THE FAILURE OF THE COUNTRY SCHOOL IN THE

MODERN CITY

JOSEPH K. HART

University of Washington, Seattle, Wash.

The old-time country school has been lauded as the great American educational institution-a very successful institution in its own work, and the forerunner of all subsequent developments in our education. For generations we have been thrilled by the stories of great men who came up to their greatness through that school life; and one of the characteristic notes of the past decade has been the lament that swells as we near what seems to be the close of a chapter in our educational history: for that old country school seems to be passing away.

But not all that was said about the old country school was true. We need to look more deeply into the matter than do most of those who shower indiscriminate praise. It is true that here and there, in country districts, there did exist educational situations that could be called almost ideal. Note the term "educational situations," not schools. For as a matter of fact the country school was but one element in the educational development of the community. Aside from the school there were great worlds of nature at first hand, which through changing seasons presented infinite points of contact and varieties of stimulation. There was the social life of the whole community, aside from the school-the church gatherings, neighborhood social meetings, picnics and parties attended by old and young. Above all, there was the endless and varied round of work of the household and the farm. The school as an educating influence was but one element in the life of the growing child.

We may put the situation concretely in this way: There were some six years of preliminary play, together with the beginnings of farm and household activities, before the child went to school at all. This, to be sure, was not always healthy activity, it was not

always wise, or wisely directed, activity; but it was largely free, untroubled activity, in the pure air, with endless change of stimulation, both natural and social, and with most of the grown-up people too busy to interfere with natural processes of development except as a last resort. This had its bad sides as well as its good, but it

had its good sides. There was not much learning of lessons, but there was much real and fundamental growth and development. After six, there was a maximum, seldom reached, of seven months of school per year: one hundred and forty days, of six hours each a total for a year of eight hundred and forty hours. But a year of three hundred and sixty days, of fifteen waking hours each, holds more than five thousand hours. Therefore that old country school at its best occupied not more than one-sixth of the total of the child's waking hours. Of course, there was some school work assigned to be done out of school; but that was fully offset by the time in school that was spent in doing "other things" behind the friendly shelter of the big geography.

Now, if one-sixth of the total was all the time actually spent in the school, no one will seriously contend that the remaining fivesixths had no productive educational value. As a matter of fact these other five parts of the time were spent in work and play, doing things, making things, planting things and watching them grow, learning how to care for them and to gather them, how to store them or sell them; making tools and using them; learning the animal and plant life of the farm, the barnyard, field, and woods, in winter and summer; in gatherings and frolics, parties and bees; the church and the literary society; in short, all the thousand interests of the home, the farm, and the neighborhood. And there were the occasional visits to the village or city; the long-to-beremembered times when cousins and uncles and aunts came from far away and told of distant cities or regions in which they lived, or through which they had traveled; and there were the few books, well used and known by heart, and all the legendary lore of country districts that fed the imagination, even though unhealthily. There were five parts of these sorts of things to one part of school, the year round; and as the years passed, and the child grew older and spent less and less time each year in school, the proportion of these

outside affairs to the life in school increased: not many country boys after the age of twelve spent more than four months in schoola period representing not more than one-tenth of the total time of each year. Who will contend that the other nine-tenths, spent in growing work, was time wasted, educationally? As compared with these far-reaching experiences, the work of the school seems to have been of very minor importance.

No contention is here set up that all this out-of-school time was wisely used, or that it yielded the largest educational returns. But the whole matter needs to be very closely examined. We need to ask ourselves very seriously: What was the actual value of the country school in the life of the child? We have had enough of indiscriminate lauding; let us ask ourselves the serious question of values, in order that we may the more truly value the conditions of today.

Answering the question, we may say that the actual value of the country school in the life of most boys and girls was exceedingly small. Few country boys or girls learned much geography or history in the school. Most of them learned the rudiments of reading, writing, spelling, and figuring. This was the actual work of the school for them. The real education of most of the boys and girls came in the work of the farm and the household, and in the reading of such books and papers as came their way and in which they found a real interest. The school gave them a start, and little else. Most of what the school had to offer had no meaning to the child beyond some of these simpler processes. They actually got their mastery of themselves, their increase in experience, and their experience-controls outside of the school. It is true that the farm was not always an ideal educational instrument. It was often too severe in its exactions, wearing out the joy and the patience of the boy. It was sometimes too close to the more brutal aspects of nature, and failed to provide substance for the finer fancies of the child. It not infrequently defeated its own ends by killing off all interest in farm life, and forcing the boy out of its toils in sheer self-defense.

But the real weakness in the country-school situation was to be found in the utter lack of relationship between what was done in

school hours and the out-of-school life. There was little, if any, vital or obvious connection between the two phases of the child's experience. Very few boys or girls ever found any relationship between the two. The school work was practically unrelated to the farm and home work and life save in the most abstract fashion. The teacher rarely saw or felt the need of any such relatedness; most children never found any connection. If the farm and home life had been a little less exacting; and if the school life and work had been a little more real, a little more concrete, so that both the teacher and the child could have seen some connection between the two; if they could have seen that the farm and the home were giving the child just that constructive activity and practice that he most needed, together with the building-up of habits, and the exercise of his senses and his imagination, and the calling forth of all his physical prowess; and that the school was trying to give him the constructive meanings of all these things: the geography that should make his home and farm and neighborhood a part of the great world in which men live; the history that should make him and his family and his friends and his hopes and ideals a part of the great story of man; the reading and the writing and the figuring that should put him into possession of the tools by which he could open for himself the treasures of man's spiritual past and the resources of the present, so that he too might become a man, "with power on his own life and on the world"-if-if someone had seen these things the country school might have so related itself to the farm, and the farm might have so related itself to the spiritual meanings implicit in the ideal of the school, as to have made every country community a completely ideal educational situation. And this is just the thing that is going to happen in the country school of the future.

Now, this very thing did happen in some degree, here and there. Here and there, there was a rare teacher who did see just this need of a real connection, and who was able to supply it in some measure. Such a teacher made himself, along with the husking-bees and the camp-meeting, an integral part of the community life, unobtrusively interpreting to the community the meanings of the farm and household work, and bringing into relation

to this work the great knowledge of the world, so that he came to be thought of, not so much as a teacher to be shunned, as an oracle to be reverenced: and he opened the two worlds of work and of books to each other, so that each knew and supplemented the other in the growing world of the child, and a real education was a result. Or, here and there, was to be found a boy, or girl, of exceptional power to grasp relationships who could, instinctively and unaided, make these connections in a more or less adequate fashion; who could catch a glimpse of the concrete meanings of school work in terms of the life of the home and the farm, and who could enrich and ennoble the work of the farm and the home with the splendid visions that came from contact with the books in the school; and wherever such events happened real educational processes were going on; such children became star pupils, devoured the books, amazed the teacher, went on to other, better schools, and to college, perhaps; they became leaders: their names are probably written among those who for a century have served the republic in notable ways.

But it needs to be made clear that wherever such a genuine education did appear it was brought about by a combination of the out-of-school life with the work of the school, so that to some degree, at least, the two became one in the child's experience, mutually interpreting and upbuilding each other. And, it is not too much to say that in this educational partnership the farm and home life and work furnished the great constructive values, while the school interpreted and enriched those values out of the experience of the race. No rightful praise should be taken from the school. All that it has done should be acknowledged, all that it has earned should be paid. But-we shall never get the sort of school we need for today until we are brave enough to face the facts as to what the school actually does in any situation. As long as we indiscriminately ascribe to the school all the credit for doing the educational work of the community, just that long we work to prevent that work from being done in the best way by keeping that work from being rightly understood. The old country school should not have all the credit for that work which, occasionally, was done so well, for the school did not do all the work. It did an essential