Sure, blame the tractor

 Connersville News, 1907

MANY SCHOOLS WILL

BE ABOLISHED, NOW

As Law Requires that Trustees Must

Close When Less Than 12 Pupils Attend

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Four district schools in Wayne Township (Wayne County) under the new law, which requires trustees to abolish all schools whose attendance is not 12 or more are about to be abandoned.

It is said that the law will require the closing of several schools in this county. Pupils are then conveyed daily by hack to the next nearest school, where the facilities are usually better and the total expense much less.

There are some gloomy souls who look at this depopulation of the country districts as an evidence of race decadence but perhaps the most potent factor in reducing the number of people in the country districts is highly improved farm machinery.

Now one man can do, with the aid of farm machinery, what four or five did before. The result is larger farms and fewer farm dwellers. People are not given to staying in a community where their labor is not in demand, when the town offers opportunities in abundance for the labor of both men and women.

NOTES: No idea if a school with 13 students could stay open for long. So, folks who were sharecroppers were moving to the towns. Interesting analysis, given that not very many people owned any mechanical farm implements. The machines they did have were powered by mules or horses.

Many one-room schools continued to exist until the early 1920s despite a law forcing the smallest ones to close. They were replaced by township schools. If they wanted to stay open, I wonder if they could have lied about their enrollment. Who'd bother asking? 

The drive to abolish the country school was nationwide. A school administrator from New Paltz, NY, said at a conference: "Fifty percent of the children of the nation are in the country districts and 35 percent of that 50 percent are in one-room country schools where they are being taught by immature girls who are not much more than giggling children."

Indianapolis Star story in 1907: "It is the rule for the rural schools to have the poorest buildings, the worst equipment, the shortest terms, the poorest paid teachers and only a few high school students. The higher institutions of learning, cities and towns, are served first."

Reality: The rural students were stuck in perpetual intellectual poverty. They didn't get enough education to leave and, as a result, sent their kids to the same schools that didn't educate them. 

Another Star story in 1907 said several one-room schools around the state were introducing mechanical arts to their curriculum. Assuming the teacher stuck around a year or so, it's likely a few students learned a trick or two about woodworking or cross-stitch.