Chapters in Rural ProgressButterfield, Kenyon L. (Kenyon Leech)
Science
Chapters in Rural Progress
Butterfield, Kenyon L. (Kenyon Leech)
Agriculture -- United States
4. A fourth method is by making the schoolhouse a meeting-place for the
community, more especially for the intellectual and aesthetic activities
of the community. A good example of this kind of work is the John Spry
School of Chicago. In connection with this school there is a lecture
course each winter; there is a musical society that meets every Tuesday
evening; there is a men's club that meets every two weeks to discuss
municipal problems and the improvement of home conditions; there is a
woman's club to study for general improvement and social service; there
is a mothers' council meeting every two weeks; there is a literary and
dramatic society, meeting every week, composed of members of high-school
age, and studying Shakespeare particularly; there is a dressmaking and
aid society meeting two evenings a week, to study the cutting of
patterns, garment-making, etc.; a food-study and cooking club, also
meeting two evenings a week; an inventive and mechanical club, meeting
two evenings a week, and tending to develop the inventive and mechanical
genius of a group of young men; an art club; and a boy's club, with
music, games, reading-lessons, reading of books and magazines, intended
for boys of fourteen or fifteen years of age. These things are all
under the direction of the school, they are free, they are designed to
educate. It will not be feasible for the rural school to carry out such
a programme as this, but do we realize how large are the possibilities
of this idea of making the rural school a community center? No doubt one
of the advantages of the centralized rural school will be to give a
central meeting-place for the township, and to encourage work of the
character that has been described. Of course, the Grange and farmers'
clubs are doing much along these lines, but is it not possible for the
district school also to do some useful work of this character?
Singing-schools and debating clubs were quite a common thing in the
rural schools forty years ago, and there are many rural schools today
that are doing work of this very kind. Is there any reason, for example,
why the country schoolhouse should not offer an evening school during a
portion of the winter, where the older pupils who have left the regular
work of the school can carry on studies, especially in agriculture and
domestic science? There is need for this sort of thing, and if our
agricultural colleges, and the departments of public instruction, and
the local school supervisors, and the country teachers, and the farmers
themselves, could come a little closer together on these questions the
thing could be done!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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