Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 84.djvu/186

182 school building should face the road, or be very near it. Light, warmth, horizon, room to play, these are the important considerations in locating a schoolhouse. Play, in the rural districts, is almost a forgotten art. No provision is ever made for it. No ball grounds, or tennis courts, or croquet lawns, are ever seen near the rural schoolhouse. The boys get no training in team work, or athletics. The community has yet to learn that a boy's play is a vital element in his education. Here, in the location and layout of the school grounds, is the first use of the rural school for community uplift.

Moreover the curriculum of the rural school is faulty. It has been kept at odds with its environment. In the midst of trees and flowers, birds and bugs, the child has been held down to a study of words and forms, and figures, not much related to his common life, and at the best too abstract for him to digest. He learns nothing of agriculture, mechanics, or biology. The children are not taught to study nature, or, in the least, directed or instructed in their play, except in a few instances. Nothing of manual training, even in simple forms, is ever attempted. These things have been crowded out by the old-fashioned literary curriculum. While there need be no neglect of reading, writing, spelling, or arithmetic, still, it is true that "these ought ye to have done and not to have left the others undone." Indeed, I would add to the reading and writing, together with the elements of agriculture and nature study, a systematic culture of memory selections, little enough of which have I found in any school. But it calls for a teacher of culture and training to make and exploit such a curriculum. Here the teacher is of paramount importance.

The teacher must be capable of leadership in the community. For, although these pupils may be learning only the elements, they must still be shown, at the right time, the wider world, in unison with which, when at their best, they also are moving. There must be opened to them a world of deeper significance than that commonly seen. They must be taught to feel the throb of a universe in the pulse beat of their own hearts. They must be filled with enthusiasm for life. This calls for a teacher of large caliber, of rich culture. It is a blunder, as well as a waste of money, to select teachers for the rural schools, as is now largely the custom, from the graduates of the high school. No one ought to be employed to teach a country school who is not a graduate of college, or trained in the best normal schools, or one who, by industry and experience, has gained an equivalent for such culture.

Then, after the seventh grade, the schools would become much more effective if they were centralized. The old district system has not lost all of its value, for the first six grades, or perhaps seven, can be taught in the old schoolhouse, providing that schoolhouse be rightly orientated and equipped with playgrounds, and other necessities, quite