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created to perform this special service. Until the state has made such a provision, the growth and development of rural education will be precarious and uncertain.

New teacher-training institutions are expensive. They are extravagantly dispersive and wasteful of both finances and energy. Overhead and administrative expenses are materially increased; buildings, equipment, and teaching forces are duplicated; and the upkeep costs are greatly increased. In a constantly widening and expanding school system new demands are continually made on teacher-training institutions. If these agencies prove flexible enough to meet the new needs through necessary readaptations, much progress is made. Existing organizations provide a ready mechanism for the immediate discharge of new activities; they are accelerated by the new responses; and society is given maximum returns for minimum expenditures. Separate teacher-training institutions are open to danger of dissipating energy through needless competition caused by artificial lines of segregation.

The normal schools of the state are confining themselves to the field of the elementary school. Since the training of elementary teachers of rural schools is an adaptation of their present activities to the needs of many communities in the state, it seems logical that they should assume the responsibilities of adequately and permanently developing the necessary organization and technique for this training. Through these organized institutions vitally engaged in the solution of related problems this service should be rendered most adequately, efficiently, and economically.

II.

TYPES OF TRAINING DEMANDED BY NEEDS OF RURAL SCHOOLS

The present rural situation justifies the normal schools in making provision for three types of training: (1) preparation of teachers for one-room rural schools, (2) preparation of elementary teachers for consolidated schools, and (3) preparation of supervisors for rural schools.

1. Preparation of teachers for one-room rural schools.—A part of the pioneer work in this field has been performed by the system of training which has developed in the teacher-training depart

* See President Maxwell's Report of Winona State Normal School (1910–12), p. 105.

ments of the high schools. By an act of the legislature in 1903 these departments were given official recognition by the state. Previous to the act a few departments had been supported through the initiative of local school systems. The movement grew slowly. In 1907-8 there were only 10 departments; in 1909-10 there were 27; a period of rapid growth followed, for 81 were reported in 191112; in 1913-14 the number had increased to 106; and in 1915-16 the number reached 129.2

The curriculum of these training departments is overcrowded with subject-matter. Courses are given in pedagogy, rural-school management, and country life. Instruction in the common branches based on the Minnesota state course of study is required. Industrial work (including primary handwork, agriculture and nature-study, cooking and sewing, manual training, drawing, and music3) is provided in each department. At the beginning of the year three weeks of observation work are required of each student. This is followed by practice teaching, of which from forty to sixty minutes of actual practice teaching per day throughout the rest of the year is required of each student. Each student receives at least two weeks of practice teaching in a rural school. The organization of a spring primary class is recommended in order that each student may receive actual practice with beginners. At least one day each month is given to the instructor in the department to visit rural schools. Only one year is given to the course.4

Under the present plan of organization these departments are rapidly reaching their limitations. In the greater number of them the work in agriculture, cooking and sewing, and manual training is offered by the special instructors of these subjects in the high school. All other instruction is given by the instructor in the training department. The average enrolment of the department is thirteen. This training instructor must direct the observation

I Benjamin F. Pittinger, Rural Teachers' Training Departments in Minnesota High Schools, 1914.

2

See twenty-second and twenty-third Annual Reports of the State High-School Inspector.

3 State High-School Board Rules, 1914.

4 State High-School Board Rules, 1915.

5 See twenty-third Annual Report of the State High-School Inspector.

work. In 1915-16 forty-one of the departments aided in the support of rural schools used for purposes of observation and demonstration. These must be supervised. Practice-teaching facilities are provided in the local school system; spring primary classes are organized in many departments; and affiliations are made with a number of rural schools providing for rural practice teaching. If these activities are to prove efficient they must be most carefully supervised. The extension activities of the departments draw heavily on the time of the training instructor.

The State Department of Education has had the insight to place these teacher-training departments under most capable supervision; the instructors are women with initiative and professional spirit of an exceptionally high order; the city superintendents have given the departments most careful guidance; and the county superintendents have stood as a unit in consistently urging that the work be adapted to the needs of rural teachers. The entrance requirements to the departments have been gradually raised until only graduates of accredited high schools are admitted. The course is crowded with subject-matter, and pressure is being exerted to extend it through two years. The courses should be extended and intensified. The practice-teaching facilities should be extended and placed under competent supervision. In 1915-16 five of the departments had responded to the need for expansion and were employing two teachers. It is impossible for the 120 high schools of the state maintaining departments to assume separately the responsibilities demanded by the movement for growth.

This work can be done much more advantageously by the normal schools. They possess the advantage of being able to place each subject in charge of a specialist. The practice teaching can be better organized and more closely supervised. In many other ways they possess such great advantages over other teacher-training agencies for performing this service as to enable them to demon

Twenty-third Annual Report of the State High-School Inspector. During the summer of 1916, 80 per cent of the instructors in the teacher-training departments either taught in, or attended, summer schools.

2 Ibid.

strate their superior fitness with comparative ease. The normal schools are facing a most auspicious opportunity. The time for organizing this training on a more comprehensive and permanent basis has arrived. Their success depends very much on the care, zeal, and vision with which they enter the work. If either financing or vision is inadequate when the plan for training is adopted, it will fail to equal or surpass the standards set by the most successful among the teacher-training departments in the high schools. Such a catastrophe would result in disaster, for with superior advantages the normal schools must even raise these high standards.

2. Preparation of elementary teachers for consolidated schools.Many times special teachers for these schools have been promised, but no provision has been made for their training. This responsibility has been placed on no one teacher-training agency, but has been intrusted to chance pure and simple. Patrons of rural 1 schools have been assured that the consolidated system will provide them with a school adapted to their special needs. The potential advantages which the larger district unit provides for increased educational opportunities have been presented with much vigor. These communities have been inspired with a desire to make progress; they have assumed that the needs so glibly pointed out could be met; few have taken the precaution to hesitate and investigate; and immediate preparation should be made for a day when these matters shall be checked up. The type of training needed by these teachers differs in many respects from that demanded either by the teacher of a one-room rural school or by the teacher of the grades in a city school system. A new school has been pledged based on the assumption that teachertraining institutions would rally to meet the need and produce a new type of teacher.

To be sure, the principals of these consolidated schools have been required to offer work in manual training and technical agriculture among their many activities; but the rank and file of elementary teachers who have the actual charge of the children for a much longer time and who bear a much more intimate relationship to them have not been offered a training that will enable them to interpret the common branches from the rural point of view.

Under such conditions the instruction is likely to lack motivation; the school exercises in which the children participate become artificial because their past experiences have not been considered in the presentation of the school work; and there is a danger lest these consolidated schools be as formal as, and no more vitally concerned with, life-activities of the rural people than were their predecessors.

The rural people, under the encouragement of liberal state aid, are rapidly pledging themselves for better rural schools; in 1914-15 there were go consolidated schools; in 1915-16 the number had increased to 140; and in 1916-17 there were 217 such schools reported. Strong emphasis has been placed on the organization of the administrative phases of these schools, but little effort has been expended to improve fundamentally the type of instruction in the elementary-school subjects offered in them. It is now up to the teacher-training agencies to redeem the pledge which has been given these communities for a new school. The one hope of making good lies in the training of a new type of teacher. Since the training of these teachers is but an adaptation of the present work of the normal schools to the needs of many communities in the state, it seems reasonable that they should assume the responsibilities involved in organizing and carrying out such a scheme of training. No other teacher-training institutions are so well prepared to perform this much-needed service.

3. Preparation of supervisors for rural schools.-Recent studies in the field of rural education have been placing much stress on a need for more adequate supervision. The whole matter of supervision has been much talked about; the present practices have been most severely criticized; the entire system has been railed at; but little progress has been made toward the organization and application of an adequate and comprehensive system of training better supervisors.

The county as a unit of organization has been championed as a panacea. However, the Maryland Survey points out3 that even

See Minnesota state directories for the respective years.

See Public Education in Maryland and the surveys made recently by the U.S. Bureau of Education in Iowa, Washington, North Dakota, Colorado, and Wyoming. Public Education in Maryland, p. 43.

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