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 RURAL PROBLEMS OF TODAY




 RURAL PROBLEMS OF TODAY




 ERNEST R. GROVES

 _Author of "Moral Sanitation," "Using the Resources of
 the Country Church," etc._




 ASSOCIATION PRESS
 NEW YORK: 124 EAST 28TH STREET
 1918




 COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY
 THE INTERNATIONAL COMMITTEE OF
 THE YOUNG MEN'S CHRISTIAN ASSOCIATIONS




 TO

 GLADYS HOAGLAND

 WHOSE UNSELFISH AND INTELLIGENT CARE OF

 CATHERINE AND ERNESTINE

 HAS JUSTIFIED THE ABSOLUTE CONFIDENCE

 OF THEIR MOTHER




PREFACE


This book is written for the men and women who love the country and are
interested in its social welfare. Fortunately there are many such, and
each year their number is increasing.

Rural life has as many sides as there are human interests. This book
looks out upon country-life conditions from a viewpoint comparatively
neglected. It attempts to approach rural social life from the
psychological angle. The purpose of the book forces it from the
well-beaten pathways, but this effort to give emphasis to the mental
side of rural problems is not an attempt to discount the other
significant aspects of the rural environment. The field of rural service
is large enough to contain all who desire by serious study to advance at
some point the happiness, prosperity, and wholesomeness that belong by
social right to those who live and work in the country.

The author desires to thank the following for the privilege of using
material previously published: American Sociological Society, _American
Journal of Sociology_, National Conference of Social Work, Association
Press, and _Rural Manhood_.

 E. R. G.

 Durham, N. H.
 April 1, 1918.




CONTENTS


                                                    PAGE

 PREFACE                                             vii

     I. THE RURAL WORKER AND THE COUNTRY HOME          1

    II. THE FAMILY IN OUR COUNTRY LIFE                15

   III. THE RURAL WORKER AND THE COUNTRY SCHOOLS      41

    IV. THE COUNTRY CHURCH AND THE RURAL WORKER       53

     V. MENTAL HYGIENE IN RURAL DISTRICTS             71

    VI. THE SOCIAL VALUE OF RURAL EXPERIENCE          89

   VII. RURAL VS. URBAN ENVIRONMENT                  103

  VIII. THE MIND OF THE FARMER                       117

    IX. PSYCHIC CAUSES OF RURAL MIGRATION            135

     X. RURAL SOCIALIZING AGENCIES                   149

    XI. THE WORLD-WAR AND RURAL LIFE                 169




THE RURAL WORKER AND THE COUNTRY HOME




I

THE RURAL WORKER AND THE COUNTRY HOME


With reference to the care of children, faulty homes may be divided into
two classes. There are homes that give the children too little care and
there are homes that give them too much. The failure of the first type
of home is obvious. Children need a great deal of wise, patient, and
kindly care. Even the lower animals require, when domesticated,
considerable care from their owners, if they are to be successfully
brought from infancy to maturity. Of course children need greater care.
No one doubts this. And yet it is certainly true that there are, even in
these days of widespread intelligence, many homes where the children
obtain too little care and in one way or another are seriously
neglected.

The harmfulness of the homes that give their children too much care is
not so generally realized as is the danger of the careless and selfish
home, although, in a general way, everyone acknowledges that children
may be given too much attention. The difficulty is to determine when a
particular child is being given too much adult supervision and too
little freedom. No one would question the fact that a child can become
an adult only by a decrease of adult control and an increase of personal
responsibility. Nevertheless, in spite of a general belief that a child
needs an opportunity to win self-government, there are parents not a few
who, from love and anxiety, run into the danger of protecting and
controlling their children too much. The father or mother spends too
much time with the children. The children are pampered. Too many
indulgences are permitted them. Children in these over-careful homes are
likely to grow up neurotic, conceited, timid, babyish, daydreaming men
and women, who are of little use in the world and are often a serious
problem for normal people. Probably this second type of a deficient home
is more dangerous than the first, for children without sufficient home
care often discover a substitute for their loss, but the over-protected
children can obtain no antidote for their misfortune.

Everyone knows that attacks are increasingly being made upon the home in
its present form by people who regard it as inefficient or as an
anachronism. It is usually thought, however, that these attacks come
mostly from agitators who set themselves more or less in opposition to
all the institutions established by the present social order. Perhaps
for this reason many do not believe that the family is receiving any
serious criticism and its satisfactory functioning is therefore taken
for granted. Such an easy-going optimism is not justified, for criticism
of the home is coming from science as well as from the agitators. For
example read "The Deforming Influences of the Home," by Dr. Helen W.
Brown, which appeared in the _Journal of Abnormal Psychology_ for April,
1917. She writes in one place as follows:

"Small wonder, then, if we begin to see that many of the mental ills
that afflict men are not due, as has been commonly supposed, to lack of
home training and the deteriorating influence of the world, but to too
much home, to a narrow environment which has often deformed his mind at
the start and given him a bias that can only be overcome through painful
adjustments and bitter experience."

The psychoanalysts and the clinic psychologists are gathering material
all the time that illustrates the bad results of home influences, and
soon the agitator will be using this as proof of the harmfulness of the
home as an institution. Some of us believe that no skepticism can be
more dangerous socially than that relating to the value of the home. The
best protection of the home must come from its moral efficiency and this
cannot be obtained if people are unwilling to face reasonable and
constructive criticism of the present working of the home. It is natural
for the adult looking backward to his childhood to assume too much for
the home, and then to transfer his emotion and his sense of the value of
his home experience to the present family as an institution. With this
enormous prejudice he refuses to see how often the family influence is
morally and socially bad. It would surprise such a person at least to
read an article like Emerson's "The Psychopathology of the Family" which
recently appeared in _The Journal of Abnormal Psychology_. Material
showing the unhappy results of inefficient family influences may be
found in nearly any number of the _Psychoanalytic Review_.

There appear to be three causes of the unwholesomeness of home
influences: lack of competition between homes, insufficient science
regarding the home problems, and the pleasure basis of family
organization.

First: There is no competition between homes. This is a most strikingly
peculiar situation. The home is competed against by other institutions,
such as the saloon, the moving picture, and the like, but as between
homes there is no competition whatever. Home life is a private affair.
Public opinion rules that it remain private. Nothing is sooner or more
seriously resented than interference with or criticism of the home life
of the individual. Professional men, such as doctors, lawyers, and
ministers, and business men compete with one another, and from this
competition comes constant, sane change and progress. But in the home,
there being no competition, methods of home management, however bad, go
on without change. Parents never realize their habitual carelessness in
home life. The scientists are seeking to bring some sort of competition
into home life, but they are under a very heavy handicap. In fact this
handicap is greater now than formerly, for our forefathers made long
visits with each other, sometimes staying for weeks in one home, thus
giving ample opportunity for valuable criticisms and suggestions from
guest to host.

Second: Bringing up children is really a scientific task and requires
scientific information. But to obtain scientific information of
practical value relating to the home is a baffling proposition. Human
instincts and child development have been studied very little. We have
theorized a great deal about such problems, but we have a remarkably
small fund of actual accurate information. Such knowledge as we have
recorded has been mostly obtained by parents, who have, of course, been
prejudiced. In such cases we seldom know the later history of the child
or the character of the home management and the actual contribution that
the home made as compared with other influences. Men who have had to
consider the entire history of an individual, who comes to the mind
specialist for treatment because of some abnormality of mental or moral
character, are gathering a great deal of valuable material regarding
family influences, but much of this is in regard to men and women who in
one way or another have been social failures. We have no material at
present of equal value in regard to the persons who in a popular sense
are "normal individuals." Such valuable information as we already have,
we are not very seriously trying to distribute. Yet, fortunately, a
beginning has been made and the entire problem is receiving an attention
that it has never before had.

Third: People are finding it difficult to accept the responsibilities
that belong to family life. Modern men and women more and more are
basing the home upon pleasure and comfort and personal advantages in a
narrow and thoughtless sense. When the crucial tests of family fitness
come with the children, the parents fail. They have had little specific
training for their greatest obligation and under such circumstances it
is strange only that so often they do not greatly fail. Children are
often unwelcome when they come into the home. Their coming disturbs the
easy-going pleasure regime of the household and as they become somewhat
of a burden to the father and mother, their interests are compromised,
that their parents may continue to have some of the freedom which they
enjoyed before the children came. Imagination cannot prepare for
experience in such a degree as to make it possible for those who marry
to realize the possible responsibilities of their choice. Because of
this they often are found to have undertaken tasks against which in
their heart of hearts they protest. It is natural for them, with such an
internal dissatisfaction, not to commit themselves fully or sufficiently
to the needs of their children.

Of one fact there is no doubt. Modern science is all the time
illustrating that early childhood, the period when the influence of
parents counts most, is the most significant of all the life