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Show Improvement of Rural Schools Declared Pressing Press-ing Need of the Country Ey DR. JAMES R. GRANT, of Arkansas.. f BOUT one-half of all the school children in the United States are still taught in one-room school houses of the type Lincoln, attended. They are taught by bobbed-haired, bob-skirted teachers, teach-ers, who are grossly underpaid and who stay in the rural school only long enough to get a husband, or a better job. This lack of rural education is one important cause of America's tremendous tre-mendous migration from the country to the town. It is not a problem of "What to teach" in the rural schools, but rW ho is to do the teaching ?" "How long to teach ?" and sometimes, "Can we teach at all ?' The people of the big cities are so engrossed with their up-to-date new school buildings which have gymnasiums, auditoriums and the finest ventilation systems, that they believe the old one-room schoolhouse of Abraham Lincoln's day is nonexistent. But it isn't. There are 170,000 of these one-room schoolhouses in use today. Moreover, out of the 25,-000,000 25,-000,000 school children in the United States, 12,000,000 of them attend these schools. Folks in the city don't realize that either. Especially they don't realize that the lives of one-half of the future citizens of the nation are being molded by poorly paid and itinerant school teachers who consent con-sent to go to the rural schools only in order to get training. We need our best teachers in the country. The supervisor comes around only two or three times a year, and the teacher must be a person of character and initiative. He must be the superintendent, janitor, office help and carpenter. It takes a far broader training to teach eight grades than it does to teach one. Moreover, rural teachers deal with children chil-dren who are at an early and most impressionable age. What they learn then will stick with them throughout life. But instead of sending our best teachers to the country, we send our worst. This is because most teachers prefer to teach where they can enjoy en-joy the theaters and the movies and because the country districts will not pay decent salaries. For instance, there are over 1,000 districts in Arkansas Arkan-sas where the amount raised by school taxes is less than $200 yearly, and there are 300 districts which are able to raise only $100 a year to pay for their school expenses. And yet there are 50,000 children living in those districts, and I do not believe that Arkansas is poorer than any other state in the Southwest. Half of our teachers must teach in one and two-room country schools; and yet out of the 1,500 teachers we trained last year, only 60 wanted to work in them. |