changes in percentages of population. Each allotment is to be matched by the state; hence there will be forty million dollars available for this work. With this sum, so much more can be done than has ever been done before in this field that the physical strength of the Nation could easily be doubled or even trebled within a decade. If the program is left to local initiative or to unaided and unstimulated state action, equivalent results would necessarily be delayed, perhaps for a century.

CHAPTER XVIII

THE WEAKEST LINKS

A. THE RURAL AND VILLAGE SCHOOLS

ILLITERACY, alienism, and physical and health deficiencies have all revealed themselves as national handicaps, due in large part to the failure of state and local education to meet adequately the Nation's needs. If, however, the Nation is at all concerned with finding remedies for these defects, it must go behind superficial conditions and seek fundamental causes. Measures that fail to reach the roots of these evils cannot solve the Nation's problem.

There are two outstanding sources of weakness in American education upon the correction of which the full effectiveness of every more limited program for reform inevitably depends. Although closely related to one another these two sources of weakness must be considered separately, for to remedy them will require two distinct, though still related, programs. The two "weakest links" in the chain of American education are (1) the almost total inadequacy of the ruralschool system in every state of the Union, and (2) the low status of teaching as a profession and the reflection

of this low status in the inadequacy of the existing agencies for the preparation of teachers.

THE IMPORTANCE AND DIFFICULTIES OF RURAL EDUCATION

The rural-school situation presents, from the point of view of national welfare, probably the most important and certainly the most difficult of all educational problems. The importance of the problem is indicated by the fact that sixty per cent of the next generation of American voters are enrolled in the schools classed as rural by the standards of the Federal Bureau of Education.1

Of this substantial majority of prospective American voters enrolled in the rural schools, it is clearly predictable that five sixths, or at least fifty per cent of all the children of the Nation, will be limited in their educational opportunities to what these schools are able to provide. No democracy can intelligently disavow its concern in an agency that determines the plane upon which a clear majority of its future citizens are to think

1 This is the standard, also, of the Bureau of the Census. A rural community is one of 2500 inhabitants or fewer. The term rural schools as used in the present discussion includes, then, not only one-room and consolidated schools of the open country, but also the schools of the villages and small towns. The situation depicted in the following pages would show itself as even more serious if the schools of open country alone were considered; but it is bad enough as it stands. Generally speaking, too, the schools of the open country and those of the small centers in agricultural districts constitute a homogeneous problem, and may well be considered as a single group.

and feel and act in solving their collective problems and transacting their collective business. Humble as the rural school may be as a unit, it is far from humble as a type. In the aggregate of its influence upon the Nation, indeed, it transcends in importance the greatest of our universities.

The difficulty of the rural-school problem is partly the product of external forces and factors and partly due to the inherent character of the rural school. Of the external forces and factors that complicate the situation the two most important are the generally low status of public-school teaching as a calling and the "neighborhood" tradition of educational responsibility. The former will be discussed in Chapters XVIII and XX; the latter, the sinister influence of extreme localism in education,

XIX.

will be an important theme of Chapter

Our present concern, then, is with the inherent difficulties of rural-school teaching. Schools in sparsely settled districts will always be handicapped in competing with schools in thickly settled districts. Either the school unit must be small, thus requiring in a group or system of such units a large number of teachers in proportion to the pupils enrolled; or, if the small units are consolidated in central schools, the expense of transporting pupils must be met. In both cases, then, the cost of education will be high as compared with the cost of providing the same opportunities in a thickly settled

district. If to the bare cost of instruction there be added the "overhead" of equally competent administration and supervision, the discrepancies in relative per capita cost become even wider. As a result of this inherently greater cost of rural education, only a negligible proportion of school districts in the villages and the open country offer educational facilities equal to those even of the poorest cities.

Not only are the sparsely settled districts thus handicapped, but their situation is rendered even more unfavorable by the fact that their per capita wealth is almost invariably lower than that of the urban districts. Not only, therefore, is the cost of rural education greater, but the resources from which school revenues can be drawn are much more meager. Actual figures revealing the striking differences in the taxable wealth behind each child in typical rural and urban districts will be set forth in Chapter XIX.

A third inherent difficulty of rural education lies in the pronounced individualism of the average farmer. His mode of life with its isolation and its emphasis upon independence and self-reliance predisposes him to individualism. He is likely to resent interference from without; consequently the enforcement of compulsoryattendance laws has been practically ignored in the rural districts. Furthermore, he can use his children in the work of the farm and the household at a profit far beyond that which the city resident can gain by