Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/404

 3QO THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

there is a direct proportion between efficiency of training and the pecuniary reward.

So urgent has become the need for trained instructors that attempts have been made to give something of immediate improvement to the rural teachers. During 1903 there was held at Knoxville a summer school for teachers offering courses in kindergarten and primary work, in pedagogy, and in the high school and college subjects. Over two thousand teachers from all parts of the South were enrolled and in actual attendance.

The North Carolina State Normal and Industrial College offers a brief course of professional training to rural teachers who cannot take a full year. This work is under the professor of pedagogy, and affords opportunity for contact with the practice and observation school which contains about four hundred chil- dren. The North Carolina College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts has also organized a summer school for teachers under the direction of the president, Mr. George Winston.

Every educator recognizes the limitations of the work that can be so accomplished. It may, however, afford a valuable incentive and the opportunity for acquiring a new point of view an entirely new educational attitude on the part of the teacher that is productive of results, even though the actual information gained must necessarily be slight. 9

The second need felt in the South is for better buildings "the necessary physical equipment of the school." Ihe present condition is described by Southern Education, the publication of the Southern Education Board :

Twenty out of every one hundred of the 5,653 white school districts in North Carolina have a rude log schoolhouse or no public schoolhouse at all. 1 *

During the past winter twenty white schools in one county were closed because the miserable schoolhouse could not be made com-

' Of much interest also in the training of southern teachers is the department of education recently instituted in connection with the University of Tennessee. The object of this school, however, is not the training of rural teachers, but rather the affording of special opportunities of scholarship and training for high- school teachers, college instructors, and superintendents.

"Southern Education, May 14, 1903-