have some social center, where its people may assemble for recreation, entertainment, and intellectual growth and development. And what is more natural and feasible than that the public school should be this center? Here is an institution already belonging to the whole people, and set apart for the intellectual training of the young. Why should it not also be made to minister to the intellectual needs of their elders as well, and to the social needs of all? Why should not the public school building, now in use but six hours a day for little more than half the year, be open at all times when it can be helpful to any portion of the community?

If young people are to develop naturally, if they are to make full use of their social as well as their intellectual powers, if they are to be satisfied with their surroundings, they must be provided with suitable opportunities for social mingling and recreation in groups. This is nature's way; there is no other way. The school might and should afford this opportunity. There is not the least reason why the school building, when it is adapted to this purpose, should not be the common neighborhood meeting place for all sorts of young people's parties, picnics, entertainments, athletic contests, and every other form of amusement approved in the community.

Such a use of the school property would yield large returns to the community for the small additional expense required. It would serve to weld the school and community more closely together. It would vastly change the attitude of the young toward the school. It would save much of the dissatisfaction of young people with the life of the farm. It would prove a great safeguard to youthful morals. It would lead the community itself to a new sense of its duty toward the social life of the young, and to a new concept of the school as a part of the community organization. Finally, this broadened service of the school to its community would have a reflex influence on the school itself, vitalizing every department of its activities, and giving it a new vision of its opportunities.

The first obstacle that will appear in the way of such a plan is the inadequacy of the present type of country schoolhouse. And this is a serious matter; for the barren, squalid little building of the present day would never fit into such a project. But this type of schoolhouse must go—is going. It is a hundred years behind our civilization, and wholly inadequate to present needs. Passing for later discussion the method by which these buildings are to be supplanted by better ones, let us consider further the details of the plan of making the school the neighborhood center.

First of all, each school must supply a larger area and a greater number of people than at present. It is financially impossible to erect good buildings to the number of our present schools. Nor are there pupils enough in the small district as now organized to make a school, nor people enough successfully to use the school as a neighborhood center.

Let each township, or perhaps somewhat smaller area, select a central, well-adapted site and thereon erect a modern, well-equipped school building. But this building must not be just the traditional schoolhouse with its classrooms and rows of desks. For it is to be more than a place where the children will study and recite lessons from books; it is to be the place where all the people of the neighborhood, old and young, will assemble for entertainment, amusement, and instruction. Here will be held community picnics, social entertainments, young people's parties, lectures, concerts, debating contests, agricultural courses for the farmers, school programs, spreads and banquets, and whatever else may belong to the common social and intellectual life of the community.

The modern rural school building will therefore be home-like as well as school-like. In addition to its classrooms it will contain an assembly room capable of seating several hundred people. The seating of this room may be removable so that the floor can be cleared for social purposes or the room used for a dining-room. One or two smaller rooms will be needed for social functions, club and committee meetings. These rooms should be made attractive with good furniture, rugs, couches, and pictures. The building will contain well-equipped laboratories for manual training and domestic science, the latter of which will be found serviceable in connection with serving picnics, "spreads," and the like. The entire building should be architecturally attractive, well heated and ventilated, commodious, well furnished, and decorated with good pictures. In it should be housed a library containing several thousand well-selected books, besides magazines and newspapers. The laboratories and equipment should be fully equal to those found in the town schools, but should be adapted to the work of the rural school.

The grounds surrounding the rural school building can easily be ample in area, and beautiful in outlook and decoration. Here will be the neighborhood athletic grounds for both boys and girls, shade trees for picnics, flowers and shrubs, and ground enough for a school garden connected with the instruction in agriculture. Nor is it too much to believe that the district will in the future erect on the school grounds a cottage for the principal of the school and his family, and thus offer an additional inducement for strong, able men to devote their energies to education in the rural communities.

Now contrast this schoolhouse and equipment with the typical rural building of the present. Adjoining a prosperous farm, with its large house, its accompanying barns, silos, machine houses, and all the equipment necessary to modern farming, is the little schoolhouse. It is a dilapidated shell of a rectangular box, barren of every vestige of beauty or attractiveness both inside and out. At the rear are two outbuildings which are an offense to decency and a menace to morals. Within the schoolhouse the painted walls are dingy with smoke and grime. The windows are broken and dirty, no pictures adorn the walls. The floor is washed but once or twice a year. The room is heated by an ugly box of a stove, and ventilated only by means of windows which frequently are nailed shut. The grounds present a wilderness of weeds, rubbish, and piles of ashes. It is all an outrage against the rights of the country child, and an indictment of the intelligence and ideals of a large proportion of our people.

If it is said that the plan proposed to remedy this situation is revolutionary, it will be admitted. What our rural schools of to-day need is not improvement but reorganization. For only in this radical way can they be made a factor in the vitalizing and conserving of the rural community which, unless some new leaven is introduced, is surely destined to disorganization and decay.

The consolidation of rural schools

The first step in reorganizing the rural schools is consolidation. Our rural school organization, buildings, and equipment are a full century behind our industrial and social advancement. The present plan of attempting to run a school on approximately every four square miles of territory originated at a time of poverty, and when the manufacturing industries were all carried on in the homes and small shops. Our rural people are now well-to-do, and manufacturing has moved over into a well-organized set of factories; but the isolated little school, shamefully housed, meagerly equipped, poorly attended, and unskillfully taught, still remains.

Such a system of schools leaves our rural people educationally on a par with the days of cradling