More and more we are coming to believe that the rural district schools offer but few opportunities for educating the farmers’ children. Various schemes have been recommended for providing better and more convenient educational facilities. One proposition is first to improve the principal highways. This, it is thought, will make it possible to run ’buses or carriages twice daily to transport the children to and from some centrally located graded school. Such schemes are usually proposed by some one who has seldom seen a country school-house and who is totally unacquainted with the conditions which prevail in rural communities.

Admitting, for the sake of comparison, that teacher and pupil in the country are not so far advanced in book-lore as they are in the city, how does it happen that the country youths are able to maintain themselves on an educational level with the pupils of the graded schools when they meet them in the academy and college? Is it not quite possible that the wide opportunities enjoyed by the country youth for becoming acquainted with natural objects of use and beauty are a full offset, so far as training is concerned, for the more systematic instruction given in the city schools?

I can but look with some degree of solicitude on the effect on civilization and on the home, of palatial hotels, and great school buildings, filled with heterogeneous masses of children, in which love, solicitude and sacrifices, each for all, have little opportunity for growth and development. The family seems to be the sacred unit of civilization and morality. A full and sufficient reason must be given for massing men, much more children, in a single great structure, thereby destroying the quiet and breaking the sacred ties of the home. What good reasons can be offered for massing children between the ages of six and twelve in an uncomfortable school-room? Children do not study; they learn little except when they read the lesson in the immediate presence of the teacher who is able to amplify and explain the lesson in hand. Sending these little ones to school is a relic of the primeval days, when, by reason of large families, lack of training and excessive toil of the parents, there was no other way but to make nursery maids of the school-teachers.

I have a vivid recollection of those early days when I was crowded into a 16 × 20 school-house, with two score other bounding, mischievous urchins, all seated on the hard side of unbacked, long-legged slab benches, which left our bare legs, for which the flies had a liking, to dangle between heaven and earth. True, all this has now been improved, and good and appropriate seats are usually provided, but this only ameliorates the conditions; it does not cure them. If the parents who have lost something of their first love for their children, or who are too lazy or careless or ignorant to teach them, will go to these patent-seated school-rooms and sit for five mortal hours on one of these hard, wooden, uncushioned seats, they will no longer place their tender children in these modernized stocks. You who no longer have the hot blood and restless nervous energy of youth make long faces and complain bitterly from your well cushioned pew, if the over-earnest pastor prolongs his sermon ten minutes beyond the customary time. It may be said that many, nevertheless, secured a primary education under these unfavorable conditions. But I did not; I received it at my mother’s knee in the old kitchen, some of it before daylight. About all I got in that old school-house were kicks and cuffs from boys who were older and stronger than I, and round shoulders from sitting through many weary hours on backless benches, and blistered hands in punishment for my unrestrained interest in things in general, and in my school-mates in particular.

But what has all this to do with the opportunities which a farm life gives for education? It is to emphasize the need of more home training, more personal attention by the parents, and a more natural and rational education of those whom it has been our responsibility to bring into existence, and upon whose shoulders will rest the weal or woe of our country. In these rural homes, children should be reared and educated until they have reached the point beyond which their parents or the older children cannot carry them. The child, when only two or three years old, begins to learn handicraft, performs some little helpful act for another; it is being taught to work. As it becomes more mature it is to do useful things; but who thinks of keeping the child of eight to ten years of age at continuous work for five or six hours daily? Why not carry on the child’s mental education along these natural lines in the same manner as it receives its primary technical education?

I am almost persuaded that the farmers’ children would be better off if the old red school-house on the dusty, treeless four corners was abandoned, and the responsibility for the education of the children up to twelve or fourteen years of age was thrown upon the parents. As it is, the parents who have received a fairly good primary education become rusty and illiterate simply from non-use of the education which they had when they left the schools. If the unexcelled opportunities which rural life offers for securing a primary education were only utilized, there would be fewer country youths hating even the sight of that red school-house which has received such honorable mention. It has been glorified in every Fourth of July oration, but it still remains not only unevolutionized but even degenerated.

If you ever imagined that the best provision has been made for teaching the little ones, spend a day in one of these school-houses. Take some book with you that is as abstract and useless to you as the children believe their books to be to them, and make the attempt to memorize a single page, or essay to write a composition on “The Immortality of the Soul,” or on “The Wisdom of Annexing the South Sea Islands.” Meantime, classes are reciting in falsetto voices; the teacher is giving many admonitions and making dire threats; a festive bumblebee has found its way through the open window and makes as much commotion among the timid girls as a mouse at a tea-party. Now a dog barks, and the boys know that Bowser has safely treed a squirrel. Before you have had time to collect your thoughts a lusty farm boy, perched on a creaking wain, whooping loudly to his team, goes rattling by. Stay a week and finish your composition, and see how fast your children are securing disjointed fractions of an education. A half-hour of continuous, quiet, intensified study at home is worth more than a day in many a school-room where little muddy driblets of knowledge are being doled out to the children.

You may say that you have no time to teach children. Business is too pressing, and you are already overworked. You should have thought of that sooner, and been wholly selfish and saved the money and time you spent to persuade that beautiful maiden to join you and help perform the duties and functions of life.

You will certainly agree that home education is the best, the ideal education. For a child, an hour or two of study and recreation a day, an equal time employed in useful work, and the rest of the day spent in picking up fun and facts, both of which may be found in abundance on the old farm, is the natural way to secure a broad primary foundation, upon which to rest a liberal education.

After the child has reached the age of ten or twelve and has had careful home training, what provision can be made for continuing its education during the next four to six years? Two or more districts might be joined to form one, for graded school purposes. On every farm is, or should be, a spare horse and a light wagon; a few dollars would provide a stable near the school building. Such an arrangement would permit the children to drive to and from the central school, although the distance might be two or three miles. All this means that the children will be around the family fireside in the evening instead of on the street, as is too frequently the case when they are sent to the village or city school and remain during the week. All this keeps the boys and girls in sympathy and healthful touch with home life and their parents, until character has been strengthened by age and knowledge. Here, in these country and village graded schools, the home life, with its restraints and duties, is preserved. Only the mentally strong or the courageous and aspiring will seek the halls of higher learning, from which, if they tend to go astray or neglect their work, they are quickly returned to the bosom of their families. If the central graded school is impracticable in some cases, then a few families might join and employ a private instructor; this would be far cheaper and more satisfactory than to send the children away from home.

It is not so much lack of facilities as a lack of an appreciation of the true value of an education which debars the country youth from securing even a wholesome and logical primary education. The value of an education for citizenship must be placed first, and its value as a money-making power second. Now the first question that is usually asked is, Will an education help to secure a position or to make money? The question, Will an education help to a nobler citizenship? is not even thought of. We shall have no evolution in rural training until the parents secure a clearer conception of the true value of an education.

Evolution along educational lines has already begun, and it is not difficult to see many beneficial effects of the changed methods. M. Demolins’ recent book has this to say: “‘It is useless to deny the superiority of the Anglo-Saxons. We may be vexed by this superiority, but the fact remains, despite our vexation.’... Considering the superiority conclusively proved, the author proceeds to search for the cause of this superiority. He finds the secret of this irresistible power of the Anglo-Saxon world in the education of its youth, in the direction given to studies, to the spirit which reigns in the school. The English and the people of the United States have perceived that the needs of the time require that youth should be trained to become practical, energetic men, and not public functionaries or pure men of letters, who know life only from what they learn in books. M. Demolins has personally studied with care some prominent English schools. In these he found the school buildings, not as in France, immense structures with the aspect of a barrack or a prison, but the pupils were distributed among cottages, in which efforts were made to give the place the appearance of a home. They were not surrounded by high walls, but there was an abundance of air and light and space and verdure. In place of the odious refectories of the French colleges, the dining-room was like that of a family, and the professors and director of the school, with his wife and daughters, sat at table with the pupils.”[2]

Here is seen the beginning of better methods in primary education. In the rural districts of America, this system needs but little modification to fit it to the rural home. All else must yield to the inborn rights of the children. If that Brussels carpet which adorns the dark and unused parlor must be pulled up and some of the worst pictures relegated to the garret, in order that provision for a school-room for the children of the family or for those of the immediate neighborhood may be made, then pull it up. Receive the visitor in the sitting-room or on the veranda, and let the neighborly chat be where there is “air, and light, and space, and verdure.”

Reduce the above picture of an English school to suit environment, and we have the family as a unit; the mother and her companion as teachers; and we shall have not only the appearance of home, but a true home, where duty commands and love obeys. This is no far-fetched picture; it is one drawn from many observed instances of these farm home schools. The youths on the farm have a right to a liberal education if they desire it; they own the earth, and why should they not have the best it affords if they make good use of what the earth and all that therein is has to offer.

When we come to the higher education, there are good and sufficient reasons why pupils should be massed. At the college, expensive and rare appliances, great laboratories and museums, ample and expensive libraries, and distinguished and able teachers, must be provided. Then, too, the pupils of the college have arrived at that period of maturity which gives them a fair degree of self-restraint and discretion.

Connected, as I have been for more than a quarter of a century, with college life, I have had many opportunities to observe the freshness, vigor and purity of many of the country lads and lasses who come directly from the healthy, solid home instruction of their parents.

I am well aware that this chapter will not revolutionize rural primary education. I do not want it to do so. Revolution destroys; evolution builds. But if these brief words of one who received until near manhood the thoughtful, loving home training of a mother, who said, “I received a better education than my parents did, and, come what will, I determine that my children shall have better opportunities for securing an education than I had,” shall persuade some that the farm home is the natural, the appointed place for training children until they have passed the critical mental and physical period of life, I shall be content.