At the core of the educational transformation of American rural schools in the early 1900s, there was the re-examination of the rural school curriculum, preceded by the landmark meeting of the Committee of Ten in 1893. Until 1900, formal education in most rural areas was seen by many as an unneeded luxury, not necessary for the manual labor of the farm, mill, mine, or other primary employment sources of a given locale. Curriculum and the American Rural School traces the origins of American school curriculum, and subsequently contextualizes it within the history of rural school curriculum in the United States since the mid-1800s. Doug Feldmann examines modern issues pertinent to the rural school curriculum in light of this history, and the actual solutions to these issues that rural schools have discovered. Feldmann examines curriculum— in all of its procedural and documentary forms— in a real-life, contemporary rural school study, whereby the history and theory of this discipline is revealed in a true-to-life form.
