There has been many an argument presented in favor of consolidated rural schools for the children's sake. One might be given for the teachers sake. A consolidated school gives them a chance to come in contact with other adults, a bit of the noon hour and recess. In the one room schools, the teacher is all day, long under pressure, with the children making constant demands on work, resourcefulness, and patience. It must be lonely for many a day for these teachers, and I have never found one who did not welcome an interested visitor at any time of day.
Following a resolve to visit our school every month this year, the boys and I went down on Friday afternoon at the end of the third week of the session, taking Ruth's birthday cake with us for a surprise. We are proud of our school, even if it is a little old one-room building. It is shiny white with new paint, and it stands in a big grassy yard, in a group of maple trees, so big that the two largest children in school can't reach around some of them. Our children are the third generation of the family to "get their learnin'" in the same old building.
Gave the Place a Cleaning
Three weeks ago, the neighbors got together, one morning when no one could thresh and gave the place a rousing cleaning, while the women scrubbed and polished the men mowed the lawn and trimmed the trees, and after our picnic dinner in the shitty yard we left it immaculate with that delicious soapy water, clean smell that is sweeter to a woman in house cleaning season then all the perfumes of Arabia.
We left it immaculate but very very bare. When we went down Friday we were surprised at the difference three weeks had made. The school was a busy live community; a regular hive of activity. Tinted tissue paper curtains at the windows and bright color "busy work" of the beginners cheered and adorned the room. The row of wraps near the door, the shelf of shining dinner pails, the row of towels and cups near the water cooler and basin. All gave evidence of friendly habitation. Most striking of all was the new sand table at the center front of the room.
Arrived at Recess
We arrived just as school was dismissed for recess, recess, and at once all the nine pupils dashed up to call my attention to this new play thing and the things they have done with it. It was divided by a cardboard partition into two equal parts. In one, the girls had built a park, and in the other the boys had laid out a farm. Even the seventh graders were bubbling over with naïve delight in the achievement. Everything was complete in miniature; swings, tables, benches in a fountain in the park, paper buildings and fences in the farm. There was even a pretentious cardboard entrance gate to the park in a large pebble monument memorial to the soldier boys. The boys had some wheat growing in their farm, it stood almost 7 inches high, spindly, and pale, but still growing and green, towering far above the windmill. Next week they are going to tear up the park in the farm and set up a village. Everyone has his special buildings to do, and there is a fine feeling of cooperation. It set me wondering, seeing them so thrilled with what many folks would call a babies toy, whether we are starving our rural children on the equipment question.
There is nothing at all at our school (and it is not much different from others, hereabouts) which could be listed as a playground equipment except a ball and a bat and a tennis racket. Of course that provides amply for scrub baseball and Andy- I-over, the two standbys of country school since ancient times, and the tennis racket introduces a more modern diversion, perhaps peculiar to our own school, known as "battle up flies".
Lack amusement equipment
Then there are the many games which need no equipment – cheese-it, hide and seek, tag, and so on. And for muscular practice there is the fence to walk when teacher is busy. But it does not mean that a little simple inexpensive equipment might not add considerably to their joy of play, as well as give the children more well-rounded, muscular exercise, than walking to school and doing chores can do. A swing or two, a teeter board, and a slide would be in reach of most districts means.
Where country schools are reasonably large, parent teacher associations are thoroughly worthwhile. Last year we had only three families represented in the school, and we contented ourselves with meeting at programs at the school on Thanksgiving and Christmas, the official school meeting in April, and the cleaning day in the fall. But we have quite a group of youngsters coming on, so that in a year or two we will have quite a school, and we hope by then to have a regularly organized association. If it seems we have too many organizations already we can at least plan to meet in the school for special occasions to show the teacher in the children that we are all cooperating – Hope