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Journal of Interdisciplinary History 31.4 (2001) 662-664



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Book Review

There Goes the Neighborhood:
Rural School Consolidation at the Grass Roots in Early Twentieth-Century Iowa


There Goes the Neighborhood: Rural School Consolidation at the Grass Roots in Early Twentieth-Century Iowa. By David R. Reynolds (Iowa City, Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 1999) 306 pp., $39.95 cloth.

A glance at the bibliography in Reynolds' study of rural school consolidation in Iowa between 1900 and 1920 indicates how important his book is. Few historians have given serious attention to this movement; even fewer have done so without portraying school consolidation as a [End Page 662] natural, inevitable process led by progressive educators and reformers and resisted by narrow-minded, tight-fisted farmers.

Reynolds offers an alternative view that contradicts the idea that consolidation was inevitable or desirable. He concludes that consolidation was an abysmal failure, laying the blame at the feet of progressive reformers and experts who uncritically and arrogantly pressed this movement forward (234). Reynolds challenges the notion that resistance to school consolidation was an anachronistic localism, the result of parsimonious, ill-informed farmers who cared little about education or improving their schools (5). He argues that opposition to consolidation emerged from the complex and nuanced nature of rural society and family relationships, religion, the economics of agriculture, spatial distributions, community dynamics, and rural social structures all shaped views about school consolidation.

Reynolds identifies Populism's demise in the 1896 election as the turning point that opened the way for progressive reformers to push for rural school reform. A new group of educational experts and Country Life reformers promised to revitalize rural communities by replacing thousands of one-room ungraded rural schools they considered inefficient, poorly maintained, and ill-taught with larger graded community schools. In spite of increasingly stringent laws that ratcheted up the pressure on one-room schools, reformer's efforts fell far short of what they envisioned. When the push for consolidation in Iowa faltered following World War I, only 20 percent of rural students attended a consolidated school--a statistic that changed little until after World War II.

In Reynolds' opinion, reformers never appreciated the critical link between school and community. Reformers pushed only for larger institutions, thus ensuring that wider options would not be examined. By completely discounting the one-room school, reformers guaranteed a continuing resistance to consolidation that they never understood and never overcame. This lack of understanding, coupled with a sense of impending loss that galvanized local farmers, explained why the consolidation movement failed to meet its goals during the early decades of the twentieth century.

Reynolds' perspective as a geographer moves this study beyond the narrow interpretations provided by traditional educational histories. By paying attention to the importance of place, Reynolds touches on a central component of rural life. Distance, space, and natural boundaries molded rural communities which, in turn, shaped resistance to school consolidation. These physical dimensions give this work explanatory power precisely because they are such important facets of rural life.

The book's few shortcomings are not central to the thesis. Descriptions of the various levels of economic dependence are wooden and oversimplified. For example, the discussion of tenants and landlords ignores the influence of ethnicity and family and relies too heavily on economic categories. Marxist frameworks like Reynolds' have always fit [End Page 663] awkwardly within discussions of rural agriculturally based communities. Also, in his case studies, Reynolds portrays situations that seem overdrawn and stereotypical. Maybe all communities were like Buck Creek, and progressive ministers like Gilbert J. Chalice were ubiquitous but probably not.

This book not only explains an era in educational reform efforts; it also broadens our understanding of the rural midwest and of the relationship among progressive reformers, small towns, and farmers. It is a story of reformers who had total faith in their cause and of farm families who sought to preserve a critical part of their lives. Running throughout this book is the question of rural values and rural...

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