Qualifications prescribed for teachers in your county or town.  How selected.

How are school books selected?  Are they free to pupils?  Advantages and disadvantages of free textbooks.

Evidence that public education is or is not a matter of common interest to the people of your community.

Examples of team work, or lack of it, in your community in the interest of the schools.

Are the methods by which school authorities are chosen in your community calculated to secure the best leadership?

How the duties relating to the schools are divided between your school board and the superintendent.  Does your board perform any duties that should be performed by the superintendent, or vice versa?  Explain.

Parent-teacher organizations in your community and their service.

DEVELOPMENT OF THE HIGH SCHOOL

Public education was long restricted to the elementary school.  High schools were at first private academies designed to prepare for college the few who wished to continue their education.  While they still continue to give preparation for college, their development in recent years has been largely for the benefit of the greater number of boys and girls who do not expect to go to college.  The high school naturally made its first appearance in cities.  It requires more elaborate equipment and more highly trained teachers, and its cost is at least twice that of elementary schools.  These facts, together with the small and scattered population of rural communities, have been obstacles to the development of rural high schools.  The consolidated school has in large measure removed these obstacles, and a high school education is rapidly becoming as available for rural boys and girls as for those who live in cities.

Report on: 

The history of high school development in your community.

The percentage of pupils in your community who go to high school after completing the elementary school.

“What the high school does for my community.”

“My reasons for going (or not going) to high school.”

The cost per pupil in the high school in your community as compared with that in the elementary school.

Education must not only be within the reach of every citizen of a democracy, but it must be of a kind that will fit him to play well his part as a member of the community.

EDUCATION FOR PHYSICAL FITNESS

The public schools now give more attention than formerly to the physical education and welfare of the pupils (see Chapter xx, pp. 314, 315).  The wide prevalence of physical defects disclosed in the effort to raise an army during the recent war will doubtless cause still greater emphasis to be placed on this aspect of education.  Physical fitness is the foundation of good citizenship.  Provision for physical education and welfare has found its way into rural schools more slowly than in city schools, as the following table shows.  But our nation can be neither efficient nor fully democratic until the physical well-being of all its citizens is provided for, and the responsibility rests largely with the public school.