel Carney, Row, Peterson & Company, Chicago, 1912.[23]Supra, pp. 180-181.

[22]An extensive reference to this school will be found in “Country Life and the Country School,” Mabel Carney, Row, Peterson & Company, Chicago, 1912.

[23]Supra, pp. 180-181.

The sun shone mildly, though it was still late January, while the wind, which occasionally rustled the dry leaves about the fence corners, had scarcely a suggestion of winter in its soft touch. Across the white pike, and away on either side over the rolling blue grass meadows, the Kentucky landscape unfolded itself, lined with brown and white fences, and dotted with venerable trees. A buggy, drawn by a carefully-stepping bay horse, came over the knoll ahead, framing itself naturally into the beautiful landscape. Surely, that must be Joe and Miss Belle; it was so like her, since she always seemed at home everywhere, making herself a natural part of her surroundings. Another moment and there was no longer any doubt. It was Miss Belle with three youngsters crowded into her lap and beside her in the narrow buggy seat, while a dangling leg in the rear suggested an occupant of the axle.

“Well, well,” cried Miss Belle, cordially, as Joe stopped, glad of any excuse not to go, “where are you bound for? You didn’t come all the way over to ride back with me?”

“No, indeed, Miss Belle,” I laughed back, “no one ever expects to ride with you so near the school-house. I’ll walk along ahead until you begin to unload.”

“Go along, now you’re casting reflections on Joe’s speed. Come, Joe, we’ll show him.” Joe, who did not leave his accustomed walk at once, finally yielded to the suggestion of a gentle blow from the whip and broke into a trot.

“Lem’me walk with you,” cried the rider on the springs, slipping from her perch and stepping out beside the buggy. So we journeyed for half a mile. The horse, under constant urging, jogged along, while the spring rider and I trotted side by side over the well-made pike. Then Miss Belle drew rein in front of a small, yellow house.

“Now, out you go,” she exclaimed to her young companions. “All out here but one. Goodbye, dearies. All right, up you get,” and in a moment we were snugly fixed in the buggy for a half hour’s ride behind Joe.

“You see those two little girls who got off there,” said Miss Belle, pointing to the house we had just left, “well, they are two of a family of six—two younger than those. Their mother died last winter, so naturally I take an interest in them. Their father does his best with them, but it is a big task for a man to handle alone.”

The last child was unloaded by this time, and Miss Belle, settling herself back comfortably, chatted about her work in a one-room country school in the Blue Grass belt of Kentucky.

“Maybe there are thirty-five families that my school ought to draw from,” she began. “Six years ago when I took this school some of them surely did need help. Dearie me! The things they didn’t know about comfort and decency would fix up a whole neighborhood for life. They wore stockings till they dropped off. Some of thegirls put on sweaters in October, wore them till Christmas, washed them, and then wore them till spring. You never saw such utterly wretched homes. There was hardly a window shade in the neighborhood, nor a curtain either. It wasn’t that the women didn’t care—they simply didn’t know.

“I saw it all,” said Miss Belle, nodding her head thoughtfully, “and it worried me a great deal at first. I just had to get hold of those people and help them—I had made up my mind to that. Impatience wouldn’t do, though, so I said to myself, ‘Now, my dear, don’t you be in any hurry. You can’t do anything with the old folks, they’re too proud. If you succeed at all it’s got to be through the children.’ So I just waited, keeping my eyes open, and teaching school all of the while, until, the first thing I knew, the way opened up—you never would guess how—it was through biscuits.["]

“The folks around here never had seen anything except white bread. There wasn’t a piece of cornbread or of graham anywhere. You know what their white bread is, too—heavy, sour, badly made and only half cooked. The old folks were satisfied, though, and there didn’t seem to be any way to go at it except through the youngsters. Day after day I saw them take raw white biscuits and sandwiches made of salt-rising white bread out of their baskets, wondering how they could eat them. Still I didn’t say anything, but every lunch time I ate corn muffins or graham wafers, with all of the gusto I could master. One day a little girl up and asked me:

“‘Say, Miss Belle, what may you all be eatin’?’

“‘Corn muffins,’ said I. ‘Ever taste them?’

“‘Nope.’

“‘Well, wouldn’t you like a taste?’

“‘Sure I would.’

“She took it, and a great big one, too. ‘Um,’ says she, smacking her lips, ‘Um.’

“‘Like it?’ I asked.

“‘Um,’ says she again, like a baby with a full stomach.

“‘Oh, Miss Belle,’ piped up Annie, ‘how do you make ’em?’

“That was the chance I had been waiting for.

“‘Would you like to know?’ I asked, and to a chorus of ‘Sure,’ ‘’Deed we would,’ ‘Oh, yes,’ I put the recipe on the board, and it wasn’t two days before those girls brought in as good corn muffins as I ever tasted. Little Annie is a good cook—never saw a better—and before the week was out she says to me:

“‘Miss Belle, ma’s mad with you.’

“‘What all’s the matter?’ I asked.

“‘She says since you taught us to make those corn muffins she’ll be eaten out of house and home. The first night I made ’em pa ate eleven. He hasn’t slackened off a bit since. He must have ’em every day.’

“That made the going pretty easy,” Miss Belle went on. “The muffins were mighty good, they were new, and, by comparison, the white biscuits didn’t have a show. It wasn’t long before I had the whole neighborhood making corn muffins, graham wafers, black bread, graham bread and whole-wheat bread. They sure did catch on to the idea quickly. Every Monday I put a recipe on the board. These women knew how to cook the fancy things. It was the plain, simple, wholesome things that they needed to know about, so my recipes were always for them. During the week each of the children cooks the thing and brings it to me, and the one who gets the best result puts a recipe on the board Friday.

“You see, after I once got started it wasn’t hard to follow up any line I liked. By the time I was putting a recipe a week on the board the mothers got naturally interested and would come to school to ask about this recipe and that. They wouldn’t take any advice, you understand, not they! They knew all about cooking, so they thought, but they were mighty proud of the things their daughters did, particularly when they took the prizes at the county fair. Besides that, it made a whole lot of difference at home, because the things they made helped out a lot and tasted mighty good on the table.”

Miss Belle’s next move was against the cake—soggy, sticky stuff, full of butter, that was very generally eaten by all of the families that could afford it. Expensive and fearfully indigestible it made up, together with bread, almost the entire contents of most lunch baskets.

“I couldn’t see quite how to go about the cake business,” Miss Belle commented, “because they were particularly proud of it. Finally, though, I hit on an idea. One of the women in the neighborhood was sick. She was a good cook and knew good cooking when she saw it, so I got my sister to make an angel cake, which I took around to her. I do believe it was the first light cake she had ever tasted—anyway, she was tickled to death. It wasn’t long after that before every one who could afford to do it was making angel food. Of course it’s expensive, but since they were bound to make cake, that was a lot better than the other.”

Similar tactics gradually replaced the fried meats by roasts and stews. When Miss Belle came, meat swam in fat while it cooked and came from the stove loaded with grease. Everybody fried meat, and when by chance they bought a roast they began by boiling all of the juice out of it before they put it in the oven. Miss Belle’sstews and roasts made better eating, though. The men-folks liked them hugely and the old frying process was doomed.

“No,” concluded Miss Belle, laughingly, “you can’t do a thing with the old folks. Why if I was to go into a kitchen belonging to one of those women and tell her how to sift flour she would run me out quick, but when Annie comes home and makes such muffins that the man of the family eats eleven the first time, there is no way to answer back. The muffins speak for themselves.”

While the girls were making over the diet of the neighborhood Miss Belle was working through the boys to improve the strains of corn used by the farmers, the methods of fertilizing and the quality of the truck patches. A few years ago when the farmer scorned newfangled ideas it was the boys that took home methods for numbering and testing each ear of corn to determine whether or not the kernels on it would sprout when they were planted. The farmer who turns a deaf ear to argument can offer no effective reply to a corn-tester in which only one kernel in three has sprouted. The ears are infertile, from one cause or another, and the sooner he replaces them by fertile seed the better for his corn crop.

Out beside a white limestone pike stands the school in which Miss Belle has done her work. One would hardly stop to look at it, because it differs in no way from thousands of similar country school-houses. Modest and unassuming, like Miss Belle, it holds only one feature of real interest—the faces of the children. Bright, eager, enthusiastic, they labor earnestly over their lessons in order that they may get at their “busy work,” andlinger over their “busy work” during recess and after school, because it glides so swiftly from their deft fingers. In this, as in everything else which she does, Miss Belle has a system. The child whose lessons are not done, and done up to a certain grade, is not taught new stitches or new designs. Even the youngest responds to the stimulus, and the little girl in a pink frock, with pink ribbons on her brown pig-tails, lays aside the mat she is making to write “Annie Belle Lewis” on the board, and to tell you that she is seven; while John Murphy, of the mature age of eleven, stops crocheting ear-mufflers for a moment to tell you what he is doing and why he does it.

“You never would guess what a help the ‘busy work’ is,” smiled Miss Belle. “You see, they never can do it until their lessons are finished, so they are as good at arithmetic as they are at patching. Then I always teach the little ones patterns and stitches where they have to count, ‘One, two, three, four, five, and drop one,’ you know, and in the shortest time they learn their number work. It seems to go so much more quickly when they do it in connection with some pieces that they can see. But you never would guess the best thing the sewing has done—it has stopped gossiping. It’s hard to believe, I know, but it’s true. There used to be a lot of trouble in this neighborhood. People told tales, there was ill feeling, and folks quarreled a great deal of the time. It wasn’t long before I found out that it was the girls who did most of the tale-bearing. No wonder, either! They weren’t very busy in school, and they had nothing much to do at home except to listen and talk. Really, they hadn’t any decent interest in life. Of course there wasno use in saying anything, but I felt that if I could get them busy at something they liked they would stop talking. It wasn’t enough to start them at dressmaking, either, but when I started in on hard, fancy work designs I had them. They made pretty clothes, embroidered them; made lace and doilies. Most of the girls can pick up a new Irish-lace pattern from a fashion-book as easily as I can, and they are rabid for new patterns. The same girls who did most of the tale-bearing are busy at work, and I find them swapping patterns and recipes instead of stories.”

While the girls patch, darn, crochet, hem, knit, weave baskets, make garments and do the various kinds of “busy work,” the boys clean the school yard, plant walnut trees—Mrs. Faulconer, the County Superintendent, is having the school children plant nut trees along all the pikes—and do anything else which is not beneath their dignity. “They have no work benches,” lamented Miss Belle, “I hope they will get them soon, although there is really no place to put them.” Indeed, in a little building packed with fifty children and the school-room furniture the space is narrow.

Yet this little one-room building at Locust Grove has left such a mark on the community that when the County School Board recently decided to transfer Miss Belle to a larger school the member from her district promptly resigned, and refused to be placated until every other member of the board had apologized to him and promised to leave Miss Belle in his school.

“We never saw the old gentleman mad before,” said a neighbor. “But he certainly was mad then. He had watched Miss Belle’s work grow, and knew what it had meant to the children; so when they proposed to take her away he went right up in the air.”

What wonder? He had seen the magic workings of a hand that felt the pulse, judged the symptoms, and prescribed a sure-to-cure remedy for a countryside full of ignorance, drunkenness, bitter hatreds and never-ending quarrels. Within a stone’s throw of his house he had seen the transformation in the life of a little girl named Marguerite. Since her birth she had lived in darkness, but into her desolate home Miss Belle had sent light.

“You never saw a worse home,” says Miss Belle. “Her mother was woefully ignorant of everything in the way of home-making. The children were wretchedly dressed. The house was barrenness itself—no shades, no curtains, no decorations of any kind. It was pathetic. When she came to school neither she nor her mother could sew a stitch.”

Marguerite, an apt girl with her fingers, eagerly learned the needlework lessons of the school. She taught her mother to sew, while she herself made portieres and curtains, lightening up the old home with a rare new beauty.

Here again is Lillie, who is very slow at needlework and arithmetic, but who has put the family diet on a wholesome basis by learning to cook some of the most delicious, nourishing dishes. Her bread—the best in Fayette County—is light as a feather. Hannah comes back after leaving school to learn how to ply her needle. Until a year ago Christmas she could not sew a stitch; now her stitches are so neat as to be almost invisible. Mrs. Hawly, aroused to enthusiasm by her thirteen-year-old daughter, has come to school, learned plain and fancy sewing, and started to make her own and her daughter’s clothes. Everywhere are the marks of a teacher’s handiwork stamped indelibly on the lives of her scholars and their families. Small wonder that the old gentleman on the board was loath to part with Miss Belle!

With supreme joy Miss Belle tells of her conquest of the fathers of her boys and girls—her family, as she calls it. “The children were very poorly cared for,” she says. “The fathers spent the money for whiskey, and the mothers lacked the means and the knowledge to clothe the children better. Sometimes they were pitiful in their poor shoes and thin clothes. Well, sir, we got up a Christmas entertainment, and, except for one or two, the children wore the same clothes they had been coming to school in all winter—shabby, patched and dirty as some of them were. They stood up there, though, one and all, to do their turns and speak their pieces, and their fathers were ashamed. They saw their children in old clothes, and the children of some of the neighbors all fixed up, and they just couldn’t stand it.

“It surely did make a difference the next year.” Miss Belle’s cheery face broadened with a satisfied smile. “The men didn’t say a word—you know our men aren’t in the habit of saying very much—but they went to town themselves the day before the entertainment and came back with new dresses for the girls and new clothes for the boys. Of course some of them were so small they would scarcely go on, while others were miles big; but every one had something new and no one felt badly.

“This Christmas,” concluded Miss Belle, “our entertainment packed the school-house, and some were turned away. Just to show you how crowded it was—there were twenty-four babies there. I was ready for them,though, with two pounds of stick candy; so whenever a baby squalled he got a stick of candy quick.”

Strange, good things have followed the visits of the mothers to the schools. They would never have come had it not been for the wonderful things which their children were learning with such untoward enthusiasm. One girl, who had been particularly successful with her needlework, brought her mother to school—a hard woman who had a standing quarrel with seven of her neighbors at that particular time. It took a little tact, but when the right moment arrived Miss Belle suggested that she pay a visit to a sick neighbor and offer to help. The woman went at last, found that it was a very pleasant thing on the whole to be friendly, and carried the glad tidings into her life, substituting kindness for her previous rule of incivility. To her surprise her enemies have all disappeared.

The mothers, coming to school to talk over the work of their children, have for the first time seen one another at their best. Sitting over a friendly cup of tea, chatting about Jane’s dress or Willie’s lessons, they have learned the art of social intercourse. Slowly the lesson has come to them, until to-day there is not a woman in the neighborhood who is not on speaking terms with every one else, a situation undreamed of five years ago.

Nine months in each year Miss Belle McCubbing holds her classes in the Locust Grove School, which stands on the Military Pike, seven miles outside of Lexington, Kentucky. “Angels watch over that school,” says Mrs. Faulconer. Doubtless these angels are the good angels of the community, for in six years the bitterness of neighborhood gossip and controversy has been replaced by a spirit of neighborly helpfulness. Boys and girls, doing Miss Belle’s “busy work,” fathers and motherslearning from their children, have heaped upon Miss Belle’s deserving head the peerless praise of a community come to itself—regenerated in thought and act, turned from the wretchedness and desolation of the past to the light and civilization of the future, saved and blessed by the lives of a teacher and her children.

This is the story of a school that was built to fit a town, and it begins with a hypothetical case. Suppose that there was a town—a prosperous town of some 2,247 souls, set down in the middle of a well-to-do farming district. As for business, the town has a few industries and some stores; the countryside is engaged in general farming. Suppose that the school board of such a town should come to you and say: “We are looking for a school superintendent. Are you the one?” Suppose you said, “Yes.” How would you prove your point?

Out in Minnesota there is a town named Sleepy Eye, set down in a well-to-do farming district. At the head of the Sleepy Eye schools there is J. A. Cederstrom. Mr. Cederstrom has proved by a very practical demonstration that he is “the one.”

When Mr. Cederstrom took charge of the Sleepy Eye schools he found an excellent school plant, an intelligent community and a school system that was like the school system of every other up-to-date two-thousand-inhabitant town in the Middle West. Before Mr. Cederstrom there lay a choice. He could continue the work exactly as it had always been carried on, improve the school machinery, and make a creditable showing at examination time. That path looked like the path of least resistance. Mr. Cederstrom did not take it, however. Instead he made up his mind that after measuring the community and the children he would, to use his own words, “fit the work to their respective needs.”

“The work offered has been somewhat varied,” Mr. Cederstrom explains. “I have not attempted to follow any set course or outline of work made out by some one else who is not familiar with our conditions and needs.”

Where does there exist a more admirable statement of the principle underlying the new education? This man, when given charge of a school plant, deliberately chose to make the school fit the needs of the community upon which the school was dependent for support. Oblivious of tradition he set about remodeling the school in the interest of its constituency.

Sleepy Eye is located in a farming district. Many of the boys who come to the Sleepy Eye School will manage farms when they are grown men, and many of the Sleepy Eye girls will marry farmers and manage them. Here were farmer men and farmer women in the making. What more natural than to organize a Department of Agriculture?

A Department of Agriculture in a school? Yes, truly; and a short winter course for farm boys and girls who could not come the year round, and a school experiment station with school farms for the children, and a live farmers’ institute that met in the school and was fed and cared for by the Department of Domestic Science, and all sorts of courses built up around the needs of the children and of the community.

As a result of this method of course-making the school janitor found himself on the instruction staff of the school. One day a couple of the short course boys were in the engine-room while the janitor was repairing a defective pipe in the heating plant. The boys lent a hand in the work; and one of them, having a practicalturn of mind, suggested that he would like to learn more about pipe-fitting in order to install a water system on the farm at home. The janitor repeated the remark to Mr. Cederstrom, who called the boys out and had a talk with them regarding the possibilities of the plan.

The outlook for the course was not bright. Every instructor in the mechanical department was working on full time. Only one way out remained and that way led to the janitor.

The janitor was a busy man during the day, but his evenings were comparatively free. After some parleying he agreed to give a course in elementary plumbing and steam-fitting on Tuesday and Thursday evenings at seven-thirty. So the boys came to school in the evening, and under the direction of the school janitor learned how to install a water system in their homes. Their work for the year consisted in making a model water system for a house, a barn and the other farm buildings. The materials for this course were picked up from the school’s scrap-heap.

Perhaps some people will not understand the spirit of it—getting the janitor in line to give a course in steam-fitting from the odds and ends that are found on the scrap-heap. Such a proceeding is unconventional in the extreme. But, on the other hand, here were boys who wished to know how they might go back and improve their homes. Who shall say that the imparting of such knowledge is not the business of a real school?

Let us go back for a moment to the organization of the Department of Agriculture. The school at Sleepy Eye have available what every other school should have—five acres of tillable ground. This tract at Sleepy Eyeis devoted to tests and experimental work, to flower gardens and to individual school gardens—one for each child who applies.

The experimental work and tests are carried on exactly as they would be at a state experiment station. In the section of Minnesota surrounding Sleepy Eye, corn is the great staple crop. Therefore on the demonstration grounds of the Department of Agriculture, Independent School District No. 24, Sleepy Eye, Minnesota, they are growing a number of plots of corn, each plot variously planted, fertilized, cultivated, and cared for, so that the children may learn at first-hand scientific methods of discovering the best kinds of crop, and the best ways of handling a crop in their own locality.

The allotment of the school gardens carried with it instruction in engineering and in civics at the same time that the bonds between home and school were cemented. The part of the school land that was to be devoted to school gardens was turned over to the older boys, who surveyed it in exactly the same way that the United States government surveyed the homestead tracts. The plot was laid out in towns and ranges. The sections were staked and numbered. Then the children who wished to take up plots went into the newly surveyed territory, picked their plots, and filed an application with the land commissioner for a plot, stating the section, town and range. After that a line formed and the plots (20×20 feet) were allotted. No child was permitted to take up an allotment unless he had the endorsement of a parent or guardian. The form on which this endorsement was secured was as follows:

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