92 Missouri Agricultural Report. 



How can this fundamental rural task best be forwarded in 

 Kansas and in Missouri in 1914? First, organize local com- 

 munity campaigns in as many neighborhoods as possible. Seek 

 the formation of a community council or federation, made up of 

 representatives of all the organizations in the neighborhood that 

 have any interest in the common good — the church, the grange, 

 the women's clubs, the farmers' union, etc. Seek to discover 

 the needs of the neighborhood that perchance may be met by 

 the organized forces of the neighborhood itself. Endeavor to 

 make an intelligent plan of operations for improving the com- 

 munity in all needful respects. 



Second, push the idea of better schools for the country boy 

 and girl, including consolidated district high schools and an 

 agricultural department in the public high school Consoli- 

 dated schools are on the increase in my state, and wherever the 

 experiment has been tried I hear only good results. One such 

 school in a little country neighborhood in Saline county, Kansas, 

 has one hundred seventy-six wagon pupils. They are taken 

 to and from the school in school wagons. None of the hundred 

 seventy-six was tardy last year. Even the wagons, which seem 

 to be the chief objectionable feature, are considered advantage- 

 ous in this respect — that a number of the pupils always ride 

 together. There is less chance for misbehavior, less chance for 

 any wrongdoing than where the boys and girls have a distance 

 to go on foot, by road and across fields. In the matter of ex- 

 pense, I am told the consolidated school costs little more money 

 on the average than separate schools, but the results in every 

 other way are so much better that our taxpayers who have 

 these schools are glad to pay the difference. 



Farming demands educated men and women. Agricul- 

 tural colleges neither in the classroom nor in their extension 

 service can meet the full need. Every boy or girl desiring the 

 equivalent of a good school education, either in academic or 

 agriculture, should have that training. We are coming more 

 and more to believe that the farmer that can afford to educate 

 his children has robbed them if he keeps their schooling money 

 and with it buys more acres of land to leave them after he is 

 gone. We must work for better rural or graded schools for the 

 benefit of the vast number of children unable to obtain the 

 advantages of a higher education, for more attention to the 

 fundamental and practical in education, for open schoolhouses 

 for the public, and the encouragement of the social center idea 



