The Challenge of the Country: A Study of Country Life Opportunity

A Thoroughly Modern Rural School

The finest type of the modern rural school seems to have been at last reports the “John Swaney School” in Putnam County, Illinois, located in the open country two miles from the small village of McNabb. This school was reported to the Cleveland Convention of the National Education Association, by a special committee on rural schools “as affording the best illustration of public sentiment, private liberality and wise organization combined, that the committee was able to find in any consolidated district in the United States.” In making this report Prof. O. J. Kern said further, “The building stands near the north side of a beautiful campus of twenty-four acres of timber pasture. This campus was donated by Mr. John Swaney, who is a farmer of moderate circumstances, a man who believes in better things for country children. His was a worthy deed in behalf of a worthy cause and should prove a suggestion and an inspiration to public spirited farmers in other communities. The consolidated school is an illustration of the fundamental fact that if country people want better schools in the country for country children, they must spend more money for education and spend it in a better way. There is no other way.”

The building is an attractive brick building located among beautiful shade trees. It contains four recitation rooms besides a large auditorium used for lectures, concerts and basket-ball; two laboratories, two library and office rooms, girls’ play room, cloak room, and a room in the basement for manual training which is well equipped. It has apparatus also for teaching cooking and sewing. It is equipped with steam heat, running water by air-pressure system, and a gasolene gas generator. The campus is ample for agricultural work besides the football and baseball fields and tennis courts and the home for the five resident teachers.

A Rural High School Course of Study

In the high school department of this consolidated school a well balanced curriculum is followed, based upon the special needs of rural life, strong in vocational courses, yet not lacking in the liberal culture studies. It includes the following: First Year, English I, Algebra, Physiology, Agronomy I or Latin, Household Science or Manual Training, Physical Geography, Horticulture or Latin. Second Year, English II, Algebra, Geometry, Zoology, Ancient History, Botany, Animal Husbandry or Household Science, Drawing and Music. Third Year, English III, Chemistry, Agronomy II or Latin or Household Science, English History, Animal Husbandry. Fourth Year, English IV, Physics, Household Science or Agronomy III, American History, Bookkeeping, Arithmetic and Civics. The farm laboratory work is in charge of experts from the Illinois Experiment Station.

As Dr. Warren H. Wilson states so well, “The teaching of agriculture is not for the making of farmers, but men and women. It must be more than a mere school of rural money-making. The teaching of agriculture needed in the schools is for the purpose of training in country life. The country school must make the open country worth while. It will teach agriculture as the basis of an ideal life, rather than as a quick way of profits.” However, though this is strictly true of the boys who study agriculture, if they can actually become proficient enough to give their fathers points, the evident “practical” value of the modern school will appeal so strongly to the farmers that its future support is assured. The farmers cannot be blamed for having little love for the school which alienates their children from country life; but schools which really train for rural citizenship will be appreciated by the country folks. And in time there will be more John Swaneys, men who will show their love for a real school for country life by endowing it after the manner of the old New England academies.

Elementary Agriculture and School Gardens

To delay the teaching of agriculture until the high school years would be to lose its most strategic value. It should be a regular course in all rural schools, beginning before the natural rural interests have been turned to discontent. As a rural educator says, “Let them early learn to know nature and to love it, and to know that they are indigenous to the soil; that here they must live and die. Give us many such schools, and the farm youth is in no danger of leaving the farm.”

Although agricultural teaching has been slowly winning its way into our American schools, it has been a feature of even the primary schools in France since 1879 and in most other European countries more recently. The wonderful agricultural revival of Denmark dates from the introduction of this subject in the schools. Elementary agriculture is taught in every rural district of the land, and it gives the children that love for the very soil which makes Danish patriotism unique.

The Macdonald movement in Canada, backed by the government, has put that country well in the lead on our continent in this matter. It is spreading fast now in the States, however. Seven states in the South alone require by law agricultural instruction in rural schools. Many states now require normal school students to prepare to teach the subject as an essential branch of rural education; so that its future is assured.

The laboratory work in school gardens is a most interesting feature of great value. Only recently has the garden movement developed in America, beginning in Roxbury, Boston, in 1891; but every European nation but England popularized it long ago. Comenius believed that “a garden should be connected with every school,” and his country, Moravia, early enacted this conviction into law. The rural schools of Prussia introduced school gardens as early as 1819; and they are now common everywhere in continental Europe. The movement is now spreading fast in this country and has proved very successful in stimulating interest in listless boys. In Dayton, Ohio, school gardens were established in 1903, and it has been observed there that boys taking gardening make 30 % more progress than others in their studies. The moral effects are sometimes notable, especially in vicious surroundings.

III. Allies of the School in Rural Education

School Improvement Leagues

This movement started in Maine, where it has over 60,000 members, and has spread to other states. It seeks to stimulate the loyalty of pupils, teachers and patrons to the schools in every feasible way. It gives coherence and direction to a rising local pride in a successful school and helps greatly to develop a local school spirit. When once aroused, this interest can be directed in any useful way which is most needed at the time. It often finds most natural expression in beautifying the school grounds with shrubbery, trees and flowers, and in furnishing the rooms with pictures and artistic decorations of real merit. Rural communities are proverbially lacking in aesthetic taste, and this is the best method conceivable for developing it. From a well-kept schoolyard, and schoolrooms relieved of their bareness by copies of the great masterpieces, there will radiate all through the township the spirit of order and beauty which will bless the whole community.

Rural Libraries and Literature

The state of Massachusetts, where the first free public library was opened long ago, now has such an institution in every town and city of the Commonwealth. In most states, however, libraries in rural communities are not common; but in many states traveling libraries are obtainable from the state librarian which vastly broaden the mental outlook of the country people. In these days of abundant books, it is easier to secure books than it is to be sure that the books will get read. Rural reading circles and literary clubs can serve their communities well by helping to popularize the reading habit, and advising in the choice of books.

So vast has the country literature become in recent years, one can little imagine the great educational service of the numerous farm journals and magazines of country life. Rare is the farmer’s home where none of them enters. They have apparently great influence in broadening the horizons of the farm home as well as teaching the people the newer ideals of our rural civilization. So popular has the topic of rural life recently become, many non-rural magazines frequently bring it before their readers, notably the World’s Work. As a magazine devoted to all the interests of the country life movement, and frankly religious in its purpose, Rural Manhood is unique in its sphere. It is the organ of the Rural Young Men’s Christian Association and by its remarkably broad survey of rural social movements has made itself indispensable to lovers of the country.

Farmers’ Institutes and Government Cooperation

Space forbids even the enumeration of all the agencies and methods by which the standards of rural education are being raised. Both state and national governments, the state experiment stations and the department of agriculture at Washington are constantly reporting the latest results of agricultural science and investigation both in the form of printed bulletins and public sessions of Farmers’ Institutes and similar occasions. The great majority of working farmers have not yet learned to value and to use these privileges as they should; but the appreciative ones who do use them are becoming constantly better informed about the secrets of country life and the wonderful ways of nature. The great national organization of the Grange, by its local discussions of farm topics and its effective lecture work, is another of the great educational forces in rural life, and the rural church and minister often have a fine educational opportunity, especially in country communities where the educational equipment is meager and the unmet need is great.

Agricultural Colleges and their Extension Work

Essentially a part of the government service, the state colleges of agriculture with their learned faculties of rural experts are the ultimate authorities in agriculture and all rural interests, and therefore are both the climax and the ultimate source of education for country life. With the remarkable popularity the past five years of rural study and the strong trend toward the rural professions, the agricultural colleges are probably growing faster than any other schools in the land. The Massachusetts State College has doubled in numbers and doubtless in efficiency in the past five years, and many other schools have shown remarkable development. With a faculty of a hundred men, and a budget this year of half a million dollars, the New York State College of Agriculture at Cornell has become in reality a great school of liberal culture interpreted in terms of country life. Its enrolment has multiplied by five in the past nine years. The extension work accomplished by these and similar institutions is wonderfully broad and more and more serviceable to the people of their several states, as their community of interest is increasingly appreciated. The teachers are no longer “mere book farmers.” They are constantly out among the people for every variety of social service; and the people, once or twice a year during the great “Farmers’ Weeks” flock to the college by the hundred with no feeling of restraint but of actual ownership.

It is thus, from the humblest “box-car school” to the great university, that the people of the open country are being educated to appreciate their privileges and to live a more effective country life. It is a great educational movement, weak and halting here and there, but moving on with a better sense of unity and a clearer vision of the goal, with every passing decade. It all gives us courage to believe that the providence of God has in store for our rural America not the stolid domination of a rural peasantry, mere renters and pirates of the soil, but ultimately an enlightened, progressive citizenship, alert for progress and unswerving in their loyalty to “the holy land.”

Test Questions on Chapter VI

1. – Why do many rural communities take so little interest in their schools?

2. – Show how most rural schools train country children away from the farms to the city instead of fitting them for country life.

3. – How does the expense of American rural schools compare, per capita, with the expense of the city schools?

4. – How can the country boys and girls be given a fair chance in our public school system?

5. – In what ways does the district school plan work badly as a unit of management and of taxation?

6. – What is wrong with the construction of most country school buildings?

7. – Why is the consolidated school in the town or village a bad thing for children from the farms?

8. – State the efficiency argument for consolidation of rural schools.

9. – Describe the Indiana law on this subject and give your opinions about it.

10. – Show the superior advantages of the purely rural type of centralized school.

11. – Describe the consolidated rural school in Illinois, known as the “John Swaney School,” and tell what you like about it.

12. – How do you think a high school course of study in the country ought to differ from that in the city?

13. – Why should agriculture, domestic science, animal husbandry, et cetera, be taught in rural schools? How early would you begin?

14. – Compare the history of specific education for rural life in Europe and in America.

15. – What can you say about school gardens as a feature in rural education?

16. – How can “School Improvement Leagues” become powerful allies of the country school forces?

17. – What are some of the educational possibilities of rural libraries?

18. – In your experience what educational service can Farmers’ Institutes render the farming community?

19. – Show something of the broad field of the agricultural colleges and their extension work, and the part they take in rural education.

20. – Write out concisely the best statement you can make of the immediate needs in rural education and the constructive policy you would propose to meet these needs.

CHAPTER VII

RURAL CHRISTIAN FORCES

THE COMMUNITY-SERVING CHURCH AND ITS ALLIESI. The Opportunity and Function of the Country Church

Its Necessity to Rural Progress

The city man’s judgment of many things rural is apt to be warped. The country is a better place than he thinks it is. Country institutions are doing better than he thinks they are; and the country church is by no means as dead and useless as he is apt to imagine. Ridiculing the plan to federate three village churches, a typical city man remarked, “What is the use? Three ciphers are just as useless together as alone!” Such a superficial verdict must not be accepted. The church in the country is certainly involved in a serious and complex problem. In many places it is decadent. In most places it is easily criticised for its meager successes in this age of progress; but it is still essential in spite of its defects.

No amount of unfavorable criticism can refute the fact that a community-serving church is the most essential institution in country life. Criticise it as we may for its inefficiency, it is to the country church that we must look to save the country. Even though it may be usually a struggling institution, inadequately equipped, poorly financed, narrow in its conception of its mission, slow in responding to the progressive spirit of the age, wasting its resources in fruitless competitions, and often crude in its theology and ineffective in its leadership, – nevertheless it is blessing millions of our people, and remains still the one supreme institution for social and religious betterment. It may be criticised, pitied, ridiculed. It has not yet been displaced.

Because the rural church is absolutely essential to the rural community, it must be maintained, whatever be the cost. Let surplus local churches die, as they ultimately will, by the law of the survival of the fittest. The community-serving church must live. The man who refuses to sustain it is a bad citizen. Dr. Anderson rightly claims “The community needs nothing so much as a church, to interpret life; to diffuse a common standard of morals; to plead for the common interest; to inculcate unselfishness, neighborliness, cooperation; to uphold ideals and to stand for the supremacy of the spirit. In the depleted town with shattered institutions and broken hopes, in the perplexity of changing times, in the perils of degeneracy, the church is the vital center which is to be saved at any cost. In the readjustments of the times, the country church has suffered; but if in its sacrifices it has learned to serve the community, it lives and will live.”33

To condense diagnosis and prescription into a single sentence: The country church has become decadent where it has ceased to serve its community. It may find its largest life again in the broadest kind of sacrificial service.

Stages of Country Church Evolution

In this rapidly growing country, particularly in the past century of empire-building in the great West, four rather distinct stages of development may be traced in the history of the country church. As the railroads have pushed out into all sections for the development of our natural resources, the apostles of the Christian faith have usually been in the van of the new civilization. Too often they have been apostles of diverse sects, pious promoters coveting for the church of their zeal strategic locations and a favorable advantage in the conquest of the country for The King. But in general, the story of beginnings in the planting of our American churches has been a tale of real heroism, of devotion to the highest welfare of humanity and the glory of God, and of untold sacrifice. In brief these stages of church evolution are as follows:

1. The period of pioneer struggle and weakness, through which practically all churches have had to pass.

2. Usually a period of growth and prosperity, sharing the growth of the community; or, if the new town failed to justify its hopes, a period of marking time, under the burden of a building debt.

3. The period of struggle against rural depletion, the rural church meanwhile losing many members to the cities. Apparently a majority of country churches are now in this stage and for many of them it is a noble struggle for efficient survival. Thousands of churches however have succumbed, 1,700 in the single state of Illinois.

4. The ultimate stage of this evolution is the survival of the fittest, the inevitable result of the struggle. Most churches have not yet worked this through, but when they do, it is by readjustment to a redirected rural life. It costs much sacrifice in time and money. It requires the church to study frankly its situation and to surrender cheerfully old notions of success and to broaden its ideals of service.

Old and New Church Ideals

The pioneer type of the circuit-rider church may still be found among the mountains and other neglected or scattered sections of the country. Its ideal of success is very simple: a monthly preaching service when the “elder” makes his rounds; and an annual “protracted meeting” in which the leader “prays the power down” and all hands “get religion,” presumably enough to last them through the year. For this kind of success only three factors seem to be essential: a leader with marked hypnotic power, an expectant crowd ready to respond to his suggestion, and a place to meet. The place may be simply a roof over a pulpit. Results are meager and the same souls, may be, have to be saved next year.

We would not deny the itinerant heroes of pioneer days the credit they deserve for their self-sacrificing labors. Unquestionably they served their generation well, as well as conditions allowed. But most churches have outgrown this low ideal of success. They plan a more continuous work. They desire more than merely emotional results. They appeal to intelligence and to the will and make the culture of Christian character the great objective. Such work is vastly important; but a still higher and broader standard must be raised to-day for country church success.

A few weeks ago there came from an ambitious and active country minister (who evidently wanted a city church) a tabulated, type-written statement of his work for the year. According to widely accepted standards it was evidence of his efficiency and the success of his church. It gave the number of sermons he had preached, the calls he had made, the prayer meetings he had led, the Sunday school sessions attended, the number of conversions and additions to his church membership, the number of families added to his parish roll, the number of people he had baptized, married and buried; the average attendance at all services, the size of his Sunday school, the amount of money raised for church expenses and for benevolences, the sums expended for repairing the property, – for all of which we were asked to praise the Lord. To be sure, it was a rather praiseworthy record, and, on the strength of it, this particular country minister was called to a city church! He will not be any happier there, his salary will not go any farther there, and he will probably have less influence; but he has attained the dignity of a city minister, the goal of many a man’s ambition. Alas that so many of us seem to forget that the Garden of Eden was strictly rural; and that it was only when mankind was driven out of it that they went off and founded cities!

This case is a typical one. We are still too apt to reckon the success of a church in statistics reported in the denominational Yearbook. The book of Numbers is a poor Gospel. Let us not disparage the importance of adding forty people to the church membership, or doubling the size of the Sunday school, or tripling the benevolences, or increasing the congregations. These things are all splendid, every one of them, and indicate a live church and an active, consecrated minister; but they are not ultimate tests of a church’s efficiency.

The Test of Its Efficiency

We must admit that the real business of a Christian Church is not to swell its membership roll or to add to the glory of its particular sect or to raise enough money for its own support and keep its property painted, nor even to get the community into the church. The business of the church is to get the religion of the Lord Jesus Christ into the community and thence into all the world. If it is not doing that it is not succeeding. It is succeeding only in proportion as it is accomplishing that; for its business is to Christianize that community.

Dr. Gladden is right when he says that the test of the efficiency of the church must be found in the social conditions of the community to which it ministers. To be sure the church should emphasize evangelism and the need of church membership. Let it add to its strength, in order to become a strong, effective organization. But let it remember that this is but a means to an end. Let it keep in mind the immediate object of its work, to Christianize its community.

I would say then, a country church is efficient if it not only gets its people “right with God” but also right with one another; if it not only saves them for the life of heaven, but helps them to begin the heavenly life right now; if it not only furnishes opportunity for the worship of God, in simplicity and truth, but also proves the sincerity of its worship in deeds of Christian service; if it furnishes spiritual vision and power, faith, hope and love, those unseen things that are eternal, but also mints these essentials of religion in the pure gold of brotherly sympathy and kindness.

The Church’s Broad Function: Community Service

The efficient church will not only perform the priestly function of mediating between God and men, until in the holy place men feel the hush and peace and power of God’s presence. It will also inspire men in a practical way to perform the duties of life. It will not only bring men into the conscious presence of God. It will somehow bring the love of God into the lives of men. It will increase the kindness and brotherliness and sympathy of men and women toward each other. It will stimulate fair-dealing in all business relations and put an end to injustice toward the weak. It will help to reduce poverty, vice and crime. It will encourage pure politics and discourage graft. It will set a high standard for the play life of the community and make amusements purer and more sensible. It will even endeavor to raise the level of practical efficiency on every farm, making men really better farmers because they are real Christians. It will help to make more efficient homes and schools, to give every boy and girl a fair chance for a clean life, a sound body, a trained mind, helpful friendships and a useful career.