The Farm Home

by Mrs. A.J. WIlder, Rocky Ridge Farm

Among all the beautiful sights and sounds of spring there is an ugly blot on the landscape here and there, a sight that is unpleasantly out of harmony and shows as little promise for the future as a blighted fruit tree. It is the presence of children at work in the fields when they should be in school.

There is compulsory school law but I have been informed that it does not apply to children engaged in agricultural work. It is a sufficient excuse for absence from school if the parent says the children are needed to go help in the farm work.

And farm children are needed at home because every bit of help it is possible to get is usually not quite enough. But it does seem unfair to country children that they should be discriminated against: that they should have no protection from the law such as town children have. Food is needed to feed the world but that is not a good enough reason why part of the children should be allowed to work to produce it while other children are protected in their right to an education.

Tho, in a way of a concession to the independence of farmers, leaving them at liberty to give their children the advantage of public schools or not as they may deny the community from the compulsory school law will react to the disadvantage of all farmers by making them as a class below the level of those who follow other occupations, for farmers are like other people. There are some who put the interests of their children above other things and there are others who because Johnny can save them a good deal of time and many steps, will keep him at home that he may do so even tho it will put him at a disadvantage the remainder of his life.

All the instruction in the farm papers, the wealth of knowledge of new ideas and methods of mutual help and the getting together spirit that all good farm papers are working to spread, does not reach the farmers who cannot read an article in a paper and understand it.

Besides the loss of all this they are at the mercy of any unfounded report that may be circulated. As for instance, in regard to the League of Nations which is now so much discussed, there is a report circulating in the back places to the effect that if the United States enters the League we shall become subject to a foreign king. And it is believed literally by farmers who cannot read understandingly. Still they would not be classed as illiterate and there are no statistics from which we may learn how many such there are.

But below them is the ignorant mass of the rural population who have not attended school for even the two years necessary to pass the literacy test and who are classed as illiterate by the Federal Bureau of Education which has compiled the statistics from the facts gathered. These illiterate persons amount to 10 per cent of the rural population.

Of the 37 million country people. 2,700,000 cannot read a farm paper nor an agricultural bulletin and most learn the news as well as trade market conditions from some rumor, perhaps deliberately untrue, perhaps only a mistake thru much passing from one to another.

"We shall have to spend great sums of money in improving our school systems! We shall have to undertake a nation-wide propaganda for the betterment of school buildings, for the replacement of unsanitary shacks with modern structures, for the adequate compensation of competent teachers," says one editor writing on this subject. But of what use will all this be to the farmer boy who in schooltime is driving old Bill and Kate with the heavy lines around his shoulders while with his hands he guides the plow, making the long furrows around and around the field which later he will help to plant to corn?

Will it mean that he must begin his work earlier in the morning and keep at it later in the evening to help his father earn the added taxes to pay for these improvements that more fortunate children may have the advantage of them?

"Pap needed me to help him," said one such boy now a grown man. "Pap needed me to help him, I know, and it's all right, but it's no use for me to take a farm paper for I can't read it so I can't understand it."

Mrs. A.J. Wilder. "The Farm Home." Missouri Ruralist (May 5, 1919): 26-27. This article was accompanied by a photograph of Laura Ingalls Wilder. The photograph is similar to - and most likely taken at the same time as - the photograph shown on page 105 of William Anderson's Laura Ingalls Wilder Country. Several similar poses are on display at the Laura Ingalls Wilder / Rose Wilder Lane Home & Museum in Mansfield, Missouri.

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