Missouri Country Life Conference. 153 



it is unfair to put that burden on the few men and women who 

 are able and willing to do that work. The states over, it can 

 not and will not be done in that way, but through consolidated 

 schools. 



Now, I am sure your schools here in Missouri are no better 

 than the schools in Illinois, and Illinois prides herself falsely in 

 many instances upon what she has accomplished as a great 

 agricultural state, yet she has something over ten thousand 

 one-room, ungraded country cross-road schools, and I know 

 of but few that begin to approach what Mrs. Harvey has been 

 able to accomplish with her school. Stop again to realize that 

 in those schools some three hundred and fifty thousand boys and 

 girls of Illinois are getting — in ninety per cent of the cases — 

 all of the education that they ever get in those one-room un- 

 graded schools. Now in those schools we have many teachers — 

 thirty or thirty-five or forty-dollar, poorly equipped, poorly 

 paid teachers. Some statistics recently given by Superin- 

 tendent Blair of the State Board of Education show that out of 

 some thirty-one thousand school teachers in the State of Illi- 

 nois sixteen thousand have had no normal or high school train- 

 ing. I don't like to speak of my own state in just that way, but 

 these things must be spoken of plainly; that is the way to get 

 results. Fifty-six per cent of those teachers have not had either 

 high school or normal training, and that means that a large 

 majority of our country schools are taught by those teachers, 

 for the larger communities have more requirements and they 

 pay better wages. The boys and girls are penalized in the 

 country with schools, in Illinois and in Missouri and in every 

 state of the union, with schools that most self-respecting towns 

 or villages would not tolerate. And so in the few words that I 

 will say to you this afternoon I cannot begin to say anything that 

 would leave the impression with you that the matter of schools 

 should have. You should carry away, carry always, these 

 thoughts that Mrs. Harvey has left with you. In other words, 

 the effort to better rural life in this country begins right in those 

 schools, too many of which will continue for some years to come 

 as one-room schools. 



Now we had a story in some of the literature that we are 

 sending out to the bankers to get them interested in agriculture, 

 for you know one way to interest people is to tell a story to focus 

 their attention. We ran across a little story of a farming com- 

 munity where the farmers very properly wanted to improve their 



