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FOUR Education in Middle America It was 1972, and Iowa had just implemented legislation to improve funding for rural school districts. Susan McAlister, a junior in high school that year, was contemplating her future. The country school she had attended through eighth grade was like a second home. The twenty farm families who lived nearby gathered monthly for fried chicken and homemade pie. The men played cards by the old pot-bellied stove while the women made quilts. The economy in northwest Iowa was suffering. Corn and cattle prices were low, and fuel and fertilizer costs were high. Susan remembers her parents didn’t say much about the hard times. “They never made me feel like we were poor, but we did eat tons of bologna when I was a kid.” Education in their small rural community could easily have been a casualty of the economy. But contributions from the state supplemented declining local tax revenue. Susan did well in school, graduating near the top of her class. She especially loved her classes in history and politics. The students read Plato, Aristotle, and Kant. Another class examined Supreme Court decisions . It awakened her interest in law. Neither of Susan’s parents had gone to college, but they cherished education. Her mother states emphatically, “Education is a really, really big thing for me. Although I didn’t get to go to college, I wanted to go on.” Her father recalls serving for years on the school board. Susan says it was simply taken for granted that she and her brother would go to college. He went to the state university, majored in agriculture, and eventually returned to the farm. She decided in high school that the rural life was not for her. “I’d read too many books and was looking for my knight in shining armor,” she says. “I’d already dated all the boys that I was interested in during high school. I was looking for something more interesting. I was ready to move on, see what was out there, what opportunities there were.” Passing up advice to attend a small college more like her high school, she opted for a large university, a “snob” school, where she could pursue her interests in history and politics. Her parents, gambling that crop and cattle prices would increase, let her go. She wound up majoring in journalism (“a marketable degree”), worked for several years in broadcasting, got married, and went to law school. Today she is a successful attorney in Houston. Education in Middle America | 93 But the transition from a small rural community to urban Texas left her deeply conflicted. Although she would make the same choices again, there is much she would like to have preserved. Her high school, she is convinced, was far better than the one her children would attend if she and her husband had not sent them to a private school. “I really miss family,” she says. “I love having a meal and then everybody sitting around for hours and doing things together.” She recalls Christmases with grandparents and cousins and weekend visits with aunts and uncles. “I loved the freedom of growing up on the farm. It is my kids’ misfortune that I can’t live there. You don’t know it until you move away.” After the 9/11 attacks, she thought for a while about moving back. The rural community seemed safe. People there were self-sufficient, but they also cared for one another. “Cities are terribly social in a superficial way,” she muses, “but not in a meaningful way.”1 Education fitting the needs and aspirations of its citizens was an important aspect of life in heartland states from the start. Country schools, private academies , public high schools, and colleges were founded in such numbers during the first few decades of the twentieth century that the region came to be known as the “education belt.” After World War II, state and county boards of education mounted a massive campaign to improve and consolidate public schools. Officials promoted education, technological improvements, and research as means of advancing their communities and the region. Colleges and universities throughout the Middle West expanded. Parents like the McAlisters encouraged their sons and daughters to attain higher levels of education than they themselves had achieved. Yet the question of how much to invest in education posed a quandary for families and community leaders alike. On the one hand, inexpensive, high-quality, universal secondary education and widely available...

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