aid society meeting two evenings a week, to study the cutting of
patterns, garment-making, etc.; a food-study and cooking club, also
meeting two evenings a week; an inventive and mechanical club, meeting
two evenings a week, and tending to develop the inventive and mechanical
genius of a group of young men; an art club; and a boy's club, with
music, games, reading-lessons, reading of books and magazines, intended
for boys of fourteen or fifteen years of age. These things are all
under the direction of the school, they are free, they are designed to
educate. It will not be feasible for the rural school to carry out such
a programme as this, but do we realize how large are the possibilities
of this idea of making the rural school a community center? No doubt one
of the advantages of the centralized rural school will be to give a
central meeting-place for the township, and to encourage work of the
character that has been described. Of course, the Grange and farmers'
clubs are doing much along these lines, but is it not possible for the
district school also to do some useful work of this character?
Singing-schools and debating clubs were quite a common thing in the
rural schools forty years ago, and there are many rural schools today
that are doing work of this very kind. Is there any reason, for example,
why the country schoolhouse should not offer an evening school during a
portion of the winter, where the older pupils who have left the regular
work of the school can carry on studies, especially in agriculture and
domestic science? There is need for this sort of thing, and if our
agricultural colleges, and the departments of public instruction, and
the local school supervisors, and the country teachers, and the farmers
themselves, could come a little closer together on these questions the
thing could be done!

5. Fifth and last, as a method for making the school a social center, is
the suggestion that the teacher herself shall become something of a
leader in the farm community. The teacher ought to be not only a teacher
of the pupils, but in some sense a teacher of the community. Is there
not need that someone should take the lead in inspiring everyone in the
community to read better books, to buy better pictures, to take more
interest in the things that make for culture and progress? There are
special difficulties in a country community. The rural teacher is
usually a transient; she secures a city school as soon as she