EDUCATION 85 



ship o whom we approved. In a small school, such as 

 that with which we had to contend, the damage which 

 the bullies or perverts are able to do is all out of 

 proportion to the damage which they can do in a large 

 one. The situation in our district, and I believe in the 

 country generally, has in the past decade shown great 

 improvement. The coming of the school bus has made 

 it possible to eliminate most of the impoverished one- 

 room schools, and in the large consolidated schools 

 which have taken their place, city conditions of school 

 organization are to a large extent duplicated. 



We first tried cooperation with the school board 

 and with the teachers. Most of the board members 

 proved impossible. When we talked about educational 

 problems to them, we found ourselves talking in a 

 foreign tongue. The teachers were, in general, not 

 quite so hopeless; at least they knew what we were 

 talking about. But most of them were immature; 

 most of them had been more or less ruined by the 

 rigid regimentation which the state required of them. 

 We did manage to win the cooperation of the first 

 teacher to whom the boys were turned over, and as 

 long as she was in charge of the school she tried to 

 make the conventional scheme work. But the next 

 teacher resented bitterly our interest, and reluctantly 

 we decided that this method of trying to make the 

 country school endurable was love's labor lost. 



We finally decided to take the boys out of school al- 

 together. 



A talk with the county superintendent of education 



