the sides or the rear. Enough ground can be added to provide for all these things, and a school garden besides. The building can be rendered more inviting through better architecture, and more attention to decoration and cleanliness. An adequate supply of books and other equipment can be provided. While the isolated rural school can never take the place of the consolidated school, while it should always be looked upon as only temporarily occupying a place later to be filled by a more efficient type of school, it can after all be rendered much more efficient than it is at present. And since the one-room school will without doubt for years to come be required as a supplement of the consolidated school, it should receive the same careful thought and effort toward its improvement that is being accorded the school of better type.

Financial support of the rural school

The rural school has never had adequate financial support. There has been good reason for this in many regions of the country where farm property was low in value, the land sparsely settled and not all improved, or else covered by heavy mortgages. As these conditions have gradually disappeared and the agricultural population become more prosperous, the school has in some degree shared the general prosperity. But not fully. A smaller proportion of the margin of wealth above living necessities is going into rural education now than in the earlier days of less prosperity. While the farmer has vastly "improved" his farm, he has improved his school but little. While he has been adding modern machinery and adopting scientific methods in caring for his grain and stock, his children have not had the advantage of an increasingly efficient school.

The poverty of the rural school finds its explanation in two facts: (1) the relatively low value of the taxable property of the rural as compared with the town or city district, and (2) the lower rate of local school tax paid in country than in urban districts. The first of these disadvantages of the rural district cannot be remedied; but for the second, there seems to be no valid economic reason.

The approximate difference in the local school-tax rate paid in urban and rural districts is shown in the following instances, which might be duplicated from other States:—

In Kansas, the local school tax paid in 1910 by towns and cities was above eighty per cent more than that paid by country districts. In Missouri, the current report of the State Superintendent shows towns and cities seventy-five per cent higher than the country. In Minnesota, towns and cities average nearly three times the rate paid by rural districts. In Ohio, towns and cities are more than ten per cent higher than rural districts, even where the rural district maintains a full elementary and high school course. In Nebraska and Iowa, the town and city rate is about double that of country districts.

When there is added to this difference the further fact that town and city property is commonly assessed at more nearly its full value than rural property, the discrepancy becomes all the greater.

It is not meant, of course, that farmers should pay as high a school-tax rate for the elementary rural school as that paid by town patrons who also have a high school available. But, on the other hand, if better school facilities are to be furnished the country children, rural property should bear its full share of the taxes required. The farmer should be willing to pay as much for the education of his child as the city dweller pays for a similar education for his.

During the last generation farmers have been increasing in wealth faster than any other class of industrial workers. Their land has doubled in value, barns have been built, machinery has been added, automobiles purchased, and large bank credits established. Yet very little of this increased prosperity has reached the school. Library, reference works, maps, charts, and other apparatus are usually lacking. In Iowa, as a fair example, a sum of not less than ten nor more than fifteen cents a year for each pupil of school age in the district is required by law to be expended for library books. Yet in not a few districts the law is a dead letter or the money grudgingly spent! In many rural schools the teacher has to depend on the proceeds of a "social," an "exhibition," or a "box party" to secure a few dollars for books or pictures for the neighborhood school, and sometimes even buys brooms and dust pans from the fund secured in this way.

This is all wrong. The school should be put on a business basis. It should have the necessary tools with which to accomplish its work, and not be forced to waste the time and opportunity of childhood for want of a few dollars expended for equipment. Its patrons should realize that just as it pays to supply factory, shop, or farm with the best of instruments for carrying on the work, so it pays in the school. Cheap economy is always wasteful, and never more wasteful than when it cripples the efficiency of education.

State aid for rural schools has been proposed and in some instances tried, as a mode of solving their financial problem. Where this system has been given a fair trial, as for example in Minnesota, it has resulted in two great advantages: (1) it has encouraged the local community to freer expenditure of their own money for school purposes, since the contribution of the State is conditioned on the amount expended by the district. This is an important achievement, since it serves to train the community to the idea of more liberal local taxation for school purposes, and it is probable that the greater part of the support of our schools will continue to come from this source. Another advantage of state aid is (2) that it serves to equalize educational opportunities, and hence to maintain a true educational democracy. Wealthier localities are caused to contribute to the educational facilities of those less favored, and a common advancement thereby secured.

While the theory of state aid to rural education is wholly defensible, and while it has worked well in practice, yet there is one safeguard that needs to be considered. It is manifestly unfair to ask the people of towns and cities to help pay for the support of the rural schools through the medium of the State treasury except on condition that the patrons of the rural schools themselves do their fair share. Mr. "A," living in a town where he pays twenty mills school tax, ought not to be asked to help improve Mr. "B's" rural school, while Mr. "B" is himself paying but ten mills of school tax. The farmer is as able as any one else to pay a fair rate of taxation for his school, and should be willing to do so before asking for aid from other taxation sources. Rural education must not be placed on the basis of a missionary enterprise. State aid should be used to compensate for the difference in the economic basis for taxation in different localities, and not for a difference in the rates of taxation between localities equally able to pay the same rate.

We may conclude, then, that while neither the rural school nor the community has been fully aware of the possibilities for mutual helpfulness and coöperation, yet there are many hopeful signs that both are awakening to a sense of responsibility. Federal and state commissions have been created to study the rural problem, national and state teachers' associations are seeking a solution of the rural school question, and, better still, the patrons of the rural schools are in many places alive to the pressing need for better educational facilities for their children.

Growing out of these influences