New Ideals in Rural Schools | Page 9

its function in the same narrow
light; for it is controlled very completely by its patrons, and a stream
cannot rise higher than its source.
Because of its isolation, the pressing insistence of its toil, and the
monotony of its environment, the rural community is in constant
danger of intellectual and social stagnation. It has far more need that its
school shall be a stimulating, organizing, socializing force than has the
town or city. For the city has a dozen social centres entirely outside the
school: its public parks, theatres, clubs, churches, and streets, even,
serve to stimulate, entertain, and educate. But the rural community is
wanting in all these social forces; it is lacking in both intellectual and
social stimulus and variety.
One of the most pressing needs of country districts is a common
neighborhood center for both young and old, which shall stand as an

organizing, welding, vitalizing force, uniting the community on a basis
of common interests and activities. For while, as we have seen, the
rural population as a whole are markedly homogeneous, there is after
all but little of common acquaintanceship and mingling among them.
Thousands of rural families live lives of almost complete social
isolation and lack of contact with neighbors.
This condition is one of the gravest drawbacks to farm life. The social
impulse and the natural desire for recreation and amusement are as
strong in country boys and girls as in their city cousins, yet the country
offers young people few opportunities for satisfying these impulses and
desires. The normal social tendencies of youth are altogether too strong
to be crushed out by repression; they are too valuable to be neglected;
and they are too dangerous to be left to take their own course wholly
unguided. The rural community can never hope to hold its boys and
girls permanently to the life of the farm until it has recognized the
necessity for providing for the expression and development of the
spontaneous social impulses of youth.
Furthermore, the social monotony and lack of variety of the rural
community is a grave moral danger to its young people. It is a common
impression that the great city is strewn thick with snares and pitfalls
threatening to morals, but that the country is free from such temptations.
The public dance halls and cheap theaters of the city are beyond doubt
a great and constant menace to youthful ideals and purity. But the
country, going to the opposite extreme, with its almost utter lack of
recreation and amusement places, offers temptations no less insidious
and fatal.
The great difficulty at this point is that young people in rural
communities are thrown together almost wholly in isolated pairs
instead of in social groups; and that there are no objective resources of
amusement or entertainment to claim their interest and attention away
from themselves. They are freed from all chaperonage and the restraints
of the conventions obtaining in social groups at the very time in their
lives when these are most needed as steadying and controlling forces.
The result is that the country districts, which ought to be of all places in

the world the freest from temptation and peril to the morals of our
young people, are really more dangerous than the cities. The sequel is
found in the fact that a larger proportion of country girls than of city
girls go astray. Nor is the rural community more successful in the
morals of its boys than its girls. In other words, the lack of
opportunities for free and normal social experience, the consequent
ignorance of social conventions, and the absence of healthful
amusement and recreation, make the rural community a most unsafe
place in which to rear a family.
But the necessity for social recreation and amusement does not apply to
the young people alone. Their fathers and mothers are suffering from
the same limitations, though of course with entirely different results.
The danger here is that of premature aging and stagnation. While the
toil of the city worker is relieved by change and variety, his mind rested
and his mood enlivened by the stimulus from many lines of diversion,
the lives of the dwellers on the farm are constantly threatened by a
deadly sameness and monotony.
The indisputable tendency of farmers and their wives to age so rapidly,
and so early to fall into the ranks of "fogyism," is due far more to lack
of variety and recreation and to dearth of intellectual stimulus than to
hard labor, severe as this often is. Age is more than the flight of the
years, the stoop of the form, or the hardening of the arteries; it is also
the atrophy of the intellect and the fading away of the emotions
resulting from disuse. The farmer needs occasionally to have