Douglas Daily Dispatch

RADIO CATCHES THE RURAL SCHOOL
(Kansas City, Mo., Times)

American citizens of forty years ago can recall without effort, a boxlike
little structure set on a hillside, in a clump of trees or the plain open field,
in which the start, and maybe the finish, on the long road toward an education
was made. The one room school had its place, a much bigger place,
maybe, than its size would indicate, in the history of this country. It still
holds a position there, but one that is steadily diminishing. For its numbers
are said to be decreasing at the rate of nearly 5,000 a year, a transformation
that has been in progress more than a decade. The larger consolidated school
is coming instead.

But something else is happening at the same time.
The rural school is
being made over in quality of offerings as well as physical dimensions. The
metamorphosis is an excellent index to the general progress which is serving
to erase the line between city and country. Here is the former United States
commissioner of education, John J. Tigert, now president of the University of
Florida, who says that widening use of the radio is affecting the instruction
and the entire atmosphere of the rural school. It is a development of which
the small boy or girl in the country school of three or four decades back
scarcely could have dreamed in the wildest moments of imaginative ram-
blings, while fellow pupils bent heavily over books and the only music within
hearing was the twitter of a bird just outside the window. Now lessons in
arithmetic, as well as programs of classical music, are beginning to come
through the air. The country schoolhouse, big, but still little, is being linked
up with all the outside world.