Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 86.djvu/182

178 in the country is just double what it is in the city, and this despite the fact that nearly all the illiterate immigrants who come to this country reside in the cities.

The problem of rural life from an economic viewpoint seems broad enough, and the task of the rural school looms large; yet we must add, that while 53.7 per cent. of the people in the United States live in the country, the per cent. of children of school age (6-20) who live in the country is 58.5. That is 53.7 per cent. of the people have to educate 58.5 per cent. of the children; while the other 46.3 per cent., who live in the city, have to educate only 41.3 per cent. of the children.

From the social side there is a problem nearly as great. For even if the telephone, the rural mail delivery, the automobile, and the good roads movements as doing much to make possible a better social life, yet where is the theater, the moving pictures, the library, the high school, the club house, the athletic fields, the parks, the shop windows, the bright lights, the crowd? These are in the city, and they call loudly to the young life in the country. Isolation is the word in the country which corresponds to the word congestion in the city. The play side of life is too narrow, and people die of lonesomeness.

It is not the purpose of this article to suggest the country school as a panacea for all these social, religious, intellectual, and economic ills, but it would urge that a systematic study of the whole problem should be made in order that the appropriate function of each rural institution may be more scientifically determined. What is said here is true only of the United States as a whole, and not of any one section in particular. But a constructive effort should be made in every community to understand the problem as it exists there. And then for its solution we need, not so much a new institution, as a reinterpretation of the function of the institutions we already have. The rural church ought to exist, but it must teach wholesome religion in the place of medieval creeds, and build community churches instead of Methodist or Presbyterian churches. In like manner, the school must drop some of its traditions, quit luring children away to the city, and begin to reconstruct in terms of country life. It must be a state school in more than name, and be a school for old as well as young. The schoolhouse must be open for all kinds of social and intellectual programs, and become the center of community life.

But this can not be done by the various rural institutions working singly, at different fragments of the problem. Concerted effort is needed, and we can not propose a safe plan of reconstruction for the school, or for the church, or for social life, until we know more about the present status and more about the facts which must underlie any constructive program.

The Country Life Commission is a notable example on a large scale