Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 86.djvu/183

Rh of what ought to be done for every country community. The state should probably take the lead, as Ohio is doing in her rural school survey, and make a complete study of the whole of her rural life. Until this is done, the school and the church will cling to tradition, and the broad cultural side of life on the farm will be neglected. And so long as this is neglected, that long will the social reason for deserting farm life exist, and the drift to the city continue.

If it is not in the province of the rural school to assist in the solution of these problems, by giving to the children a proper understanding of the rural conditions, by providing a center for the social and intellectual life of the community, then all its traditional procedure, all its narrowness which is being so broadly criticized, is justified and represents efficiency. Or putting it another way, if the government, which theoretically exists of, by and for the people, does not attempt to meet these destructive tendencies in our national life, it is following an outworn social and political philosophy. And if the state does try to meet them, and does not use the rural school as a means to that end, it is ignoring one of the most efficient agencies it has, and one whose very meaning as an institution rests in its capacity to render this broad social and intellectual service to farm life.

The problem of the rural school is therefore the problem of the rural people. It is not as narrow as a book, but it is as broad as life. The school must accept its share in these large social, economic, and intellectual responsibilities, and stand ready to assist in the execution of a broad constructive social policy, whose aim it shall be to make rural life not merely tolerable, but wholesome and attractive.