Small Town

XI: The Burden on the Schools

If there is one conclusion to be drawn from our investigation of the mind of Roxborough, it is that universal compulsory education hasn’t been a great success. The testimony of the Sole Trustee of Common School District Number One is thus added to the lamentations, exhortations, and prescriptions of a host of weightier authorities. Most American institutions are currently subject to criticism, but in no profession or trade is self-criticism so prevalent as it is among teachers. To hear what is wrong with education, all one has to do is ask an educator. In my capacity as trustee, I am principally concerned with elementary education. During most of Roxborough’s existence grammar school was, to all intents and purposes, the sum total of education, and even at the present time it is true that few residents who are over thirty have gone beyond the eighth grade. Every spring, when the question of the transportation of high school pupils comes up, there ate old-timers to grumble over the cost and say that grammar school was enough for them. The old-timers think that I am an advocate of all kinds of expensive educational frills and of everything that is modern and therefore bad in our school curriculum, but as a matter of fact there cannot be many persons in the town who are more appreciative than I am of the education the old-timers and their parents received. If the aim of education is to prepare a child for the life he will live as an adult, there is little doubt that the education children received in 1845 was better than that provided a century later. Most of the 1845 education, however, was obtained outside the school. All the teacher had to do was to give pupils the three basic tools—reading, writing, and arithmetic. Th e B u r d e n o n t h e S c h o o l s xi Watching Stan Cutter’s eight-year-old, son, on the days when he tags his grandfather, I can appreciate the educational values of a farm. Mr. Cutter loves to talk about what he is doing, but even if he were as taciturn as some farmers I know, Little Mark is observant enough to educate himself. At eight Little Mark knows most of what there is to be known about plowing and dragging a garden, planting the various seeds, cultivating and harvesting the crops. He understands the care of livestock, and has an intimate and accurate knowledge of the processes of reproduction. He can skin a chipmunk, and knows, at least in theory, how to dress a chicken. He has taken care of both baby rabbits and baby skunks, and he can recognize deer tracks. He is only moderately handy with tools, but he goes at a job of carpentry the right way. If he finds us engaged in some kind of tinkering around the place, he usually has suggestions to make, and the suggestions are worth listening to. A hundred years ago a boy brought up as Little Mark is being brought up would have been given chores to do and then more chores, and by the time he was twelve or fourteen he would have a vocation. Such training, as has been demonstrated times without number, fits a boy not only for farming but for much else. In the Tennessee Valley farm boys, confronted with the most complicated machinery, catch on at once. And why not? They have learned to use their eyes, and have acquired an insatiable curiosity about processes. If there were ten right ways of doing a thing and only one wrong way, I would probably try the wrong way first. My eight-year-old neighbor finds the right way—and usually there is only one right way—with a minimum of hesitation. The training a boy received on a farm in the old days was not only training for a vocation; it was an initiation into life. Today the very same training cannot achieve the same results. Little Mark, for instance, is exposed to half a dozen different philosophies . His grandfather expounds, with some modifications, the values of the past. His father tries to impart to the boy his own s m a l l t o w n 228 defiant individualism and his love of machinery. In our home he encounters middle...