The Mankato Free Press

ONE ROOM SCHOOL
NOW OUT OF DATE

"The rural school has made some progress in the last twenty-five years, but as compared with the schools of villages and cities during the same period it seems they have stood stock still," declared E. M. Phillips, state rural school commissioner, in his address on rural school consolidation at the conservation congress today. He said that no scheme for improving rural conditions can omit the betterment of the rural school.

If the country school is to assist in improving rural conditions, working hand in hand with other agencies now at work to make the country a better place to live in, the one-teacher school system must be replaced by the consolidation of rural schools, declared Mr. Phillips.

Mr. Phillips discussed the Holmberg act of 1911, providing state aid to consolidated schools, giving the requirements prescribed in order to get state aid. Teachers, he said, are required to have the same qualifications as in the best city schools, and the principal is chosen for his special fitness as a farming community leader.

"First, last and all the time, it is the intention of the state to make the consolidated school a community institution," he declared. "In all its activities it must reflect community needs, community interests, community life, at their very best, and must foster the ambitions of both children and parents for better conditions."

Sixty-one Schools.

"The Holmberg act went into effect April 18, 1911. Since that date, consolidation has been effected at sixty different points, located in thirty-one counties. He continued, "Thirty of these schools are now very well equipped and organized, and, therefore, it is possible to hazard an opinion as to their adaptation to purpose. First, it is certain now that pupils in the new schools are receiving better instruction than they ever received in the old--although the new schools are still crude in organization. We find, too, that children are attending more regularly and more punctually than was possible in the country without transportation. There seems no reasonable or unavoidable objection to transportation on the part of patrons. Protection thrown about children through the provision of better buildings, with warm, sanitary closets, good drinking water, uniform heating and adequate ventilation, and numerous other sanitary provisions, is bearing evident results in improved health. What the result will be in the direction of attaching children to farm life and the farm home, we can, at this early date, only conjecture. There seems no doubt that efficient schools, the broadening of thought which follows the association of large numbers for a common purpose, and the addition of industrial work to the old curriculum, can have no other effect than to keep the young people of rural communities from hurrying away to the cities for employment."

Land for Each School

"Each school has connected with it a small tract of land, varying in extent from one to ten acres, which is to be used by the principal teacher as an agricultural laboratory. As principals are employed for the entire year, this land can be used to good advantage. It will be used in verifying for children and parents those agricultural facts of immediate local value, as well as to visualize the classroom work in general agriculture. All this will logically lead to a growing and intelligent interest in farm problems on the part of the children, who will naturally become the practical agriculturists of the next generation.

"Minnesota has about 7,000 isolated one-room rural school districts. Of this number, 141 have, in one year, been combined into very promising consolidated schools. There are very few counties in the state where steps have not been taken looking toward further consolidation. If the sixty schools now established fulfill our expectations as to efficiency, their influence will give the consolidated school movement an impetus sufficient to carry the state for this system within the next decade."