ities.

Now contrast this schoolhouse and equipment with the typical rural
building of the present. Adjoining a prosperous farm, with its large
house, its accompanying barns, silos, machine houses, and all the
equipment necessary to modern farming, is the little schoolhouse. It is
a dilapidated shell of a rectangular box, barren of every vestige of
beauty or attractiveness both inside and out. At the rear are two
outbuildings which are an offense to decency and a menace to morals.
Within the schoolhouse the painted walls are dingy with smoke and grime.
The windows are broken and dirty, no pictures adorn the walls. The floor
is washed but once or twice a year. The room is heated by an ugly box of
a stove, and ventilated only by means of windows which frequently are
nailed shut. The grounds present a wilderness of weeds, rubbish, and
piles of ashes. It is all an outrage against the rights of the country
child, and an indictment of the intelligence and ideals of a large
proportion of our people.

If it is said that the plan proposed to remedy this situation is
revolutionary, it will be admitted. What our rural schools of to-day
need is _not improvement but reorganization_. For only in this radical
way can they be made a factor in the vitalizing and conserving of the
rural community which, unless some new leaven is introduced, is surely
destined to disorganization and decay.

_The consolidation of rural schools_

The first step in reorganizing the rural schools is _consolidation_. Our
rural school organization, buildings, and equipment are a full century
behind our industrial and social advancement. The present plan of
attempting to run a school on approximately every four square miles of
territory originated at a time of poverty, and when the manufacturing
industries were all carried on in the homes and small shops. Our rural
people are now well-to-do, and manufacturing has moved over into a
well-organized set of factories; but the isolated little school,
shamefully housed, meagerly equipped, poorly attended, and unskillfully
taught, still remains.

Such a system of schools leaves our rural people educationally on a par
with the days of cradling the grain and threshing it with a flail; of
planting corn by hand and cultivating it with a hoe; of lighting the
house with a tallow dip, and traveling by stage-coach.

The well-meant attempts to "improve" the rural school as now organized
are futile. The proposal to solve