brought to the rural
community, but only when country people come to appreciate and develop
those forms of play and recreation which are possible and adapted to
their conditions, and when they are willing to afford ample facilities
and opportunity for the play of their children, will the lure of the
city be checked. With such a changed attitude the rural community need
have no fear of the competition of the city. It may not be able to have
as fine commercial amusements, but it can have the best sort of play and
recreation at small cost, for which the cities incur large expense.

There is a peculiar need for a better understanding of the place of play
and recreation in the open country at the present time. Formerly large
families gave better opportunity for the children of one family to play
together, and there were more children of similar ages at the district
school of the neighborhood. To-day with farms farther apart and fewer
children, farm children do not have sufficient opportunity to play
together in groups. The better opportunity for group play and team
games is one of the advantages of the consolidated school which has been
too little appreciated.

We have seen that one of the obvious necessities for the economic
progress of agriculture is that its business be conducted on a
cooperative basis. The chief obstacle to cooperation is the
individualism of the farmer. The training of boys and girls in team
games, in which they learn loyalty to the group and to subordinate
themselves to the winning of the team, will do much to change this
attitude. Boys who play baseball and basketball together, who are
associated in boy scouts and agricultural clubs, will be much quicker to
cooperate, for they grow up with an attitude of loyalty to the team
group as well as to their own family.

Again, the awkwardness and self-consciousness of the country youth in
comparison with his city cousin is due to no inherent inferiority, for
in a few years he often out-strips him, but it is the direct result of
his lack of social contacts. Personality develops through social life,
through the give and take of one personality with another, through
imitation, and the acquirement of a natural ease of association with
others. The country boy and girl who has had the advantage of
association with larger groups in the consolidated school or high school
tends to become quite the social equal of the city child.

Heretofore many people, and parti