Little Red Schoolhouse--1938 Model
I
THIS is the story of efforts in the South to drive rote teaching from the school system and to put some education in its place. Especially it is the story of coöperative activities by Southern teachers and one of the philanthropic foundations — the Julius Rosenwald Fund — to lift rural schools out of the formal routine into which so many of them have fallen. The efforts and ideas reported in this paper are simply examples of fresh interest that is springing up in many places in one of America’s most cherished institutions — the little red schoolhouse.
The Julius Rosenwald Fund, as an institution interested in education, had as its chief programme for many years the building of schoolhouses for Negroes in the South. This was a happy and successful effort. It contributed to the building of more than five thousand schoolhouses in almost every county of the fifteen Southern states. It transformed the physical facilities for the public schooling of this large group of the population.
But in spite of this success we began to wonder if we were really promoting education. We were certainly building up physical plant and contributing to a system of schools. But some of us were becoming suspicious even of the biggest plants, even of the most smoothly running systems. This was a rather unpatriotic suspicion, because America has taken its public school system very seriously. It has assumed that because we have more children in school than any other nation, and have more expensive buildings and more elaborate equipment , we must be providing better education than is known anywhere else in the world. The public school has become a kind of sacred cow in America. To question it is almost sacrilege.
And it is true that the success of our nation, at least in buildings and organization, is spectacular. Not only are almost all children of elementary-school age actually enrolled in school, but we have carried higher education to numbers beyond the dreams — or nightmares — of any other country. During the current school year more than seven million children are enrolled in high schools or other institutions of secondary grade. This is nearly 70 per cent of the children of this age group and is an amazing contrast to the 15 or 20 percent of secondary-school enrollment which is the best that has ever been shown even by such enlightened countries as England, France, and Germany. Our enrollment in colleges and universities exceeds a million, and is in even stronger contrast to the relatively small numbers in other countries. Our investment in educational plant is estimated at three billion dollars, and our current expenditures for education are almost three billions each year.
Certainly America has given every outward sign of her belief in education. But no one who looks beneath the surface is satisfied with the results that are coming from our enormous and expensive school plant.
At any rate, when the officers of the Julius Rosenwald Fund began looking into what was going on inside the little schoolhouses they had helped build in the rural South, they were appalled. The teaching was routine, formal, and almost completely detached from the life of the communities and the interests of the children. Rows upon rows of boys and girls were being drilled by ill-trained teachers in a routine which neither teacher nor pupil pretended to understand and which they went through day after day and week after week in a kind of fatalistic resignation.
At first we thought this mumbo jumbo of rote recitation might simply be the mark of Negro schools, but when we enlarged our explorations to include white schools in the same communities we found little to choose between the two. In general the Negro teachers had less training, worked for smaller salaries and with shabbier equipment. Yet, in spite of handicaps, occasionally the zest and ingenuity of this hearty race resulted in activities and interests above the practice in the white schools.
We became convinced that the curse of American education is rote teaching, the continuous meaningless drill in formalistic studies. This, of course, is no new discovery. All thoughtful educators realize it. The struggle of true education the world over is against this archvillain, rote learning.
The problem in the rural South, as everywhere else, is to get the school to open the minds of the children, to lead them out into ability to think clearly and to act sensibly. While much of school time is necessarily devoted to training in the basic skills, it is perfectly clear that nothing of value is accomplished unless these skills are put to use. In fact, it is impossible even to learn the skills except by using them.
We ran into some choice examples of rote teaching. In a little school just outside Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the teacher had been hearing a class read a lesson on birds in one of the standard textbooks. To drive home a point from the lesson, she asked a boy, ‘When do the robins come?’
The pupil answered promptly, ‘In the fall.’
‘Now, Jimmie,’ urged the teacher, ‘read the lesson carefully again.’
After he had droned out the text a second time, she said cheerily, ‘Now, Jimmie, when do the robins come?’
More hesitantly and sullenly he answered again, ‘The robins come in the fall.’
‘James, James!’ shouted the teacher. ‘Read that lesson again. Now tell me, when do the robins come?’
Almost in tears the boy finally answered, ‘The robins come in the spring.’
And so they do — in Boston, where the text was written. But in Louisiana, just in order to avoid the Northern winter, they come in the fall, as the boy well knew.
Here we had an all too frequent combination of a stupid teacher, who was intent on grinding out a ‘lesson,’ and a textbook unadapted to the region. The result must have been either to destroy the boy’s confidence in his own common sense or, more likely, to break down completely his respect for book learning.
In a Negro school a teacher holding a health catechism read from the text, ‘Why should we wash and comb our hair?’ And the row of little Negroes droned back the answer, ‘So it will not get stringy and fall down in our eyes.’
Neither teacher nor pupils seemed to think this a surprising answer from pupils whose hair was so kinky that it never could get into strings or hang down anywhere. This was the lesson; all that teacher or pupils had to do was to recite it. As with Tennyson’s Six Hundred, ‘theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die.’ And in this rote learning children’s minds die as stupidly and as wantonly as did the members of the Light Brigade on the fields of Balaclava.
II
What happens in the rural schools of a given region is of more than local interest. It concerns all of us. In the first place, if we can devise good educational practices anywhere, these may be expected in time to influence our whole school system.
Furthermore, those of us who live in cities have a very direct interest in country schools because to a great, degree the future citizens of the large centres are being educated not in the schools of those centres but in the rural communities. It is well known that urban populations are not reproducing themselves and that rural regions are continuing to produce surplus populations which are steadily moving into the cities.
The greatest excess of children is in the rural South. And the heaviest reproduction rates are not, as is sometimes supposed, among Negroes, but among native white Americans. In the Southern rural states the number of children under five years old per 1000 native white women of childbearing age (twenty to forty-four years) is more than double that of Northern industrial regions, figures for typical states being 827 for North Carolina, 786 for Alabama, 777 for South Carolina, and 740 for Mississippi, as contrasted with 363 for Rhode Island, 362 for New York State, and 359 for Massachusetts. During the three decades from 1900 to 1930, three and a half million of the people born in the rural states of the Southeast moved to other regions. The education of these rural children, many of whom will be the future citizens of Chicago, New York, and similar metropolitan centres, is a matter of quite as much concern to Northern cities as to Southern counties.
But the main concern of rural schools, as of any schools, is to educate the children for their life in their present communities. The great bulk of rural children will go on living in the country. America in her recent spectacular development has largely ignored the people of the countryside. If we are to have a healthy nation we must bring up to decent living and to enlightenment the rural masses. The great task of the rural school is to improve life right in the country.
Lively education should be more easily possible in the country than in the city — there are so many exciting things lying all about in the countryside that should engage the child’s interest. As a matter of fact, merely living in the country is in itself an education. Rural children, from time immemorial, have picked up a good deal of skill in handcrafts, a lot of knowledge about growing things and the processes of nature, and a good deal of generalized ability to meet all kinds of problems. The man who has grown up in the country is notably much more resourceful than a person who has spent his youth in the more restricted and artificial surroundings of a large city.
How, then, can we plan the rural school so that it will capitalize the natural educative interests of the countryside and at the same time cultivate those general mental abilities that are needed by every citizen of the modern world? The problem is not only to provide the children with the basic tools of knowledge, but also to get them to put those tools to use currently for their own growth and for the improvement of the communities in which they live. It is the problem of supplanting rote lessons by active learning. That it can be done we have proved by our own experience in many little schools in both rich and poor communities, with both white and Negro children.
III
Let us consider, then, what we should expect to-day from the little red schoolhouses of the countryside.
First, whatever else is done, the school must provide skill in the use of the three R’s. No child is prepared to take his place in the modern world without competence in reading, writing, and arithmetic. Language and number are tools so basic to our civilization that teaching them is the first task of any school. The only thing we need to remember in this connection is that language and number are, after all, simply tools to be used in various ways. They are not ends in themselves. The chief fault in the teaching of them is that the lessons in reading and writing and arithmetic become so formalized that the pupil scarcely understands why he is learning them. In fact, in spite of the great amount of time devoted to these primary subjects, a shocking number of children — especially in the rural regions — do not acquire even an elementary knowledge of them.
If a child really learns to read, and puts this knowledge into practice, he can care for all the rest of his academic education by his own efforts. The difference between educated and uneducated people is largely the difference in the range and understanding of their reading. Abraham Lincoln was one of the best-educated of men in spite of meagre schooling — because he read so avidly. Almost the whole of the subject matter of the elementary school may be regarded as practice in reading. And reading, by the same token, should be thought of not as a ’lesson,’something associated with a special class or a special set of textbooks, but as the means of mastery of all the subjects and projects which make up school life — and all life.
In addition to the three R’s, the rural pupil should get an acquaintance with two other fields: handcrafts and the processes of nature. We advocate these not at all as ‘vocational subjects,’but simply as essential tools quite as general in their use as language or arithmetic.
Ability to use one’s hands is a fitting supplement to ability to use one’s wits. Manual arts run the whole gamut from homely hand labor to high expression in art and music. Certainly the beginnings of hand skill should be a part of any child’s preparation for life.
What we mean by the understanding of nature is harder to define, and it will probably be harder to work into the educational programme. It is not merely instruction in gardening or animal husbandry or in the protection of our own health, although it should be applied in all of these. It is the beginnings of knowledge of how natural forces work. ‘Nature study’ is probably the best term, in spite of the fact that this phrase has been put to some pretty sentimental uses. At any rate, what we are urging is an introduction to the simple biological facts which are a vital part of all our lives and which are particularly important and conspicuous in the rural scene.
Now the addition of these other fields of interest will not in itself protect the school from rote teaching, but it will help toward connecting lessons with life. The big problem is to get each of the elementary tools constantly applied so that there will be a clear relationship between living and learning, between tools and their application. This is what is meant by the slogan ‘learning by doing.’ It is the basis of the programmes of the so-called activity schools and the chief feature of the movement which calls itself ‘ progressive education.’ Skill and knowledge — it cannot too often be repeated — are of no value unless they are put to use; children cannot learn even the elementary skills unless they practise them.
The three R’s, for example, easily fall into a rote so perfunctory that no learning results. It is easy to give rules for reading and arithmetic and to set ‘exercises’ or ‘lessons.’ Children may be drilled week after week, year after year, without ever realizing that they are acquiring tools which are usable in many ways. In such cases skill in reading or writing or the manipulation of numbers is on a level with the skill of parrots who have been taught to call words, or of dogs who have been taught to jump through a hoop or to sit up and shake hands. Much of our school work, it must be sadly confessed, does not go far beyond this animal-training level.
The autobiography of a Southern country boy records that after going to school for several years he happened to pick up the family Bible. To his amazement he found that he could read it. Up to that moment, he said, it had never occurred to him that the rote drill in school called reading had any connection with something he might do out of school. Suddenly he discovered that what he had supposed was a scholastic trick was instead a generalized tool, by means of which he could gain information and pleasure from the whole realm of literature.
This seems an extreme case. Yet the tests given to the draft troops during the World War indicated that 25 per cent of that cross section of American youth had never made a successful transfer from the school lessons to reading. One fourth of the whole American draft army, although most of the individuals had spent several years in school, had not learned enough to carry over into life the ability to read simple sentences or to write their own names.
In mathematics the percentage of educational failure is even greater. Many pupils become skillful in performing the cunning tricks of addition, multiplication, and division, or even in handling what are so aptly termed improper fractions. But they gain no general mathematical ability. In many cases they do not even understand that the problems are intended solely as exercises or examples, on the one hand, of simple dealings which they will have every day of their lives, and, on the other hand, of the highly sophisticated process of dealing with quantities by symbols.
The additional fields of interest which we have suggested — manual dexterity and the understanding of nature — are happily less liable to rote training than the three R’s. In fact these subjects are so generalized that they may better be introduced through related activities than through formal courses. Certainly the school lessons attempted, for example, in health have proved to be almost as deadly as the ills they were supposed to correct. But stimulating activities that involve manual dexterity and natural processes can easily be arranged by any resourceful teacher. They do not require elaborate or expensive equipment. In fact the less formal equipment the better, since the aim is to stir up the creative impulse and to develop resourcefulness. This is especially true for country children, whose problems are to create utility or beauty from meagre materials.
If true education is learning from the doing of one task how to use similar processes in other problems, then handwork and activities with nature are almost necessarily educational. One can scarcely use a saw or a hammer without realizing that this tool is usable in many ways and for many ends; the handling of clay or cloth or a musical instrument is by its very nature a lesson in generalization. Similarly, in the processes of nature, variety rather than routine is the rule. The planting of a school garden, for example, involves so many variables (seed, soil, fertilizer, weather, parasites) that it is almost impossible for it to become routine.
Furthermore, the introduction into the school course of these hand and nature activities tends to break down the rote learning in the three R’s. When a child sees multiplication at work through the breeding of rabbits, he cannot keep from realizing that arithmetic is something more than a lesson. Reading becomes an active tool — not simply an exercise — when it is used in finding out how to plant flowers or cultivate vegetables. Figuring comes alive when a boy measures off a garden plot or computes the yield from seed corn.
We have not listed social studies among the subjects of the rural school because it seems to us that the whole school should be organized around the social setting. The school which realizes its full functions, especially in the country districts, will be at work improving and leavening the social life of the community. And only as school learning is applied can it be said to be education.
If rural children can gain some competence in these basic skills and can put them to active use, they will have some preparation for happy and successful living. Surely the learning of the three R’s and some acquaintance with handwork and nature are not too much to expect of the six to eight years of the common school. The reason these or any other subjects are not mastered is that, instead of generalized study and practice of a few broad topics, the school attempts to cram a great multitude of lessons into the brief days. Subjects are artificially divided into fragments which are rehearsed in tiny sections, grade by grade. In many rural schools, one or two teachers rush through a whole day made up of lessons of less than fifteen minutes each. No wonder that teachers, driven by fantastic schedules of rote lessons, fail to offer real education in any subject, or that children, hurried from class to class, come to regard school as a place for reciting rather than for learning.
All this may seem to be arguing the obvious. It is. But the plain fact is that thousands of schools in America to-day are not attempting to give any application to the simplest of routine skills.
Millions of children are merely learning scholastic tricks — just like parrots or trained fleas. Hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money are going into schools which are not educational institutions at all but simply a species of jails for keeping children in order for a few hours each day.
IV
Unfortunately there is no panacea for school ills. Education is one of those combinations of science and art which, constantly making use of new knowledge and fresh insights, must be constantly adapting themselves to varying conditions. The encouraging thing about rural education in the South is that many agencies are now actively exploring and experimenting with a view not to devising some new formula but to infusing the whole educational process with fresh life. The Julius Rosenwald Fund is simply one of these forces. Our efforts are naturally merged in those of Southern agencies generally, for the function of a private foundation is to stimulate and coöperate rather than itself to try to do a job which rightly belongs to the people of the region. Efforts of this Fund and of Southern officials are directed to a number of specific programmes.
In the first place, reform is going forward in both white and colored schools. While Negroes have been grossly neglected, the white schools in the rural South are also cluttered with set schedules and dull routine. If we are to change the content and methods of education it is not feasible to work with simply one segment of the population. The new ideas must be infused into the whole school system.
Secondly, the strategic approach is through the public school system. It would be easy with money and special personnel to build up a few good schools under private auspices anywhere. But education in America has been accepted as a public function, and only as changes can be brought about in the public schools are these changes likely to be of lasting effect and widespread benefit.
In a number of individual rural schools, both white and colored, experiments have been going forward during the past two years to see how typical units in the regular public school system may become lively influences upon the minds of the pupils and the attitudes and practices of the community. With the approval of the local authorities special teachers have been supplied and given a free hand to explore the various possibilities for giving a sound and stimulating education to country children. While in general these experimental public schools have foliowed the policies outlined in this paper, the only fixed principle has been to drive out rote teaching and to put in its place a learning process in which the pupil takes an active part and in which the stimulating environment of the countryside is used as much as possible.
Textbooks and informal teaching materials are being prepared with special reference to the lives of the people in the communities and regions concerned. For example, nature study for children of rural Louisiana and Georgia is being prepared with a view to conditions there rather than in Boston and New York City. In many conference groups the rural teachers themselves are taking part in the creation of the materials of instruction which they are to use.
School libraries have received special stimulus. The Rosenwald Fund has distributed some four thousand small libraries to rural schools — chiefly Negro schools, since these have been most neglected. This single little device is having great influence in carrying reading out of rote lessons and into the realm of use and enjoyment. School authorities throughout the South have awakened to the educational value of supplementary reading, as evidenced, to cite two examples, by special appropriations this year by the states of Georgia and Tennessee of funds of $100,000 each for school libraries.
Strenuous efforts are being made in several counties to coördinate the services of the various public agencies in teaching and promoting the several aspects of public welfare — farm extension teachers, home demonstration agents, health workers — and to link all these special services to the general education of the school. Too often these subjects are hammered home by their special agents as though they were separate entities, whereas what the pupil and the community should realize is that health and farming and good homes, as well as reading and figuring and thinking, are simply parts of civilized living.
Every school in this group of experiments gives attention to the care and beautification of its building and grounds. It is a delight — and a surprise — to see how eagerly parents join with pupils and teachers in the communal task of making the school an object of pride. Grass and flowers and shrubs are planted in front, while the surrounding grounds are devoted to play spaces and to gardens, a rabbit hutch, often a chicken run. Clean toilets are built in the back and a deep well adorns the foreground. Sometimes a shack is built by the voluntary labor of students and parents to serve as a shop for the boys, and a small room is partitioned off in the schoolhouse for a sewing machine and a cookstove for the use of the girls. Skillful carpenters and farmers among the parents, and competent housewives, — rather than paid professional teachers, — prove to be willing and able directors of these supplementary units. The school at once becomes a matter of pride and interest to the whole community, while ideas of hygiene, farming, and homemaking become a natural part of daily discussion and practice.
It is clear that good teachers can be held in the country only as decent salaries are paid. At present the ladder of pay and prestige runs from the country to the city and from the lower grades to the higher. Recently Southern states have begun adopting new salary scales on a state-wide basis to iron out the irregularities which penalize the rural teacher. The new law in Georgia, for example, provides equal salaries for qualified teachers regardless of the size and situation of the school district. The interesting practice in British Columbia of paying a bonus to teachers in rural communities is attracting attention in those Southern agricultural states where the great bulk of the people live in the country.
Chief emphasis in the whole movement is upon the normal schools and teachers’ colleges, for it is evident that the spirit as well as the procedures of the school depend almost wholly upon the teacher. The contributions of the Rosenwald Fund and of other educational foundations are being increasingly centred on improving the preparation of teachers. Specifically, we are coöperating with the state normal colleges at Statesboro and Carrollton, Georgia, and with the Negro State Normal School at Grambling, Louisiana, and with two private colleges, Fisk University (colored) and the George Peabody College for Teachers (white) in Nashville, Tennessee. The purpose is to improve the general quality of the teaching and to explore the methods of preparing teachers especially for the rural schools. One of the greatest needs in America is that teachers’ colleges — too often the neglected stepchildren of our university systems — be given the prestige, the financial resources, and the wise planning that have gone into other branches of higher education.
Much of the recent ferment in Southern rural education has arisen from the Council on Rural Education, which is composed of Southern officials, teachers, and private citizens, and of persons of educational wisdom from the country at large. This Council on Rural Education has been a clearinghouse for ideas and the directing force in the studies and experiments. Through it the several educational foundations are working together with Southern educators toward improvement of the Southern rural schools.
In these efforts in behalf of rural education all of us have been greatly heartened by the fresh interest throughout America in the content of living as contrasted with merely making a living. In this interest in a better life for the total people it is clear that the rural areas must be given a chance to come up to general national levels both in standards of living and in enlightenment. If the school can be kept from dull routine and can be infused with true education, it is the natural force for enriching country life. In spite of present doleful conditions, there is such ferment, and so great an opportunity, that one is encouraged to believe that in time we may begin to justify the almost mystical faith which Americans have always had in their public school system.