July/Aug 2023 (Volume 15, Issue 4)

 

By Dr. Janice Nahra Friedel

 

It was a time of rapid change. The United States had emerged from the devastation of the Civil War to become the industrial leader of the world. It was the turn of the 19th to the 20th century. America had become a magnet, attracting new immigrants who sought better lives, jobs, land and freedom.

 

The Industrial Revolution was creating new and improved technologies. Increased farm production, free public school education, and educational opportunities for farmers and their wives were starting to improve the lives of those in rural areas and their communities. 

 

An internal immigration was in motion, drawing youth from rural areas to the cities. Would rural America be left barren with no future generation? It was a question of great concern in a time of uncertainty. 

 

With Teddy Roosevelt as President, the U.S. had boldly stepped onto the world stage. A child of privilege, the former governor of New York, knew of our nation’s vastness and the isolation of rural communities; his concerns were so great that before he left office in 1908, he called for the President’s Commission on Country Life to study the conditions of rural America; and, to make recommendations for sustainability and improvement, and equitable access of rural America to the emerging conveniences and advancements of the 20th century. Issued on Feb. 9, 1909, the commission’s final report identified four structural deficiencies of the open country: Knowledge, education, cooperative organizations and personal leadership. The report concluded that “the business of agriculture must be made to yield a reasonable return to those who follow it intelligently; and life on the farm must be permanently satisfying to intelligent, progressive people. Roosevelt saw that the way to do this was through knowledge and education.

 

Roosevelt was convinced that to become a central part of the community, rural schools needed to teach farm and home subjects. Youth should be prepared to work together. Diversification and rotation of crops would not only improve the fertility of the land but would counter the monotony of farm production. Working cooperatively would go further than the development of cooperative warehouses and cooperative credit, two areas emphasized in the commission’s report. The emphasis needed to be on rural educational innovation and reform.

 

An innovator emerges in Page County  

 

In 1899, Jessie Field of Page County, had just graduated from Shenandoah High School. Two years later, in only her second year at Western Normal College in Shenandoah, the directors of the Goldenrod School in Page County wrote her. The directors knew Jessie from her early childhood years when she accompanied her father, Solomon Elijah Field, to the Farmers Institute meetings. The Goldenrod School directors had heard that Jessie might now be interested in teaching so they sent her a letter asking if she would come and teach the spring term. 

 

Celestia Josephine “Jessie” Field was born in Shenandoah on June 21, 1881. Jessie was an inquisitive child and exhibited to her parents, both of whom had been teachers, an enthusiasm for learning and scientific methods. Following the Farmers Institute meetings, her father would explain how he could improve his farming practices by applying what he learned from these meetings. 

 

Jessie was 19 years old when she accepted the invitation from the directors of the Goldenrod School. She taught the required 3 Rs but found that many students lacked interest in these subjects. Jessie realized that education needed to be relevant to the needs of rural youth and their communities. They needed to know how to apply their learning and how improved and scientific farming methods and efficient home management could improve their lives.

 

She implemented applied teaching lessons that would inspire pride in being from the country. Each morning before school, students were taught how to properly tend to a garden by planting a garden in the school land. They even planted a bed of tulips next to the school house. These flowers were foreign to her students, and her brother Henry donated bulbs. After school, students would clamor around Jessie wanting to hear the wonderful things the teacher had to say.

 

Jessie called these after school meetings her Boys Corn Club and the Girls Home Club. Meeting on alternating days, the boys would learn how to apply scientific knowledge to farming, and the girls would learn gardening, cooking, sewing and other domestic arts. 

 

While teaching at the Goldenrod School, Jessie drew from the lectures she heard at the Farmers Institute meetings and her father’s farm journals. She used the nature studies materials developed by Liberty Hyde Bailey of Cornell University in her science classes. Her students had lots of questions. It did not take Jessie long to realize that she needed more education to answer their questions so she returned to college. Jessie obtained her bachelor’s degree from Iowa’s Tabor College in 1903. Jessie then taught in Antigo, Wis., (1903-1904), and in Shenandoah (1904-1905). She then served as principal of the Jefferson School in Helena, Mont., in 1905. These early years of teaching gave Jessie opportunities to pioneer an innovative concept in education: relating the curriculum more closely to the student’s environment and future occupations. It was the progressive idea of “learn by doing.”

 

TO READ THE ENTIRE STORY AND OTHER FASCINATING STORIES ABOUT IOWA HISTORY, subscribe to Iowa History Journal.