immigrants who have not mastered English.

Immigrant churches should be required to report regularly on the
Americanization progress of their congregations (number of families,
home language, service language, naturalization, etc.) to the state or
Federal Bureau of Education.

XI

THE PUBLIC SCHOOL

The preceding three chapters show how important is the public school as
an instrumentality of Americanization. The question is whether the rural
public school meets present-day requirements. Field investigations and
search through both public and private reports have convinced the writer
that the rural public school is the most neglected class of all the
educational institutions in the country. It is far behind the times. It
not only does not adequately meet the problem of immigrant children, but
it does not even root out illiteracy from the rural population in
general. Some of its limiting features are inevitable, while others are
gradually being changed.

LIMITATIONS OF THE ONE-TEACHER SCHOOL

The great majority of rural public schools are one-teacher schools. The
Commissioner of Public Education of California stated that there were in
the state of California in 1918, 2,300 one-room public schools and 410
two-room schools. Over a third of all the Wisconsin school children,
city as well as country, and 42 per cent of the Wisconsin
school-teachers, are found in the one-teacher country schools.[31] A
report on school conditions in Arizona shows that 149 rural schools, or
70 per cent of a total of 214 reporting, are one-teacher schools.[32]

The one-teacher school usually means a crowd of children of various
grades taught by one teacher during the same day. In most cases the
recitation work can go on only with one grade at a time, while the other
grades have to do study work. Without the supervision of the teacher,
this is much less efficient than the recitation work. About two thirds
of the rural teachers answering questionnaires sent out by the United
States Bureau of Education[33] instructed eight or more grades and held
from twenty-two to thirty-five classes a day, which means that the
recitations averaged the absurdly short time of nine to thirteen
minutes. A few teachers manage to lengthen the recitations by a system
of organizing the grades into groups and of combining classes, but this
is the exception, not the rule.

As a rule the one-teacher schools have limited room and equipment. Most
of these s