Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 84.djvu/185

Rh willing to finance the chances of these boys and girls by manning the schools with teachers of large enough caliber to hold them through the eighth grade, or to develop the possibilities of their lives for strong and useful careers. If such communities are ever to assume their normal burden in economics, or the social life of the world, their boys and girls must be carefully trained in the schools.

These communities have not only lost their best men to the city, but they have never tried to make the most of those who remained at home. Here is the opening for the schoolmaster. He must gather up the waste material in the persons of boys and girls, and by enriching and prolonging the course of study, hold them in the schools until they have obtained something like a fair knowledge of the elementary necessities of a life work. Now, the larger number of rural boys and girls leave school at the end of the sixth or seventh grade. If a boy hangs on a little longer it is because his parents force him to, and it is often at the expense of his self-respect, for he must go on with younger pupils. He is now twelve, or thirteen years old, and feels that, although staying in school, he is not getting anywhere, while he might be at work earning money.

After the seventh grade the rural school is well-nigh chaotic. It is pretended, by some school boards, that the full eight or nine grades are taught, but the wholesale manner in which pupils from these schools are turned down in the tests for the city high schools rather negatives the claim. The following figures taken from the government school report for 1903 are eloquent with misgivings. After the seventh, for the whole country, 20 per cent, of the grade drop out of school. But in the rural districts, where the seventh grade virtually finishes the course of study, the number dropping out is over 50 per cent, of the grade, which not seldom means all of the boys. The girls linger a little longer. Here is a waste of energy, a loss of vital possibility for which any amount of money saved can not compensate. Boys leaving school at such stage have not obtained the elements of a common education.

Still the country school has possibilities. Raised to a normal standard, generously equipped, and strongly manned, it can do much to redeem the waste and apathetic life of the community. It possesses the initiative of a renaissance, but it must be made the most of. In order to accomplish such result a great many customs must be readjusted to a new day and its larger environment. In this readjustment we must be sure and begin low enough, by giving thought to what hitherto has seemed insignificant, namely, the careful location of the schoolhouse, and its orientation. The school building should be in a dry, sunny, sightly spot. Ordinarily it should face the southern compass. This would move seven tenths of our rural schoolhouses, and turn more than half of them end for end. It is not at all necessary that a