Education.
Education in many forms--vocational training, agricultural extension, product and equipment training, business conferences, craft apprenticeships, for instance--is important for the country economy, country culture, and agriculture. It is difficult, though, to avoid the impression that American society does not think education is central to country living in the same way education is central, it believes, to urban life and industrial occupations, service jobs, and professional careers. Surely, this is a mistake. If country living as we have defined it (residing on the land and making a living from the land) is a distinctive culture--and country people believe it is--then education is central to its existence. Education is needed to teach the culture, recruit newcomers to country life, prepare the ground for cultural innovation, and pass the culture to the next generation.
Tick eradication educational film, Florida, 1941. USDA Historical Photos.
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Since the late nineteenth century, agricultural experts have promoted education as a remedy for the ills of small family farming. The farmer was criticized for having inadequate scientific knowledge of farming and inadequate business know-how to organize with other farmers and to market successfully. A library of classic books on America's farming problems, such as Liberty Hyde Bailey's The Country-Life Movement (1911), pointed to the need for education.
The farm wife, managing the home and a kitchen garden, raising children, cooking for hired hands, and helping the men in the field and barn, was criticized for her inadequate knowledge of home-making techniques, for inefficiency, for lack of thrift. The Cornell University library on-line collection of books on home economics provides numerous historical titles devoted to farm home-making. Farm extension programs often targeted women, teaching everything from household budgets to sanitation to nutrition to cooking techniques.
None of these historical needs for education have disappeared; but they have been ameliorated. Surely the farmers of today, whatever their ages, are better educated than their forebears. Educational needs exist, but they have shifted. The complexity of modern living, the scientific innovations in farming, federal and state governmental tax rules, farming regulations, and rural aid programs, and international trade regulations have added to the need for continuing education.
Preparing lunch in the school room, Franklin County, Massachusetts, 1938. USDA Historical Photo.
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Advocates of consolidated schools argue that rural schools are too small to be effective institutions of learning. What evidence do we have for this claim? Little. Increasingly, parents are rejecting large, consolidated schools by enrolling their children in small, private schools. Rural public schools can be just as effective as private schools.
Advocates of country living need to formalize the educational values of country living. Educational programs need to be articulated and integrated into existing schools.
Certain programs should be present:
- local country elementary schools, with country life appreciation courses
- agricultural and country economy curricula in secondary schools, with country life appreciation courses
- agriculture, agricultural business, and country economy curricula in community college
- vocational training appropriate to agriculture and country economy in community college
- apprenticeship and internship programs to place students on farms and in country enterprises beginning at the secondary education level
- student exchange with agricultural schools and rural schools in other countries to broaden student experience with farming and country businesses
- certificate programs in continuing education and extension programs for expansion of agricultural and country skills
- on-line instructional courses for specific farming and country job skills
Agricultural four-year colleges remain important, but they are not present in most farming counties. The community and technical colleges are likely to be the key institutions of higher education in local areas.
Closed historic school and hall, now rented for public functions, Shasta County, California.
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Country schools must be kept open. The consolidation of country schools and long-distance bussing of rural children to towns demoralizes rural families. Lack of public country schools inhibits young families from moving into the country. Closing country schools tears apart the culture of the countryside. It is a direct statement by government that maintenance of a central institution in country life is not an important priority. It deprives schools of the opportunity to tailor their instruction to country life. A chance to build knowledge of and respect for country life in school children is lost. Standardized curricula set children on paths of learning that ignore country life and farming. Generations of children are taught there is no future for them in the countryside. Devising social arrangements to preserve country schools is crucial to preserving the culture of country life and to retaining young families in the countryside.
Educational curricula should involve regional countryside identity. The national movement of standardization of curriculum content and standards has made it more difficult to tailor local school instruction to regional needs. Local and state history is relegated to a few subjects usually taught in a year or so in the lower grades. This amount of attention is not adequate to promote regional countryside identity.
Country life is identified with the regional land and climate, its natural inhabitants, its peoples and their history and their cultures. The relation of natural ecology, people, history, settlement, and culture to the land is crucial educational content and should be taught at the upper grades, as well as lower grades, in country public schools.
Countryside identity.
There is a popular inclination today to believe mobility and popular culture have obliterated the significance of local culture and history; this is scientifically a mistake. If it were true, then culture would not exist at all, independently of fashion. The patterns of society and culture that we see exhibited today are overlaid on historical patterns that they hide, but which nonetheless determine their shape and form.
Religion, class, racial, and ethnic relations in marriage and work, law, electoral parties and government, property relations, patterns of disease and health--these and many other historical patterns of human culture determine the way we live today. Newcomers to a region fall into these patterns unconsciously. Their heads are filled with the commotion of popular news, popular fashion and culture, and moment-to-moment concerns of living; this mental noise deceives them into thinking that how they live and the patterns of interactions with their new neighbors are not indebted to history. They are mistaken. Four examples should prove this point. Scottish and Irish folk culture of the Appalachian mountains dating from settlement in the eighteenth and nineteen centuries is the source of much popular folk music today. The existence of African slavery affects how Blacks and whites treat each other. The Civil War between Southern slave states and Northern free states affects economic and political relations between the nation's sections. The United States Constitution, written and adopted over 200 years ago, still breathes through every law with which Americans interact every day.
Each countryside should have a local museum, with departments of history, anthropology, and natural history. The local museum should be the center for collection, exhibition, and interpretation of regional history and culture. It would naturally become the locus of public efforts to celebrate and promote local culture. The museum should conduct surveys, collect local history information, archives, memorabilia, and photographs. It provides information and resources as content for local school courses.
The ethnographic study of folk culture in southern West Virginia, conducted in the 1990s and now housed at the Library of Congress and available on-line, is a wonderful example of local historical preservation.
The museum should conduct an on-going oral history program, interviewing local notables and families and compiling information about settlers, their enterprises, and the events that made the countryside what it is.
The local museum also serves as the center of on-going historical preservation efforts. It's staff could write the EIR reports for county and town government review of land development issues.
The museum, with volunteers, should conduct a historical inventory of the countryside and its villages. Every historical structure, including roads, historic farming areas, homes of old families, and so on, should be documented.
Local history and natural history marker programs should be initiated. Simple markers noticing and commemorating local historical structures and places and events, and natural history points, should be placed. Extensive information can be printed on descriptive brochures to be available at the local museum and commercial and hotel establishments.
The museum and preservation programs will be informative for residents, as well as for visitors. The programs will foster local pride and contribute to local country culture.
There is an inevitable expectation that rural areas do not have the money to create and support a museum, or to start preservation and education programs. The refrain will go ... there are so many needs, from roads to schools to job formation, and we don't have enough for even these. This is a debatable belief. A museum can be started modestly in a small donated room with volunteers and a donated exhibit case. Professional staff can be added through federal and state grants. Programs can be created with grant from philanthropies and federal matching funds. Other localities have done it, against all odds; all can do so.
Contents
A Theory of Rural Life
1. What is Country Living?
2. Social-Economic Classes.
3. Conditions for Successful Production.
4 pt. 1. Land-Use Stability.
4 pt. 2. Landscape Preservation.
5. Country Living Values.
6. What Are Values?
7. A Home Place.
8. Education and Identity.
9. Marketing the Countryside.
10. Conclusions and Recommendations.
(Revised, April 8, 9, 10, 11, 2007; August 29, 2007--I removed a link to an oral history recording that would not allow the page to load.)
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