The Alumni Bulletin of the University of Virginia Volume . 3, 1-5 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1910 Excerpt: ...life; it tends to break up unsocial and anti-social tendencies. Its very erection is a form of cooperation, which makes easier other cooperative efforts. And it is proper to say here that unless the consolidated school tends to make the economic life of the community profitable, while it is raising the intellectual and moral life, it is failing to fulfill one of its chiefest missions. Country life must be made economically profitable, else the country districts will be depopulated. It is as much the duty of the educational department as it is of the agricultural department of the state to help make it economically profitable; and the consolidated school is the best center from which to accomplish this vital work. But to make country life economically profitable and yet to permit it to remain socially unattractive will not stop the movement from the country to the city. A consolidated school has in it, as already indicated, the possibility and the opportunity of making country life socially attractive, and it is its duty to meet the issue. This, then, is what we mean by a consolidated school. This is the ideal to which we look, however far we may be from it. The consolidated school must be a center from and through which to disseminate the best methods of home making and home keeping; to teach a more scientific farming; to inculcate a true cooperative spirit in community life; to give to the children and to the people of the community definite instruction in the principles of public sanitation, of individual and public hygiene, and of dietetics. The small school also should stand for these essential things, but it is much easier to turn these ideals into realities through the consolidated school. To accomplish these things in the oneroom school usually means...