when it can be helpful to any portion of the community?_

If young people are to develop naturally, if they are to make full use
of their social as well as their intellectual powers, if they are to be
satisfied with their surroundings, they must be provided with suitable
opportunities for social mingling and recreation in groups. This is
nature's way; there is no other way. The school might and should afford
this opportunity. There is not the least reason why the school building,
when it is adapted to this purpose, should not be the common
neighborhood meeting place for all sorts of young people's parties,
picnics, entertainments, athletic contests, and every other form of
amusement approved in the community.

Such a use of the school property would yield large returns to the
community for the small additional expense required. It would serve to
weld the school and community more closely together. It would vastly
change the attitude of the young toward the school. It would save much
of the dissatisfaction of young people with the life of the farm. It
would prove a great safeguard to youthful morals. It would lead the
community itself to a new sense of its duty toward the social life of
the young, and to a new concept of the school as a part of the community
organization. Finally, this broadened service of the school to its
community would have a reflex influence on the school itself, vitalizing
every department of its activities, and giving it a new vision of its
opportunities.

The first obstacle that will appear in the way of such a plan is the
inadequacy of the present type of country schoolhouse. And this is a
serious matter; for the barren, squalid little building of the present
day would never fit into such a project. But this type of schoolhouse
must go--is going. It is a hundred years behind our civilization, and
wholly inadequate to present needs. Passing for later discussion the
method by which these buildings are to be supplanted by better ones, let
us consider further the details of the plan of making the school the
neighborhood center.

First of all, each school must supply a larger area and a greater number
of people than at present. It is financially impossible to erect good
buildings to the number of our present schools. Nor are there pupils
enough in the small district as now organized to make a school, nor
people enough successfully to use the school as a neighborhood center.

Let each township, o