The war and rural school improvement

Abstract

War is a great stimulus to social change. It recasts custom violently, and opens the way alike to disaster and to progress. The direction which the war-time changes will take depends very largely on the leadership which various people give during the period of partial disintegration, of rapid change, and of subsequent reorganization and stabilization which is sure to occur during and immediately after a war. What will happen to the rural schools during this period of sharp social change? The answer to this question will depend, of course, on a great variety of highly uncertain factors. It will depend in part on how long the war lasts, and how severe its ravages will become, and what its ultimate outcome will be. If the war should not last too long, and if we should win a clear-cut and secure victory, we shall certainly be ready almost immediately to make great forward strides in the development of our whole civilization. Great productive resources will be at our command, the country will be in a mood for great adventures as it was immediately after the last war, and the opportunity for making substantial progressive improvement in many of our institutions will certainly be great. During the period immediately following the last war, education in general enjoyed some substantial permanent gains. We had the great community high school building movement accompanied by a huge increase in high school and college enrollments. There was a corresponding great increase in the physical facilities for the colleges. Many cities almost completely replaced their old school buildings with fine, modern structures during the first decade after the World War. Indeed the only great section of the American public school system which did not enjoy very substantial change for the better was the rural school. Due mostly to the very early post-war decline in prosperity on the farms, but due also in part to the natural conservatism of country people as well as some other factors, rural education stood practically still on the physical side during this whole period, and made only moderate progress in other ways. Even the small progress which was made during the decade after the war was very largely lost during the decade of the depression, because the farms had to bear the savage