Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 84.djvu/187

Rh as well as in the center, and the children are within their mothers' reach. But the next upper grades, in the rural community, must be centralized, strongly manned, with an adequate curriculum. Here manual training and elementary agriculture, can be taken in hand, and when this is done in earnest and with skill and enthusiasm, it becomes interesting, and by its appeal to the boy's larger self, holds him longer in school.

But the rural district needs a high school. It may be true that no rural community can equip a school that would compare with the city high school, where, now, some of the boys and girls are sent; nevertheless if it would take its own place in the world, the rural community must have its own high school. For it is not the boys and girls that are fitting for college, financed and forced by their parents, who create the school problem here, but the boys and girls who have not so much as heard that there is a college. It is the large number of pupils that might attend high school, and possibly go up to college, were a high school nearer home involving little, or no expense, and for which, to some degree, their fathers were responsible, who complicate the school problem, and make it vital. No one can conjecture what talent, or slumbering genius even a year in the high school might develop in the dullest boy. And it is the possible boy and man who must be provided for. The waste of possible men and women of greater parts than the common life bears witness to among the farmers is great and sad. In the face of so much latent energy of the highest kind, the talk one hears about the expense of the thing is utterly unworthy of an intelligent community. It is indeed true that the farmer has suffered from the tax system of our government more than any other class, but it is not so much demanded that more money shall be raised, as that what is raised be more intelligently expended; so placed that it can make returns in character and in life.

Now that the world, once more, is waking up to the fact that the rural community is an absolute necessity in the economy of civilization, a splendid opportunity opens before the schoolmaster to make himself felt. Here the schoolhouse may become the power house of a higher life. But the master must have the training necessary to reach the practical element in these problems; he must be able to meet the boy's need of a dignified curriculum, and he must possess in himself a neverending fund of imagination, of enthusiasm, and of long vision. Given such a man backed by a well-equipped schoolroom, and the community has a powerful asset towards grappling with the new life of the day, and meeting the economic, political and moral demands now being made upon it.