for better educational facilities
for their children.

Growing out of these influences and the faithful work of many state and
county superintendents, and not a few of the rural teachers themselves,
a spirit of progress is gaining headway. Several thousand consolidated
schools are now rendering excellent service to their patrons and at the
same time acting as a stimulus to other communities to follow their
example. State aid to rural education is no longer an experiment. The
people are in many localities voluntarily and gladly increasing their
taxes in order that they may improve their schools. Teachers' salaries
are being increased, better equipment provided, and buildings rendered
more habitable.

The great educational problem of the immediate future will be to
encourage and guide the movement which is now getting under way. For
mistakes made now will handicap both community and school for years to
come. The attempt to secure better schools by "improving" conditions in
local districts should be definitely abandoned except in localities
where conditions make consolidation impracticable for the present. The
new consolidated school building should take definitely into account the
fact that the school is to become the _neighborhood social center_, and
the structure should be planned as much with this function in view as
with its uses for school purposes. The new type of rural school is not
to aim simply to give a better intellectual training, but is at the same
time to relate this training to the conditions and needs of our
agricultural population. And all who have to do with the rural schools
in any way are to seek to make the school a true vitalizing factor in
the community--a leaven, whose influence shall permeate every line of
interest and activity of its patrons and lead to a fuller and richer
life.

_The rural school and its pupils_

One of the surest tests of any school is the attitude of the pupils--the
spirit of loyalty, cooeperation, and devotion they manifest with
reference to their education. Do they, on the whole, look upon the
school as an opportunity or an imposition? Do they consider it _their_
school, and make its interests and welfare their concern, or do they
think of it as the teacher's school, or the board's school or the
district's school? These questions are of supreme importance, for the
question of attitude, quite as much as that of ability, determines the
use made of opportunity.

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