Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Recommendations on Needed School Legislation: Being Advance Sheets From the Biennial Report of W. D. Ross, State Superintendent of Public Instruction; December, 1914
In a general way the development of free schools has been everywhere coincident with the growth of democracy. Here in America as else where public education has been an evolution. Pioneer conditions with us have always meant first, homes and a living; then, churches and schools. In Kansas around the cabin and the dugout on the far horizon, was erected the local school district, and there followed the box car school house as representing the simplest and cheapest form of architecture. Other settlers came and other districts were formed, irregular in shape, unequal in size, and varying in valuation, but always with the one oblong, cross-lighted type of building.
The sod house and the ox team have vanished with the Indian and the buffalo. In their 'place are coming, in numbers unequalled anywhere else in the world, the modern farm home and' the automobile. But the rural school of the pioneer lingers with us yet - the last survivor of a by-gone age. New occasions teach new duties in time, however, and already there are abundant signs that the god of Things as they are will not much longer be able to dictate educational conditions to the boys and girls of Kansas.
Within the past four years Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio and Iowa, realizing that their school laws and systems of school organization had become outgrown and antiquated, have adopted absolutely new school codes prepared and recommended by expert commissions appointed and provided with funds for that purpose. Minnesota and Colorado will to all appearances do so at the coming sessions of their legislatures, while there is strong and growing sentiment in Nebraska for similar action.
Kansas would do well to follow this example. For the fact that the schools of the past have nobly met the needs of their day and generation is' no more evidence that they are good enough now than is the fact that the sickle and the ?ail hold an honored place in the history of the race sufficient proof that we now have no need of the header and the thresher.
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