Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 86.djvu/179

Rh for which the school is constructed. (Fortunately notable exceptions to this are increasing in number.) But where this is true, it is plain to be seen that in a district where there is little taxable wealth there must be either a very high tax rate, or the alternative of little school money, and hence a poor school. Thus the state may levy the school tax and distribute it, but when it levies a higher rate in one district than in another, or distributes less to one district than to another, even though that district may actually have more children to educate, it would seem that there are at least some very important ways in which the schools are not state institutions.

It is because of this interpretation by the state that the rural school, which along with many other phases of rural life, being left desolate by the accumulation of wealth in the cities, has suffered. And by comparison with the city schools its suffering has been very real. For the rural schoolhouse of to-day is of the same general type that was in vogue a hundred years ago; a large percentage of its teachers have not only had no professional training, but are teaching for the first time; the teacher rather rarely succeeds herself, and is often succeeded by one or two others within a single year; one teacher has all the grades and teaches from fifteen to thirty classes daily; poor library and no laboratory apparatus, save some dust-covered curios bought from a clever agent by an unsuspecting school director; no play apparatus or director; no domestic-science or manual training; little agriculture; and little or no supervision. This may not be a pleasant picture, but for the United States as a whole it is not badly overdrawn, in spite of many excellent signs of awakening here and there. But it is only by comparison, point by point, with a modern city system that the real poverty of the country school becomes apparent.

These are the conditions we are becoming conscious of to-day, and they are provoking a serious study of the real underlying troubles. The teacher, the preacher, the farmer, the banker, the legislator, the president, all are asking the same fundamental question, each from his own particular angle. The teacher sees that the country school is not vitally tied up with its problem, the preacher finds that the country church is disappearing, the banker realizes that a more successful handling of the farming problem will aid his business, legislatures are looking to the conservation of the soil and the destruction of farm pests, the national government has looked after the important matter of credit for the farmer, and the report of the Roosevelt Country Life Commission speaks in similar terms. Thus when we are counting the defects of the country school we are only counting one group of symptoms. The trouble is deeper and more far-reaching than any one institution. The problem is therefore not the mere problem of the school, but the whole problem of country life.