The Teacher's Home

In the extended campaign now going on for the betterment of the rural schools in the United States, perhaps there is no single factor that will contribute so much permanent benefit to rural education as the teacher's cottage. New and enlarged courses of study, modern school buildings, expensive apparatus, and greater facilities for industrial education will not in themselves give us a better system of rural schools. The hope of our country schools lies in securing first-class teachers and in retaining them longer than one term. A home, built, furnished, and maintained by the school district, in which the teacher may live while serving her community, will do more than any other one thing to get good teachers into the country and to keep them there. The home furnished to the teacher by the school district has been called by different names in various parts of our country. In this part of the West it is usually spoken of as the teacher's cottage; in some states, particularly in the South, as the teacher's manse; in many other states, as the teacherage, and in old, classical New England as the dominage. This residence, whatever its name, is built near the schoolhouse, usually on the school grounds, or as part of the school building. The style of structure ranges through varied architectural schemes from the lean-to, the shack, the school attic apartment, the cedarshake cottage, the one-room cottage, the tent-house, the old, abandoned schoolhouse remodeled, the six-room bungalow, the double house of ten or twelve rooms, to the modern residence-the cost varying from $50 to $6,000. The teacher's cottage is to the teacher what the parsonage is to the preacher. It assures a suitable home for the teacher while teaching her school, where she may rest and have her privacy,