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The Myth of Agrarianism in Rural Educational Reform, 1890–1914∗

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Ann M. Keppel
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Extract

In 1888 a Midwestern school official remarked, “I find people everywhere interested in a general way in schools but too much absorbed in other matters to give them much time or thought.” This candid appraisal, near the turn of the nineteenth century, was particularly applicable to the attitudes of Americans toward their rural schools. Staffed by poorly qualified and even more poorly paid teachers who came and went, given but minimal support by parents as token acceptance of the need for some sort of an education, the rural school was all too frequently a “hopelessly gloomy and forbidding” place where little of interest to farm children was taught.

Type
Research Article
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 2 , Issue 2 , June 1962 , pp. 100 - 112
Copyright
Copyright © 1962, University of Pittsburgh Press 

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References

Notes

1. Report of the Superintendent of Schools, Clark County, Wisconsin, in the Biennial Report of the State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Wisconsin (1888), 133.Google Scholar

2. Quotation from the Grange column in Farm and Fireside (January 15, 1901), 11.Google Scholar

3. Illuminating contemporary comments on rural schools in Hamlin Garland, Son of the Middle Border (New York, 1917), 115, 144–5, 298; James P. Slade, “Country Schools,” Education (January 1882), 234–236 and Belle Cushman Bohn, “Early Wisconsin Teachers,” Wisconsin Magazine of History (September, 1939), 58–61. See also Louis B. Wright, Culture on the Moving Frontier (Bloomington, Indiana, 1955), passim.; Fred A. Shannon, The Farmer's Last Frontier, Agriculture, 1860–1897 (New York, 1945), 372–376; Merle Curti, The Making of An American Community, A Case Study of Democracy in a Frontier Community (Stanford, 1958), 381–3.Google Scholar

4. Report of the Committee on Industrial Education in Schools for Rural Communities, published by the National Education Association (1905), 14.Google Scholar

5. In reports of the state educational officers, statistics were not yet broken down into urban and rural categories. The elementary schools in the nation were the common schools. The National Education Association had no rural department in 1900 although it did have—among others—departments of science education, business education, and education of the deaf, dumb, blind, and feeble-minded; see table of contents of the National Education Association Journal of Proceedings and Addresses (1901).Google Scholar

6. Progress in various states noted in Report of the United States Commissioner of Education, 1903, 1:466 ff., and Ibid. (1910), 1:257–77. Liberty Hyde Bailey, “On the Training of Persons to Teach Agriculture in the Public Schools,” United States Bureau of Education, Bulletin No. 17 (Washington, 1907) and Ernest Burnham, “Teacher Preparation in the Normal Schools,” Ibid., Bulletin No. 27 (Washington, 1918) contain good summaries. List of petitioners and action taken on request for a rural department in NEA Journal of Proceedings (Washington, 1907), 44–45. One of earliest indications of interest in rural schools within the United States Bureau of Education in A. E. Monahan, “Rural Education,” Report, U. S. Commissioner of Education 1912, 1:181 ff.Google Scholar

7. Quotation from speech by Hoard, at meeting of the Country Life Commission held in Madison reported in Wisconsin State Journal (Madison, Wisconsin, December 12, 1908).Google Scholar

8. General history of the club movement in Reck, Franklin M., The 4-H Club Story, A History of 4-H Club Work (Ames, Iowa, 1951) and Dick J. Crosby, “Boys' Agricultural Clubs,” Yearbook of the United States Department of Agriculture (Washington, 1904), 484–96.Google Scholar

9. Twelfth Census of the United States: 1900, Statistical Atlas (Washington, 1903), 40. In 1890, one-third of the total increase in population was rural, according to the Eleventh Census, 1890. House Miscellaneous Document No. 340, part 18, lxix.Google Scholar

10. This is an attempt to elaborate more fully one of the contradictions of the progressive movement in education merely noted by Cremin, Lawrence A., The Transformation of the School, Progressivism in American Education, 1876–1957 (New York, 1961), 88.Google Scholar

11. European backgrounds of the myth of agrarianism in two articles by Johnstone, Paul, “In Praise of Husbandry,” Agricultural History (April, 1937), 80–95 and “Turnips and Romanticism,” Ibid. (July, 1938), 224–55. Johnstone explored the role of the myth in farm attitudes in “Old Ideals Versus New Ideas in Farm Life,” An Historical Survey of American Agriculture, Yearbook Separate No. 1783 extracted from U. S. D. A. Yrbk. (Washington, 1940), 114–70. Whitney Griswold's, A. Farming and Democracy (New Haven, 1952), deals with the importance of this image of the freeholder in the shaping of public policy.Google Scholar

12. For biographies of Bailey see Dorf, Philip, Liberty Hyde Bailey, An Informal Biography (Ithaca, 1956), and Andrew Denny Rodgers, III, Liberty Hyde Bailey, (Princeton, 1940). Brief description of Bailey's contribution in George H. M. Lawrence, “Liberty Hyde Bailey, 1858–1954, An Appreciation,” Baileya (March, 1955). But the fullness of Bailey's ideas is evident in such volumes as The Nature Study Idea (New York, 1903); The Outlook to Nature (New York, 1905); The Training of Farmers, (New York, 1909); The State and the Farmer (New York, 1908); The Country Life Movement in the United States (New York, 1911); The Holy Earth (New York, 1915); Universal Service (Ithaca, 1919); The Harvest of the Year to the Tiller of the Soil (New York, 1927).Google Scholar

13. Bailey, , The Country Life Movement, 19–20.Google Scholar

14. Bailey, , The Holy Earth, 32–33.Google Scholar

15. Bailey, , “The Outlook for Agricultural Teaching,” The Cornell Countryman (December, 1903), 1:3.Google Scholar

16. Quoted by Dorf, , Liberty Hyde Bailey, 112. Bailey firmly believed that agriculture, as a subject, would never replace nature study, but it was important to him that the spirit of nature study be retained whatever it might be called. As he wrote: “It matters less what the material of nature study is in any school, than what its modes and intentions are….” Bailey, ed., Cyclopedia of Agriculture in 4 vols. (New York, 1909), 4:468 in article entitled “Education By Means of Nature Study.”Google Scholar

17. Bailey, , The Nature Study Idea, passim. Google Scholar

18. Bailey, , The Harvest, 15.Google Scholar

19. Journal of Proceedings of the National Grange, the Patrons of Husbandry, 1896, 140–41.Google Scholar

20. Ibid., 1902, 242–43, 246.Google Scholar

21. Wisconsin Dairyman's Association Annual Report, 1900, 185; Ibid., 1901, 182; Ibid., 1902, 190.Google Scholar

22. From group discussion recorded in the Annual Report of the Illinois Farmers' Institute, 1903, 183.Google Scholar

23. Quotation from Annual Report of the North Dakota Farmers' Institute, 1907, 175–6.Google Scholar

24. Journal of Proceedings of the Ohio State Grange, 1893, 49 in the report of the education committee; Herbert Gedney in Annual Report of the New York State Agricultural Society, 1894, 99.Google Scholar

25. Moore, Professor R. A., Transactions of the Wisconsin Agricultural Society, 1896, 99.Google Scholar

26. Annual Report of the North Dakota Farmers' Institute, 1900, 174.Google Scholar

27. Mrs.Tilson, Ida, Bulletin of the Wisconsin Farmers' Institute, 1902, 68.Google Scholar

28. Felmly, David Dr., “Agriculture in the Schools,” Annual Report of the Illinois Farmers' Institute, 1907, 111.Google Scholar

29. Shideler, James H., Farm Crisis: 1919–1923 (Berkeley, 1957), 1–7; McConnell, Grant, The Decline of Agrarian Democracy (Berkeley, 1953), 10–12; Fisher Wilson, Harold, The Hill Country of Northern New England, Its Social and Economic History, 1790–1930 (New York, 1936), 259–262.Google Scholar

30. True, Alfred M., “Agricultural Education in the United States,” U. S. D. A. Yrbk., 1899, 166 ff.; See also Shannon, Farmer's Last Frontier, 272–290.Google Scholar

31. There is no biography of Kern or Graham. For brief sketch of Kern's life, see Carney, Mabel, “The Service of O. J. Kern to Rural Education,” NEA J1. of Proceed., 1931, 523–24. The best source of information describing his work in his own Annual Reports as Superintendent of Schools in Winnebago County, Illinois, available in the library of the University of Illinois. Also important is his Among Country Schools (New York, 1906), which contains not only a summary of his own program and ideas but a survey of existing conditions in rural education. The work of Graham as well as that of Kern described in Reck, 4-H Club Story, 12–20. See also A. B. Graham, “Boys' and Girls' Agricultural Clubs,” Agricultural History (April, 1941), 65–68.Google Scholar

32. Field, Jessie, The Corn Lady (Chicago, 1911), 58–59.Google Scholar

33. The best material relating to each man's ideas on education can be found in Wallace's Farmer (Des Moines, Iowa), and Hoard's Dairyman, (Ft. Atkinson, Wisconsin) between 1895 and 1915. For Wallace, see Lord, Russell, The Wallaces of Iowa (New York, 1947), a biography dealing with several members of this distinguished family; Henry Wallace's Own Story of His Life, 3 vols. (Des Moines, 1917) and Dictionary of American Biography, 19:369–70. For biographical data on Hoard, see Ibid., 9:90–91 and a laudatory biography by William Rankin, George, William Dempster Hoard (Fort Atkinson, 1925) which, incidentally, is dedicated to “every man who walks in the footsteps of the dairy cow”Google Scholar

34. Reck, , 4-H Club Story. 44–45.Google Scholar

35. Quotation from Erickson, Theodore, My Sixty Years With Rural Youth (Minneapolis, 1956), 5.Google Scholar

36. Letter from Graham describing his club work quoted in Price, Homer C., “Agricultural Clubs in Rural Schools,” Ohio State University Bulletin, Series 8 No. 10 (March, 1904), 11.Google Scholar

37. Jasper Kern, Ollie, “A New Kind of Country School,” World's Work (September, 1908), 10722.Google Scholar

38. Kern, , “Educational Possibilities for the Country Child in the United States,” NEA J1. of Proceed., 1904, 94.Google Scholar