The Country School.

Levin Daily Chronicle, 15 August 1918, Page 2

The Country School.

Mr F. L. Combs, the educational reformer, ill a recent address, made special reference to the small country school. A very large proportion of our children were educated in these schools and of all the drawbacks suffered by denizens of the backblocks they were perhaps the greatest. The reasons lay on the surface. The emoluments of the teacher were as a rule less tlian those of the roadman. Xo one, for reasons one could admit to be valid wished to give him or her board, but it was even more disagreeable to have to accept board reluctantly proffered than to give it. AVere there a. school residence it was, as a rule, an old building out of all comparison inferior to the up-to-date farm homestead. The land attached to this residence had often the dimensions of a town back yard. It was impossible to keep a cow or a horse or a few sheep 011 it.. Yet unless the teacher could provide his own. meat, milk and transport, 110 one else wanted the bother of catering for him. The teacher, therefore, whose habits and previous environment made a country life exceptionally uncongenial to him found himself deprived of those conveniences and resources which alone made rural existence tolerable to those brought, up to it. What was the resulti ? The country teacher was a bird of passage and some of these little schools suffered from an annual cha. nge of teacher. He used the word "suffered" advisedly. When the mutual sympathies of child and teacher had taken fast hold of each other tliere was a bond of intimacy and comprehension to dissever which by the teacher's departure caused as severe a check to the child's mental development as the uprooting of an oak tree did to flie tree foliage. A country child under the tutelage of five, teachers (and tyro teachers at that) made five false starts in the learning process, often in as many years. No wonder he became baffled and disheartened and disappeared into the cow byre somewhere between Standards 4 and 6. Moreover, not only was the country child getting too many teachers ; he was receiving only the second choice. For a town vacancy there were always from 20 to 30 applications; in the country as .a, rule -J or 4 and sometimes not even one.

The remedy, was obvious. Give tile country teaclier identity with the rural locality to which he ministered. Train him .first in the theory and practice of husbandry in a lioilmal college attached to one of. our State farms. Next, on sending him into the country, give' him a small farm of his own— in other words attach to a modern and sizeable house, a glebe of from ten (bo twenty acres. ' This farm would serve a dual purpose, (a) that of providing milk, etc., not 'easily procurable elsewhere; (b) that of a working model for t'lie rural instruction course.

One further reform, and the country teacher, instead of being an unstable animal would be transformed into a sturdy lifer. Admitting that the teacher of 30 children had >.i more important duty than the master of 900 sheep, give him an income something approaching an equivalent of that of the comfortable farmer. Of the outcome of such reforms he would speak with confidence. Good men would go into these simall schools and, saving for the refresher courses, as urgently needed by our teachers as by our Army officers, would spend a life time of _ usefulness—a Usefulness of activity and influence increasing at compound interest rates among the children and adults of their chosen community. So little, however, did the possibilities of such a proposal appeal to the Department that when a Board recently acquired «i site of 14" acres for a school, the Director cut the -site down to three acres. Clearly the Director had little insight into country conditions.