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community with its needs and its problems.

It is the boast of the people of the country school district that their
school has "sent out" so many people of distinction. On a rocky hillside
in a New England town there stands, between a wooded slope and a swamp,
an unpainted school building. Within and without it is more forbidding
than the average stable in that farming region. But the resident of that
neighborhood boasts of the number of distinguished persons who have gone
forth from the community, under the influence of that school. This is
characteristic of country places and country schools. The influence of
the school, so far as it has any, is that of disloyalty to the
neighborhood. It robs the neighborhood of leadership. It does nothing
to cultivate a spirit of sympathy with the life that must be lived
there. For every one whom it starts upon the exodus to other places it
leaves two at home uninspired, indifferent and mentally degenerate.

Another fault of the one-room country school, which makes it a weak
support of the country community, is its lack of professional support.
Among four hundred teachers in such schools, throughout the country, not
one in a hundred expects to remain as a country schoolteacher for a
lifetime. There is no professional class devoted to the country school.
Its service is incidental in the lives of men devoted to something else.
It is a mere side issue.

Besides, its building is inadequate. Too many needs, impossible to
satisfy, are assembled in a single room. Too many grades must be taught
there for any one child to receive the intense impression necessary for
his education.

The third great fault of the country school is its total lack of
intelligent understanding of the country. Its teaching is suited to
prepare men for trade, but not for agriculture. Instead of making
farmers of the sons of farmers, the majority of whom should expect to
follow the profession of their fathers, the country school prepares them
for buying and selling, for calculation and for store keeping. It starts
the stream of country boys in the direction of the village store, the
end of which is the department store or clerical occupation in a great
city.

The improvement of the one-room rural school is possible within narrow
limits only. A recent book[33] gives most sympathetic attention to this
problem of improvement, while asserting that reorganization alone will
be adequate to the situation. But there