NEGenWeb Project
Resource Center
Schools

     Table showing the cost per pupil of maintaining all the country schools, the schools with an average attendance of ten or less and the graded schools of Madison county, 1906-1909.

     Table showing the cost of maintaining country schools, eight grades, with an average attendance of ten or less in Jefferson county compared with the cost of maintaining the Fairbury schools, twelve grades, 1908-1909.

     The greatest difficulty in consolidating these scattered and weakly schools lies in the fact that it is a "new thing." We grow accustomed or hardened to the disadvantages of a system long In use and come to look upon them as inherent in the case and altogether inevitable, but we have little patience with the difficulties of a new system, many of which are imaginary and others of which will disappear with experience. And so it is that we bear the ills to which we have grown accustomed until they become intolerable, believing always that it is conservatism, and not unthinking apathy that controls us.

     It throws light on a situation of this sort to reverse conditions. Suppose that consolidation had been the plan up to date, and that good graded schools doing high school work were established in the country, everywhere to which children were transported regularly and landed warm and dry every day, requiring six to eight wagons for each school. Suppose then the proposition should come up to dissolve these schools; to build eight houses in the township Instead of one or two; to hire eight teachers instead of three or four; that each teacher should

---

© 2003 for the NEGenWeb Project by Ted & Carole Miller