In 1888 a Midwestern school official remarked, “I find people everywhere interested in a general way in schools but too much absorbed in other matters to give them much time or thought.” This candid appraisal, near the turn of the nineteenth century, was particularly applicable to the attitudes of Americans toward their rural schools. Staffed by poorly qualified and even more poorly paid teachers who came and went, given but minimal support by parents as token acceptance of the need for some sort of an education, the rural school was all too frequently a “hopelessly gloomy and forbidding” place where little of interest to farm children was taught.