CHAPTER VI 



RURAL EDUCATION 



Various causes are assigned for the fact that the 

 younger generation are leaving the country districts 

 as fast as they find opportunities for doing so. Better 

 wages, attractions of town life, social considerations, 

 and the stagnation of village life, are the reasons 

 usually given for this " exodus." But there is no doubt 

 that one of the most potent causes of all is to be found 

 in the kind of education given in rural schools. 



The direct tendency of that education is to create 

 a distaste for agricultural labour — if not for manual 

 labour of all sorts — and a dissatisfaction with country 

 life generally. By it new ideas, totally dissociated 

 from the localities in which they live, are instilled in 

 the minds of the young, who believe that such ideas 

 can only be realized elsewhere. This, and a total 

 absence of any prospect for the young labourer of a 

 career on the land, are together sufficient to account 

 for that wholesale migration which is such a serious 

 incident in our national life. 



The authorities a generation ago, in putting the 

 Act of 1870 into operation, took a too scholarly view 

 of education. Their methods were to store the rustic 

 mind with undigested facts, to teach children as you 

 would teach parrots, unmindful of the fact that they — 

 the children — had powers of observation, of thinking, 

 and of inquiry, the development of which is " educa- 

 tion.'' Hence the well-stuffed codes and the wonder- 

 ful invention of " payment by results " (rather a pay- 

 ment for appearances), which together gave a paper 



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