CHAPTER IV

THE REORGANIZED CURRICULUM

What, then, shall be taught in the rural schools? Shall we desert the time-honored fundamentals of reading, writing and arithmetic? Shall we teach the child how to test seed-corn, judge stock, garden and make boxes, but leave him helpless in the matter of spelling, geography and history? Is there danger that we shall become so enamored of the new that we shall forget the old?

There are many earnest people who fear these very things. But their fears are founded on an imperfect unValuable in old derstanding of the spirit of the new conserved education. No one who is intelligently seeking to reorganize the rural-school curriculum is willing to let go the fundamentals of education, the tools of knowledge which all must have. On the contrary, one of the great aims of the new ideal of the curriculum is to vitalize and make more perfect and usable the "three R's"-to fortify the work of reading that it may mean much more to the learner than it has meant under the older plan; to make the subject of arithmetic a thousand times more practical and useful than it has ever been before, and to increase the efficiency in its operations, beyond what has obtained in the old type of schools. It is the purpose to put such interest into the matter of writ

ing that the child will desire to write well because he has something that he wants to write; and in the subject of geography to make its dry bones live because clothed with subject-matter of vital interest and importance.

The method by which this is to be done is by first of all changing the method of organization within the curricPoint of emphasis ulum-by changing the center of to be changed emphasis, in order that the matter to be learned may be approached more easily and naturally, and be related more closely to the life of the learner. Every one, old and young, knows from his experience, that we are more interested in the things that lie closest to our lives, the activities in our home, the occupation that claims our attention, the vocation that we mean ultimately to enter on, than we are in mere abstractions. For example, with what zeal one will study even a railway time-table if he is about to make a journey! And, those who are planning a trip to Europe enter on a mastery of its geography and history far more thorough than they would ever attain if studying them as an assigned task. The boy who needs to learn the new rules of the ball game does not require some one to compel him to get his lesson; the necessity of his interest compels him. The great thing, therefore, is to connect the work of the school so closely with the interests and activities of School interests the home, its work and its play, that related to home in- the incentives to study may be immediate and real. It is this immediate vital interest that saves the boy from becoming dull and disinterested, and the girl from becoming listless and inefficient in her work. Many a child has quit school before completing the course of study, not because he was compelled to stay out to work,

terests

but because interest failed, owing to the Yack of connection between his school work and his outside interests and activities. Many others have continued in school until they have obtained a smattering of what it had to teach, and later found little immediate use for what they had learned.

The aim, therefore, in reorganizing the rural school curriculum is to get a foundation of actual interest on which to build a mastery of the fundamentals of knowledge; and then to go on and add certain vital matter to the training of rural children which they have heretofore lacked. The purpose is to find in the daily lives and activities of the pupils the incentives that will lead to a better and more complete learning of the elementary branches, and in addition, so attach the pupils to the school and its work that they will desire to remain for a much more extended and helpful education than they are now receiving.

geneous

This fundamental basis of interest is easily found in the lives of the rural school pupils. For they all come Rural life homo- from homes founded on the same type of occupation, and interested in the same industrial problems. In the town or city school, the pupils represent ten or twenty different occupations; but in the rural school they represent only the one industry of agriculture with its supplemental occupations. The homes are agricultural homes, the interests on the vocational side are agricultural interests. Therefore what will appeal to one group of pupils as an incentive to effort will appeal to all the others of the same community. Knowledge or skill adapted to use on one farm, will be adapted to use on the other farms of the locality.

Core of new curriculum

These important facts make it possible to organize the curriculum of the rural school on a much more simple and practical basis than that of a town school. Nature study as related to the open country, agriculture adapted to the local needs and conditions, manual training of the type most related to the needs of the farm, home economics suited to the conditions of the farm home, these are the basis of the rural-school curriculum, the core around which the other subjects are to be grouped. In these will be found the sources of the interests and incentives that will lead to the mastery of the branches constituting the tools of education. It is not, therefore, that these latter branches are to be omitted or neglected; they are only to be set in their proper relation to the interests and experience of the pupil. Only those parts of the old subjects that should plainly give way to more useful material are to be supplanted by the new. Not annihilation, but reorganization is what is proposed.

What shall be the plan of the reorganized rural-school curriculum? How shall it differ from the old curricPlan of the new ulum on the one hand, and from the curriculum curriculum of town and city schools on the other? For it is clear that the old curriculum was faulty both in the meagerness of the material it offered, and the emphasis it put on the technical and theoretical as against the practical and concrete. And it is also evident that the curriculum best adapted for the city school is not the one for the rural school, where the interests and activities outside the school are entirely dif ferent.

While the interests related to the life and work of the farm or agriculture-nature study, stock raising, the

Vocational subjects alone not enough

practical handicrafts and domestic science-will constitute the basis of the curriculum, this does not mean that the work of the school is to be limited to these subjects. It rather signifies that they shall constitute the point of departure, the foundation of incentive, for the other studies. The country boy and girl can no more stop with these vocational subjects alone than the youth preparing for a trade can afford to study solely the mechanics of that trade without any knowledge of other things. It is to be remembered that the workers on the farm are men and women before they are farmers, and as such have a right to the help and inspiration that grow from a knowledge of the world's history, its literature, music and art; they demand and have a right to the broadening influence that comes from contact with the field of science and invention. In short, the men and women of the farm need as good an education as any other class of American citizens.

What, then, is to be the organization of the new curriculum? On what shall the child begin when he first enters school? How shall he proceed, and what shall he study from grade to grade?

ricula

Let us first answer in general, that under the reorganized curriculum the pupil will primarily study things, and only secondarily will he study Difference between old and new cur- books; and that he will actually do his lessons, in field or shop or home or garden, as well as sit at a desk and learn them. The new curriculum will change the point of emphasis from cramming the head with information, to applying the knowledge learned to one's actual life and work. For the only true way to learn a thing is to live it.