The progressive farmer and southern farm gazette., June 25, 1910, EDUCATIONAL SPECIAL, Image 1

About The progressive farmer and southern farm gazette. (Starkville, Miss.) 1910-1920

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EDUCATIONAL SPECIAL
Volume XV. No. 25.SATURDAY, JUNE 25 1910Weekly: $1 a Year.
The School the Hope of the South.
TRAVELING this week across a considerable section of our
Progressive Farmer and Gazette territory, we could but
dream of the time when all oar Southern country shall be
come ar fair as the rural districts of France and England as we
saw them two years ago—when*our muddy roads _
shall give way to beaatfal highways; when our
old fields shall be redeemed to life and useful
ness ; when oar half-cultivated patches shall be
converted into broad and fertile fields; when
herds of cattle and flocks of sheep shall dot our
hillsides ; when a gully shall be reckoned a dis
grace and a fire-ruined wood a crime; when
cabins and ugly cottages shall be replaced by
homes made beautiful by loving care, however
humble they may be ; and when a thickly-settled,
and well trained population shall not only relieve
a a m M Jt a e a a a a a m a • e
country u/e oj tnut taoiutton wmen nua
most retarded its development, but shall
give needed support for all the conven
iences of twentieth-century rural life—
rural telephones, water-works, the town
ship high school with its public library
and lyceam course: the school a center
of intellectual and the church of spirit
ual activity, each giving symmetry and
beauty to a community life which finds
its material basis in a high degree
of efficiency on the part of the ^_
averaPe man. i
Even as the painter when he
goes to his canvas, sees with his
mind’s eye some beautiful vision
which he is to work out, even so
ail of us should have before us as
we go about our daily tasks this
vision of the South that is to be,
and the part, however insignifi
cant, that we may have in helping
its fulfillment. We should all of
us like to live to see it with our own
eyes, as Moses yearned to see the
promised Canaan to which he led
his people. But whether we shall
see it with the physical eye or only
in our dream, it is enough that we
may have a hand in bringing it
about, enough that we may work
intelligently and unselfishly to has
ten the coming of this better day.
And the one way is by giving the
child a chance. That boy of yours,
that boy of your neighbor’s, who
already has the basis of all character in that he is learning to work,
that boy who “warms his feet cold mornings in the place where the
cows lay the night before”—he is the hope of the South. That girl
of yours, that girl of your neighbor’s, whose mind and spirit will
_______ some day give tone and color to everything in a
home—she is the hope of the South. And only
through the school they can he developed.
The hoy and girl in the towns are getting good
schooling; the farm boy and girl in the North and
West are getting ‘good schooling. Shall it be,
then, that among all our twentieth-century Ameri- \
can youth the Southern farm boy and girl alone
shall enter life’s race handicapped by shackles
of ignorance ?
It must nbt be so. The best investment the
South could make in 1910 would be to double its
_I_I __* J_LI. __—A___ _
o/ oar schools and colleges. Only
by providing the best of facilities can
we attract to the South that tide of im
migration which we need to increase our
percentage of white population and to
relieve rural life of isolation ; and only
by educating all our people can we ever
work out our dream of a South the beauty
of whose rural and urban life, the intelli
gence and efficiency of whose
__ people, shall make it indeed the
1 foremost and the fairest section MA
of America.
EDUCATIONAL FEATURES OF
THIS ISSUE.
An Up-to-Date School House 449
College Training for the Country
Girl .451
Educating Farmer Boys For .
Efficiency . 448
How the Home Can Help the
School . 450
Madison County High School. . 449
Mississippi Higli Schools.449
Mississippi Text-Book Commis
sion .452
Six Things to l)o for the Rural
School .451
The Educational Demands of
Our Time.452
The Farm Boy’s Greatest Prob- [
lem . 460 |
The Southern Farmer’s Needless
Burdens . 446
What Arkansas is Doing. 459
What the South Can Learn From
New England.453
What We Can Do to Help the
Cause . 447
[Courtesy Noith Carolina Department of Education*
THE OLD AND THE NEW
Here is a striking example of what consolidation of rural schools and the local tax
will do.
There are still hundreds of such school houses as those shown in the two upper pic
tures. scattered about over the South—school houses without any facilities at all for good
work and without pupils enough to permit of the employment of a good teacher. Where
two or more such schools can be combined and an up-to date building with modern
equipment provided and a good teacher employed, is it not work well worth while to do it?
Every person who helps in making such a change has a right to be proud of his
work; and no one can tell what difference the better turrourdings will make in the lives
of the boys and girls who attend the school.