Missouri Country Life Conference. 



225 



W. F. Hupe. 



ADDRESS BY W. F. HUPE. 



(Mr. Hupe is superintendent of schools in Montgomery county and is a real leader In Agri- 

 cultural and country life work.) 



I came here to make a great speech, but now I can't do it. 



You will know I had a great speech 

 when I tell you that Mr. Wright stole 

 it and delivered it just now. In the 

 second place, I am informed that I am 

 limited to five minutes when I expected 

 to use fifteen minutes. So I shall have 

 to hurry and touch only high places. 

 When I used to sit in this audience 

 as a student, when I attended school 

 here, I longed for the time when I 

 might have the honor of standing on 

 this platform or speaking from it. 

 Now when I have the privilege I am 

 afraid to get up there. I wish I did 

 not have the opportunity. 



It seems to me that this problem of rural life improvement 

 which we are discussing this afternoon is largely one of education 

 — education through the schools. I do not want to repeat Mr. 

 Wright's speech, but I do want to suggest just one or two things 

 in connection with it that he may have left unsaid. 



In the first place, it seems to me, as he has already so 

 forcibly argued, that we need a change of ideals, need to hold 

 up before our boys and girls different ideals. We have held up 

 long enough the ideal of the president, the governor, the states- 

 man, or the doctor or the teacher, or of the lawyer, as Mr. 

 Wright said, but we have left unsaid, untaught, those things 

 about the country men who were just as great as our presidents, 

 or our governors or our statesmen. We need to teach in our 

 schools, in our rural schools, something about the things that 

 surround the boys and girls on the farm — some of the things 

 that savor of the country life and country interests. And the 

 boy or girl that learns to interpret the grass that grows in the' 

 field, the flower that grows by the wayside, or the trees that 

 grow in the forest, has learned a lesson that is no less valuable 

 or no less important than the solution of a mathematical prob- 

 lem, so far as his or her well-being and happiness is concerned. 



A— 15 



