Rural Education

This work examines the main economic trends affecting rural areas today and the types of local programs that are being implemented in response. The lessening of federal government involvement since the Reagan administration has shifted the public policy focus, placing greater responsibility for economic development on local governments. With more states encountering financial austerity, even greater requirements for economic development activities will rest with local governments--especially in rural areas. The long-term effects of these developments on states and localities are analyzed, and suggestions are made for economic development initiatives that local governments can undertake.

"A timely & important book for those seeking to move beyond the numbing instrumentalism that dominates the current discourse on the purposes of education in our time.... Educators -rural, urban, & suburban-in search of direction for renewal & hope for the future of public education will find it here." Don Ernst Director of Government Relations, Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development "The best analysis of what has gone wrong in the countryside & what might be done to save it since Wendell Berry's The Unsettling of America." Paul Gruchow Author of The Necessity of Empty Places & Grass Roots: The Universe of Home

In this well-researched and absorbing account, Paul Theobald chronicles the history of the one-room country schools that were spread throughout the rural Midwest during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Focusing on the region's educational history in light of the religious, economic, and political atmosphere, Theobald explores the tight connection between educational preferences and religious views, between the economics of the countryside and the educational experiences of children, and between the politics of local power and the educational prospects of the powerless. Basing his study on extensive archival research, including findings from eight midwestern states - Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, Iowa, Nebraska, Minnesota, North Dakota, and South Dakota - Theobald neither condemns nor lauds the one-room school experience. Providing an objective evaluation, he examines rural school records, correspondence of early school officers, contemporary texts, and diaries and letters of rural students and teachers. As he weaves together a contextualized account of the circumstances surrounding and within the one-room country schools of the Midwest, Theobald stresses that religion was of primary importance in nineteenth-century American life. Yet he also looks carefully at the shifting economic environment at work in the countryside, particularly in regard to the development of widespread farm tenancy and the consolidation of agricultural and related industries. He challenges readers to analyze how a national move from an agrarian to an industrial view caused conflict and confusion, thereby introducing irrevocable change into rural American life.

Small isolated country schools were the major educational institution in rural America for more than two hundred fifty years until they were replaced by consolidated schools by the second half of the twentieth century. Country School Memories uses the techniques of oral history to capture the insights of forty-seven individuals who had participated in the one-room school experience as teachers or students during the period from 1900-1955. Beginning with an overview of rural education during the twentieth century, the authors analyze the distinctive pedagogy of rural schoolteachers, the character of the teachers, and the culture of the schools. They discuss the school consolidation movement that ended the reign of one-room schoolhouses and draw conclusions about lessons that can be learned by contemporary educators from old-time schools.