AVERAGE LENGTH OF TIME PUPILS ARE IN THE CONVEYANCE AND DISTANCES TRAVELED.

Partial and complete reports from 20 States give the following information: The average time pupils are in the conveyances is from 35 to 90 minutes one way. Sixty minutes should be the maximum time for any pupil.

Schools open their doors for pupils at 8.30 a. m. Those who are transported leave home at 7.45 to 8 for the autobus and at 6.30 to 7.30 for the horse-drawn conveyance.

The average distance traveled one way is from 5 to 6 miles for the horsedrawn conveyance and from 10 to 15 miles for the autobus.

ADVANTAGES OF TRANSPORTATION.

1. Protection for the pupils from wind, rain, and snow.

2. Garments dry and comfortable when the children arrive at the schoolhouse.

3. More time at home in the morning and evening.

4. Greater regularity in attendance.

5. Proper protection and supervision while going to and from school.

6. The handicap of distance is removed.

7. An equal opportunity is given to every child to attend school.

WASHINGTON GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE 1922

RURAL TEACHERS NEED MODERN EQUIPMENT.

Just as the farmer of to-day would be handicapped by having on his farm only the tools, machinery, and means of transportation which the farmer of 50 years ago found adequate for farming, so many teachers of one-teacher schools in the United States are handicapped, because they are supplied with a type of equipment that had to serve 50 years ago when it was possibly the best available. A carpenter could build a house with the help of only a hatchet and a saw, but he would waste time and energy, and a crudely constructed building would be the result.

Abraham Lincoln with the aid of a wooden fire shovel, a bit of charcoal, borrowed books, and a lighted pine knot mastered the rudiments of knowledge. But Abraham Lincoln was a genius who succeeded in doing for himself what the average boy or girl would not even attempt; besides he lived in a frontier community in pioneer days. Pioneer conditions belong to the past; modern schools should reflect the present.

In a rural school one person is expected to do the work which in a graded school is performed by a janitor, a principal, eight grade teachers, often one or more supervisors of special subjects, and a nurse. The one-teacher school with fewer children has all of the problems found in the larger school. Teachers in such schools, therefore, actually need more equipment than does the gradedschool teacher.

THE NEEDS OF RURAL CHILDREN DEMAND LIBERAL EQUIPMENT.

In no other type of school are children so dependent upon good texts for the knowledge which they gain in school. Necessarily the study periods are numerous and long and the class periods infrequent and short. Rural schools should be supplied not only with the most interesting basic texts but also with supplementary texts and a good collection of library books suited to the interests and needs of even the youngest children.

Boards of education sometimes adopt the policy of providing only one reader a year per child, but a single book may be read in a few hours, and money, as well as time, is wasted when children spend a school year dawdling over reading which they should cover in two months.

Quite as necessary is a liberal supply of seat-work material for little children. Too frequently in the past and sometimes even to-day such children have been set the task of copying pages from their reading books in order to fill in their

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