76 Missouri Agricultural Report. 



viding for the consolidation of a few districts in order to form a 

 central school, and we want to look forward to the development of 

 country high schools that will bring high school instruction, es- 

 pecially in agriculture for the boys and in domestic science for the 

 girls, right near the homes of the boys and girls. We can never 

 get that until it is possible for the State to give aid to the indi- 

 vidual community, because it is only in a few communities where 

 this provision of our present school law is worth anything. In 

 Jackson county, I believe there are three or four of these schools, 

 and I take it that it is possible to have them now in the best farm- 

 ing districts of the State, but in a great many districts it will not 

 be possible until the State comes to aid us in the establishment of 

 these rural high schools, and I hope that that will be a step taken 

 in the near future — the development of high schools adapted to 

 training the youths for life on the farm and also to train them for 

 teaching in small rural schools, and in some case enabling them to 

 go on to the Agricultural College of the State University. We in 

 the University are, of course, specially interested, in rural schools 

 and the development of country high schools, because, as anyone 

 knows who observes university life, our very best students in the 

 University are to be found among those who come from the rural 

 communities and who by hard work and indirect methods have 

 reached the university course. In my college days, I observed that 

 of the men who stood out as prominent students, three-fourths of 

 them were from the farms, and I am afraid that with the lack of 

 high school facilities in the rural communities, this situation is 

 likely to change because our towns are developing high schools 

 rapidly, and the boy on the farm is now at greater disadvantage 

 compared to his town brother than formerly. 



We are interested in this matter for other reasons : One of 

 our departments here concerns itself directly with the life on the 

 farm, and we are at present cut off, except for our short course, 

 from direct touch with the rural communities so far as the coming 

 of students from those communities is concerned, and this agri- 

 cultural college is therefore vitally interested in seeing the con- 

 necting link established in the way of these country high schools 

 so that we can have a direct connection with the rural pupils who 

 wish to take an agricultural course here as well as the indirect one 

 through the town high schools. It seems to me that if the Agricul- 

 tural College is to do the greatest service to the agricultural com- 

 munities of the State, it will have to find an opportunity to teach 

 not only the adults of the farming population by sending them 



