Education: Consolidated Schools

The one-room school is rapidly disappearing. Citizens in every State of the Union have been aware of the change. They have seen the little white (or, by tradition, red) buildings at the cross-roads falling into decay; they have seen larger brick buildings replacing them at central points; and they have met buses on the hard roads conveying pupils from considerable distances to the new seats of instruction. But few have known that it was a nation-wide affair, few have known that it had a long history behind it.

Bulletin No. 41 (1923) of the Bureau of Education of the Department of the Interior at Washington tells the story with charts and statistics. It is entitled Consolidation of Schools and Transportation of Pupils, and its author is J. F. Abel, Assistant in Rural Education.

The problem of rural education is difficult, in view of the fact that the 18,000,000 young people between the ages of 5 and 20 are scattered over an immense territory under extremely varied social and physical conditions. Two years ago one-fourth of the rural pupils in the U. S. attended one-room schools, which numbered 187,951. The aim of educators now—local, town, county, state and national—is to decrease that number, and to increase the number of institutions like the following, which Mr Abel gives as typical:

"A school located at or near the center of a natural community, the resultant of a combination of a number of smaller schools each of which has given up its identity as an administrative school unit, maintaining full-grade and high-school courses. Offering a diversified curriculum, housed in a modern plant equipped for giving effectively the courses offered, transporting to and from school by safe and sanitary methods the pupils that live too far from the school building to walk, a,nd functioning as a center for community activities."

The weaknesses of the one-room school are numerous, including "the difficulty of proper grading, the limited time that can be given each class or grade, the limited social experience and the lack of incentive in the small groups."

Mr. Abel finds five financial advantages in consolidation. 1) It "serves to concentrate the school revenues of a given area at one or a few points." 2) It "helps to distribute the burden of school taxation more equitably over the larger area." 3) It "offers the possibility of arranging better units for the apportionment of school funds." 4) "State and Federal aid for education can better be focused through the media of larger schools." 5) "In some cases it cost less to maintain the consolidated school than the one-room schools that were united to form it."

Readers of Mr. Abel's Bulletin will probably be surprised to learn that the idea of consolidation and transportation is 80 years old. But they will hardly be surprised to learn that New England, and particularly Massachusetts, generated the idea. The town, or township, was the first unit to displace the unsatisfactory "district." In New England, where the town was the unit of local control in all departments of life, districts were abolished as early as 1840; and in 1869 the first step towards community transportation of pupils was taken.