Country Education A well-known writer has been saying that country
education should be designed to fit the country child for a country life. This seems to be such a general idea among certain rural reformers that it may sound heresy to call it nonsense. If we are to have a separate standard and curriculum of rural education, designed to pioduce nothing but country citizens, then it is not Unfair to argue that we should have a correspondingly separate form of urban education, de- signed to produce nothing but town citizens. Mr. Ritchie Calde must have horrified many rural die-hards recently when he spoke of the necessity of bringing. the town and the country nearer to- gether; yet the idea has in it the very gumption that rural reform needs. To offer country children a form of education designed solely to fit them for country life is equivalent re saying to a town child " Fields and farming are not your business. You are being educated to a life of machines." For clearly a country boy may show great gifts as a chemist, an engineer or a printer, just as a town boy may show a great desire to become a farmer, a stock-breeder or a fruit- grower. Mr. Ritchie Calder's idea of bringing the town and the country into closer collaboration, especially in education,. is therefore sound. For town and country, in England perhaps more than any where, are essentially complementary forces in the national life, and in any post-war regeneration of rural life there must be an end of the idea that they are perpetually trying to take something away from each other.
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