For these reasons the church does not seem able to furnish the nucleus of the rural social center save in rare instances. Here and there, the rural church is doing good work in building up again the lost sense of neighborship; but on the whole churches are losing ground in the country. One of the gravest problems which confronts the churches is the problem of the ebb-tide which is leaving stranded and abandoned churches on so many countrysides. Moreover, the church cannot do the whole work. Many people do not belong to any church. Those who do belong are divided among many denominations, which, if not warring on each other, are not coöperating, and are in no position to coöperate. The church cannot call in aid the powers of taxation, nor the assistance of the state. It may be a social center for the community, but it can never be, and should not be, the social center.

The neighborhood club and the coöperative organization are doing good work in places. Women's clubs have worked great changes in some rural neighborhoods. I know of some places where clubs of farmers' wives have kept up for many years successful meetings of a character very similar to the gatherings of people interested in literature, current events, and music in cities. Some of these communities are admirably served by these clubs. But on the whole I feel that there is less of this social activity than there was thirty years ago. The clubs are better, perhaps, than were the old spellingschools and "literaries," but they are vastly fewer. The need for social centers everywhere, as a potent force in American life as universal as the practice of agriculture, has no hope in these. The communities that most need awakening are incapable of finding utility or amusement in these rather sophisticated and “highbrowish" affairs. Something more elemental and elementary, more useful and more profitable materially, must appear.

Along with this demand for rural centers comes the admitted need for a new kind of rural school. The rural school of to-day

is apt to be in the main a bad copy of a poor city school. It is not related to the country life. It proceeds as if on the theory that farmers' sons should all become clerks or professional men engaged in urban employment and all country girls stenographers, shopgirls, factory employees, or the wives of such city-dwellers. The bias of the rural school against rural life is the one great scholastic blunder of this nation. It has acted as a powerful wind blowing the selfsame way with the baneful tide of allurement and economic pressure which has been for so many fateful years, and still is, emptying the farms into the cities.

Our eyes are becoming opened to the destruction which such schools work on our national life. The word has gone forth that the rural school must be ruralized. It must be correlated with rural life. It must open the eyes of the country children to the beauties of that field of nature in which the farmer acts with, and is reacted upon by, scientific truth. Our arithmetic must deal with the quantities of soil constituents, farm inventories, eggs, poultry, cow-testing, and generally with the computation of problems related to scientific agriculture. Every problem in mathematics must be a problem in scientific rural life. Our nature-studies must deal no more with the koodoo, the mongoose, the toucan, and the aard-vark, but rather with the cow, the hen, the hog, the horse, and the sheep. Our physiologies must abandon the useless anatomies and terminologies of yesterday, and become comparative. The physiology of the domestic animals must be considered with that of the human being to the end that we shall know our animals while knowing ourselves, and each the better for knowing the other; and our hygiene must take in the nutrition of these friends of the barnyard and pasture. Thus the rural school shall become a school of animal husbandry. Geography must so far include the study of soils that the child may know of the plant food in his father's farm, whether he knows the capital of his state or not. Reading and spelling must be related to the life of the farm. History must tell of the movements of agriculture,

rather than of battles or political contests. Pupils will do their language work in reporting the results of experiments in farming, rather than in the diagramming of sentences or the parsing of words. And where such work in systematic grammar is done, the sentences chosen will be such as to possess a background in the real life of the pupils, rather than in mythology or the classics. The school will be completely ruralized.

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And in this process the cultural efficiency of the schools will be increased tenfold, because the children will not only imbibe ideas, but will use them. The dreadful uselessness of most of our purely "cultural" studies lies in the feeling on the part of the child that the whole matter is in an unreal world of school and quite aside from the world of life. When the rural schools become real laboratories of farm life, and girls study in the schools the very things their parents are laboring with on the farm, the habit of thinking about things rather than about words will give vigor to every phase of thought. If I desired to produce a generation of poets, artists, mathematicians, and statesmen, I would begin by giving to the minds of the young the real grain of scientific truth to grind, trusting to the insatiable hunger of the mind which grows by every morsel of truth consumed by it. I once saw in one of these new rural schools a boy sitting with a rack of agricultural bulletins at his elbow, writing on raspberry culture. I asked him why he chose that topic for his essay. "I'm growing raspberries for the market," said he. Language for this boy was a medium for expressing thought, rather than for getting marks. He was interested in the essay, but more in next year's crates of berries. Out of such conditions will come pupils who will make the language glow with meaning, as do Caesar's Commentaries and Grant's Memoirs - and for the identical reason that gives immortality to these works as literature. In each case the writer will have something to say.

Out of this new kind of country school, I believe, will grow the new kind of rural social center. Already the Babcock

milk-tester, the weed cabinet, the trap nest, the experimental plat of grain, vegetable, or flower are to be seen in and about the rural school. Wherever these schools are correlated with rural life, the social center springs up in the school spontaneously. I am convinced that if it is to live and serve it must so spring up. A farmer in Page County, Iowa, was rather opposed to the newfangled notion of teaching agriculture in the school. But after the milk of his cows had been tested in the school, as a part of its regular exercises, he changed his mind. For by this test he discovered that cows which he had thought as good as any were actually being kept at a loss. The simple classroom experiment in natural philosophy had made it possible for this family to live a fuller and happier life. The school reacted on the home, and the home felt it. To this man the school became as much a part of his life as it had been of the life of his children. The correlated rural school thus becomes a continuation school for every man in the district. And for every woman, too. The girls who compete in the cooking and sewing contests bring their mothers into the work of the schoolroom inevitably. A link is established connecting every farm with every other farm, and binding them all together. A social center comes into being with or without meetings. But the meetings are inevitable, and with the fact of meetings come social relations, debates, lectures, moving-picture shows, and perhaps dances and games. The people meet because they have something to consult about, and not because some wellmeaning person has said, "Go to, now let us be social."

I am convinced that the school must furnish the nucleus of the rural social center of the future. It must do so by making its work a part of the farm work of the community. It must do so by an appeal to the economic sense of the people. It must do so by taking over and performing a great deal of work that can be done by the pupils to their great educational advantage, and to the financial benefit of the farmers. The schools are equipped, or can equip themselves, to perform a great many

such tasks. They may carry on cow-testing work for the upbuilding of dairy herds. They may work out balanced rations for the live stock and poultry of the neighborhood, in each case furnishing the farmer the instructions for mingling feeds, and telling what he should buy for the purpose of balancing the diet. For these things are a matter of investigation which any advanced class in a country school may do. They may keep records of the egg production of the various flocks, to the end that the best local strains may be known. They may record increases in weights of the different lots of animals being fed, that the best rations and the best conditions and the best breeds may be recognized. They may analyze every lot of seed brought into the neighborhood, for foul seeds and for vitality. They may test the seed corn of the neighborhood, ear by ear, or, if this seems impracticable, they may make and send out the cabinets for such testing at the homes. This work alone would add millions to the corn crop of any of our corn-growing states if it were universally carried out. They may test new vegetables and flowers. They may make garments for the homes. They may develop the art of cookery to the great satisfaction of the housewives. They may make war on flies and vermin. They may make the hookworm in our Southern states a thing of the past. Some schools may do all of these things now, and any school may do some of them. And as soon as this work starts, the social center is well on the way to flourishing birth, whether it is intended or not.

There are other and higher tasks to which the rural schools may address themselves as they gather strength by contact with truth-tasks beyond the power of the ordinary farmer to perform. One of the greatest of these is the task of keeping the farm accounts. Many will be surprised at the statement that no satisfactory system of farm accounts of a statistical nature has as yet been worked out. So many agricultural economists are now at work on this matter, however, that we shall soon have, I doubt not, as good a cost system for the