The Country-Life Movement in the United StatesBailey, L. H. (Liberty Hyde)
History
The Country-Life Movement in the United States
Bailey, L. H. (Liberty Hyde)
Country life
There is necessity that we now reorganize much of our peripatetic
teaching. It is no longer sufficient to call persons together and exhort
them and talk to them. We have come about to the end of agricultural
propaganda. All field and itinerant effort should have a follow-up
system with the purpose to set every man to work on his own place with
problems that will test him. We have been testing soils and crops and
fertilizers and live-stock and machines: it is now time to test the man.
There is also danger that we consolidate too many rural schools in
towns. If it is true that the best country life is developed when
persons live actually on their farms, then we should be cautious of all
movements that tend to centralize their interests too far from home, and
particularly to centralize them in a town or in a village. The good
things should come to the farm rather than that the farm should be
obliged to go to the good things.
_The present educational institutions._
We must first understand what our institutions of education are. The
extension of agriculture-education in institutions in the United States
(beyond the regular colleges of agriculture) is in four lines: as a part
of the regular public-school work; in unattached schools of agriculture
publicly maintained; in departments attached to other colleges or
universities; in private schools. The last category (the private
schools) may be eliminated from the present discussion.
The separate or special-school method is well worked out in Wisconsin
(county plan), in Alabama and Georgia (congressional-district plan),
Minnesota (regional plan), with other adaptations in Louisiana,
Oklahoma, Michigan, Maryland, and elsewhere.
In New York, the movement for special schools has taken an entirely new
direction. Two schools are connected with existing institutions of
higher learning of long-established reputation (being the only schools
of this kind, state-maintained, attached to liberal arts universities)
and one is unattached; none of them has a defined region or territory.
These institutions are established on a more liberal financial plan than
the special schools of other states, standing somewhat between those
schools and the agricultural college type.
While much publicity has been given to the unattached-school plan, the
main movement is the adding of agriculture-education to the existing
public-school systems. Only eight or ten of the states have entered into
any regular development of separate or unattached schools, whereas in
every state the movement for agriculture in the public schools is well
under way. The public schools are of definite plan; the unattached
schools are of several plans, or of no plan; and in some states an
intermediate course is developing by the establishing of public
high-schools (one to a county, a congressional district, or other
region) in which instruction in agriculture and household subjects is
highly perfected.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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