The Curriculum Problem in Rural Elementary Schools

Abstract

It is no secret that the rural school is in bad repute. The building is old, poorly arranged, and poorly equipped. The teaching personnel is relatively immature, inexperienced, and untrained. Supervision is meager and often inefficient. The curriculum attempts to provide little more than so-called bare essentials, and these are presented without much relation to the child's experience or to the issues he is likely to face. In achievement in the fundamental subjects the rural child is approximately one year behind the urban child of the same grade. The rural people themselves are far from satisfied with present conditions. In fact, to criticize the rural school has been the easy and popular thing to do. Judging from reports, people are quite unanimous in calling it the black sheep of the educational family. On the other hand, suggestions for its improvement are many. It is the purpose of this article to analyze some of the present tendencies in rural education, to evaluate suggestions for the reorganization of the rural elementary curriculum, and to point out certain fundamental principles that should guide us in constructing a curriculum for rural children. This wholesale criticism and the consequent efforts to reform the rural school had their major beginnings in the Roosevelt Country Life Commission of 19o8. The report of this commission revealed certain conditions that attracted attention. The first significant fact was that the rural population was being depleted. It was decreasing in numerical strength as compared with the urban group and was supposed to be deteriorating in quality, the best being attracted to the city. Another disturbing condition was that rural agricultural practice had not kept pace with the times. It was primitive, unscientific, and inefficient. Moreover, the farmer's economic returns for his labor were not enough to build a satisfactory civilization in the open country. A third condition to give concern 586