s. The
sequel is found in the fact that a larger proportion of country girls
than of city girls go astray. Nor is the rural community more successful
in the morals of its boys than its girls. In other words, the lack of
opportunities for free and normal social experience, the consequent
ignorance of social conventions, and the absence of healthful amusement
and recreation, make the rural community a most unsafe place in which
to rear a family.

But the necessity for social recreation and amusement does not apply to
the young people alone. Their fathers and mothers are suffering from the
same limitations, though of course with entirely different results. The
danger here is that of premature aging and stagnation. While the toil of
the city worker is relieved by change and variety, his mind rested and
his mood enlivened by the stimulus from many lines of diversion, the
lives of the dwellers on the farm are constantly threatened by a deadly
sameness and monotony.

The indisputable tendency of farmers and their wives to age so rapidly,
and so early to fall into the ranks of "fogyism," is due far more to
lack of variety and recreation and to dearth of intellectual stimulus
than to hard labor, severe as this often is. Age is more than the flight
of the years, the stoop of the form, or the hardening of the arteries;
it is also the atrophy of the intellect and the fading away of the
emotions resulting from disuse. The farmer needs occasionally to have
something more exciting than the alternation of the day's work with the
nightly "chores." And his wife should now and then have an opportunity
to meet people other than those for whom she cooks and sews.

But what has all this to do with the social organization of the rural
school? Much. The country cannot have its theaters, parks, and crowded
thoroughfares like the city. But it needs and must have _some_ social
center, where its people may assemble for recreation, entertainment, and
intellectual growth and development. And what is more natural and
feasible than that the public school should be this center? Here is an
institution already belonging to the whole people, and set apart for the
intellectual training of the young. Why should it not also be made to
minister to the intellectual needs of their elders as well, and to the
social needs of all? _Why should not the public school building, now in
use but six hours a day for little more than half the year, be open at
all times