174 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



THE PEOBLEM FOR THE EUEAL SCHOOL 



Br Professor J. B. SEARS 



STANFORD UNIVERSITY 



WHAT is the real problem now before the rural school ? This is a 

 question that is being asked on all sides, and by an increasing 

 number of people. Professional and laymen alike are trying to find out, 

 not only why it is that the rural school has been so much neglected, but 

 in what specific ways it has been neglected ; and, what is even more im- 

 portant, what the rural school is really obligated to do. 



It is true that the praise of the district school has been sung almost 

 from the dawn of its existence; that the poet, the essayist and the 

 orator have all referred in endearing terms to the little red schoolhouse 

 on the hill ; to the district school, the pride of our land and the embodi- 

 ment of the best principles of American democracy, etc. ; and we have 

 continued to believe things about the country school in general which 

 we knew did not apply to any particular case in point. Thus the real 

 and the ideal have managed to avoid a conflict till the issue has become 

 very pronounced, not because the school is any different from what it was 

 a half-century ago, but because the demands upon it have increased in 

 complexity, and so intensified its problem, which it has never solved any 

 too well. And it is because the facts of its inefficiency have been ac- 

 •cumulating so rapidly that during the past decade a wealth of literature, 

 technical and otherwise, has been finding a ready consumption. Just 

 what these facts are we ought to know. ISTo policy can be laid down 

 which is in any sense comprehensive if it is not made in the clear light 

 of the real nature and extent of those problems which it is the function 

 of the rural school to solve or help to solve. 



It is well to remind ourselves from time to time that in the minds 

 of the founders of our nation, as well as in our own thinking, education 

 is conceived to be essential to our form of government. Yet, if we 

 examine more closely to see just how the school has been handled by the 

 state, we may quickly find that it has never been a definite part of a con- 

 structive national or state policy in the broad and comprehensive sense 

 commonly accepted. For while in theory the school has been instituted 

 and espoused as an instrument to be used in the development of polit- 

 ical and social permanency, yet in very fact we discover that when this 

 principle or ideal, which is referred to in almost every state constitu- 

 tion, becomes a reality, it is a state concern too much in name only, with 

 such vital matters as support left, in the final analysis, to the locality 



