Progressive Farmer Recommends Consolidated Schools, July 24, 1924

Being Educated—Or “Exposed to an Education”?

The Progressive Farmer

The most important need of most rural school is further consolidation. Certainly we can never hope to get effective teaching in schools where one teacher handles (or tries to handle) everybody from the first to the seventh grades. Such a teacher is just as badly overcropped as the one man would be if he tried to cultivate 80 acres of cotton without any one person, young or old, to help him. He might give a few acres “a lick and a promise,” but he could not keep down the grass nor save the crop from general failure. Neither can a teacher save a crop of boys and girls from failure when each class only gets “a lick and a promise.”

In the old days when a man’s speed was limited to that of a horse’s legs, school consolidation could not wisely go far. The coming of the “school truck,” however, has changed all that. And now when one teacher can give all her time and thought to helping children in one grade (instead of dividing her time and thought to helping children among seven grades) children are really making progress and getting somewhere. They are really getting educated instead of being merely “exposed to an education”—which is about the best that could be claimed for the old-fashioned one teacher school. the children were “exposed to an education--but in most cases, it “didn’t take!”

From The Progressive Farmers, as reprinted on page 4 of the Harnett County News, Lillington, N.C., Thursday, July 24, 1924.

newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/sn84006598/1924-07-24/ed-1/seq-4/