RURAL EDUCATION

Manawatu Standard, Volume LVII, Issue 198, 22 July 1937, Page 10

RURAL EDUCATION

TRENDS IN SOCIAL LIFE. EDUCATIONIST’S SURVEY. AVELLINGTON, July 21. “The times have been out of joint, but not all of the trends and changes have been losses. The problems are many and unsolved and just as the machine changed England so the forces of to-day are altering under our very eyes things long familiar,” said Dr. Edmund de S. Brunner, head of the department of rural sociology in Columbia University, New A’ork, in his address on “Rural Education” at the New Education Fellowship conference meeting at the Technical College hall to-night. Dr. Brunner devoted his address to outlining important underlying trends in rural social life which seemed to him to he too much neglected, and to explaining the educational implications of these. The Dominion, lie said, along with its other distinctions, had been unique among the nations of the world in building a system of education in its rural areas which was as nearly as the Dominion had been able to make it up to what it was giving in tho cities. He wished he could say the same of his own country and of Canada.

"STAFF CONFERENCE.’’ The farm family had a unity not marked by the urban. It had hut a single interest —agriculture—and cooperation in the task of helping to answer the world’s prayer for its daily bread, and every meal had the possibility of becoming a staff conference. The locale of the urban locality was a sort of dormitory. The cohesion of a single binding interest was missing. Instead there were conflicting ami competitive purposes which weakernel the soil-born stability of the race. Agriculture was indispensable and its value must be stressed and rephrased in the terms of this agriculture, and the life of the rural communities enriched. This migration to the town was more acute in some lands than in others. But more was involved than putting up an agricultural school; the inclusion of agriculture in a curriculum was no answer to the problem of rural values ill rural America or in rural New Zealand, It was a matter of the spirit of the life of the people, not of extending to all a knowledge of what was involved in the processes of primary production, hut for the enriching of the social life in the areas of primary production. On this question, the lecturer directed attention to the folk schools of Denmark. Might it not he possible, he asked, to take the- Danish system, fit it into our own situation, to our own needs. Out of that folk school movement no country had to-day bunt a richer, fuller, more co-operative and sociallv-minded civilisation tiffin was to be found in that little country ot Denmark. In addition to this problem of urbanward migration, there was a second trend in the AVestern world, the declining birth-rate. TOD FEW CHILDREN.

“If we grant that the white race has any contribution to make to this world, does not that impress us with the importance of the nation turning our attention to this problem? I was surprised to discover the extent to which this trend is apparent in New Zealand and also in Australia. You no longer are producing , enough children to sustain your population at what it now is. Since you have such a high proportion of your people reaching 50, 60, and even 65, you must eventuallv look forward to an increase in the death rate.” As the third trend, Dr. Brunner said that recent years had seen growing signs of recognition of the interdependence of city and country. There had been conflict in the past. That theory was that the conflict between rural and urban interests was inevitable. But ’in a complex economic order in which the people lived, especially in the AA r estern European world, that philosophy, while persisting, was dangerously erroneous. In that connection the rise of Hen- Hitler in Germany had been made possible large|L’ because the Republic failed to realise rural-urban interdependence. In many countries there was much legislation reflecting this, and even New Zealand’s own guaranteed price indicated that that interdependence was being recognised. Speaking of tho educational implications of the decline in the birth-rate and of the interdependence of city and country, the lecturer said educational administrators had a great responsibility. Studv of rural-urban interdependence should be an integral part of the curriculum of the schools, so that the farmer’s child, when he grew up, should understand the service the city did render to the body economic, and so that tho city man should begin to realise again the necessity for this interdependence. CULTURAL INTERESTS.

Another trend was of very considerable importance: speaking in terms of the North American continent it seemed quite clear that the interests of the rural man and woman had been broadened through these years; they had given cultural terms to their activiViewing the record of the North American continent, against the background of the economic stress of its depression, led to no other conclusion but that the runt* people were on the move for a better and more social lire. There was a determined effort to improve all the facilities of farm life—for community and family life. This was not confined to America. It had begun in Japan in the depression, and Japan had turned back into the rich cultural life of the nation. Social progress _in rural areas ... in Russia were too well known to be more than mentioned. Some of the South American countries were , touched in this same way. The educational aspect of all this was , that it would teach adults to expect far more of the school and its teaching Than they had ever done before.