last six years; only 6 of these have been one-room schools. In all the 

 county there is only one consolidated school with public transportation 

 of pupils; this is located at Poolesville. The white schools are in session 

 188 days a year, but the colored schools are in session only 140 days, 

 except in a few cases in which private subscription makes it possible to , 

 keep them open longer. 



The Material Equipment 



Buildings. The 76 white schools occupy 77 buildings; 70 of these are 

 frame structures, 5 are of brick and 2 are of stone. The total number of 

 rooms is 151, of which 140 were last year used for school purposes; 51 of 

 the schools were one-room, one-teacher schools. The law requires the 

 maintenance of a certain average attendance before two teachers can be 

 assigned to one school, so that a number of two-room buildings were in 

 effect only one-room schools. This proportion of one-teacher schools, 

 67% of the total number, raises a problem which is, in a way, at the crux 

 of the whole situation. 



The most frequent criticism aimed at the rural schools of recent years 

 has been that they have borrowed their course of study and their teach- 

 ing methods from the city schools, and have offered the country pupil 

 nothing distinctively adapted to his actual sphere in life. In another 

 connection we will discuss the movement for the broadening of the cur- 

 riculum of the rural schools by the introduction of studies which aim 

 directly to equip the students for farm life. This is a thing for which 

 there is an ever-growing demand. Yet it must be remembered that there 

 is an equally insistent demand for more highly efficient teaching in the 

 rural schools and a general improvement of the class of work done. This 

 brings us again to our point that 67% of the schools are one-teacher 

 schools. 



It will readily be seen that in a school in which one teacher has charge 

 of 30 or more pupils in eight different grades, with the average length of 

 the recitation period only 15 minutes, any movement to increase the 

 efficiency of the teaching must begin by narrowing rather than broaden- 

 ing the curriculum. It is only when the teaching force is multiplied that 

 the curriculum can be broadened and the general efficiency at the same 

 time increased. In the main, this situation has raised the question of 

 the consolidation of schools. 



As we have said, there is at the present time only one consolidated school 

 in the county with public transportation of pupils, though several other 

 schools, notably the Sandy Spring and Brookeville High Schools, are in 

 effect consolidated schools. It is the hope of the School Administration 

 to put into effect in the near future a policy of gradually consolidating 

 the schools at convenient centres, with a ^'iew to covering ultimately 



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