SOME PRESENT PROBLEMS 737 



ing the problems of life. Persons make more sacrifices for their 

 children than for any other cause. Probably more persons leave the 

 farm to educate their children than for any other cause. 



An ideal condition would be the total abolition of rural schools as 

 such. The custom of setting apart towns and villages into special 

 school-districts in order separately to tax the town or village for 

 school purposes has been a misfortune to the rural schools. The 

 whole school-system of any state should be organized on a broad 

 enough basis so that every boy and girl, whatever the occupation of 

 the parents, shall have the opportunity of securing the same, or at 

 least equally efficient, education. The country mill has gone. The old- 

 time country school is a passing institution. A one-teacher school 

 may be as inefficient as a one-man mill. Schools will be consolidated 

 into larger or at least into stronger units. The first pedagogical 

 result will be the differentiation of the work of teachers perhaps 

 one of these teachers can give special attention to nature-study and 

 country-life subjects. 



The school must connect with real life. It will be one of the strong 

 constructive and dynamic influences in our social organization. At 

 present its influence is receptive and passive, rather than creative. 

 The particular subjects that shall be taught are of less importance 

 than the point of view. Many questions of detail are to be discussed, 

 often with much travail; but the final solution must be to allow every 

 subject in which men engage to find its proper pedagogic place in a 

 wider and freer educational system than the world has yet seen, and 

 to place agricultural subjects with the others and not exclusively in 

 institutions by themselves. 



Whatever our doubts and misgivings, the American farmer is 

 bound to be educated. He will demand it. Having education and 

 being endowed with a free chance, he will not be a peasant. Some 

 persons have made the serious mistake of confounding peasantry 

 with comparative poverty. Peasanthood is a social stratum. It is 

 a surviving product of social conditions. 



If the open country is to be made attractive to the best minds, it 

 must have an attractive literature. There must be a technical litera- 

 ture of the farm, and also a general artistic literature portraying the 

 life and the ideals of the persons in the country. The farm literature 

 of a generation ago was largely wooden and spiritless, or else untrue 

 to actual rural conditions. The new literature is vivid and alive. The 

 new, however, is yet mostly special and technical, with the exception 

 of the growing nature-literature. Artistic literature of the farm and 

 rural affairs is yet scarcely known. Where is the high-class fiction that 

 portrays the farmer as he is, without caricaturing him? Where is the 

 collection of really good farm poems? Who has developed the story 

 interest in the farm? Who has adequately pictured rural institu- 



