work and a feeling of its value, rather than from any artificial
incentives.

How great a problem poor attendance at rural schools is, may be realized
from the fact that, in spite of compulsory education laws, not more than
seventy per cent of the children accessible to the rural school are
enrolled, and of this number only about sixty per cent are in daily
attendance. This is to say that under one half of our farm children are
daily receiving the advantages of even the rural school. In some States
this proportion will fall as low as three tenths instead of one half.
In many rich agricultural counties of the Middle West, having a farming
population of approximately ten thousand, not more than forty or fifty
pupils per year complete the eight grades of the rural school.

If the rural school is to be able to claim the regular attendance and
spontaneous cooeperation of the children it must (1) be reasonably
accessible to them, (2) be attractive and interesting in itself, and (3)
offer work the value and application of which are evident.

The inaccessibility of the rural school has always been one of its
greatest disadvantages. In a large proportion of cases, a walk of from a
mile to a mile and a half along country roads or across cultivated
fields has been required to reach the schoolhouse. During inclement
weather, or when deep snow covers the ground, this distance proves
almost prohibitive for all the smaller children. Wet feet and drenched
clothing have been followed by severe colds, coughs, bronchitis, or
worse, and the children have not only suffered educationally, but been
endangered physically as well.

It has been found in all instances that public conveyance of pupils to
the consolidated schools greatly increases rural school patronage. It
makes the school accessible. The regular wagon service does away with
the "hit-and-miss" method of determining for each succeeding day whether
it is advisable for the child to start for school. So important is this
factor in securing attendance, that a careful study by Knorr[3] of the
attendance in Ohio district and consolidated schools shows twenty-seven
per cent more of the total school population in school under the
influence of public conveyance and other features peculiar to
consolidation than under the district system. He concludes that, broadly
speaking, by a system of consolidated schools with public conveyance,
rural school attendance can be increased by at least on