146 STATE BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



that they are free, and they are intended to educate. And plans like 

 these are growing in our cities. Other schools are doing something of this 

 kind of work. A new school building in New York city, large enough to 

 contain forty-eight rooms, is expressly designed for use to some extent 

 as a neighborhood center. It includes an auditorium to hold twelve 

 hundred people, so arranged that it can be used as an assembly hall for 

 pupils, and also for the general public. There will be gymnasiums and 

 these can be used both by pupils and by the general public. It will not 

 be feasible for the rural school to carry out such a program as this, but I 

 mention the plan to show the possibilities of this idea of making the 

 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 I have been 

 describing. Of course, the Grange and farmers' clubs are doing much 

 along these lines, but I still believe that it is 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 right here in Michigan 

 that are doing work of this very kind. I can see no 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 do- 

 mestic science. There is need of this sort of thing, and I believe that if our 

 Agricultural College and the Department of Public Instruction, and the 

 county commissioners of schools, and the county teachers, and the farmers 

 themselves, could come a little closer together on these questions the 

 thing could be done. 



5. Fifth and last, I would suggest as a method for making the school 

 a social center, 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 some one should take the lead in inspiring every one 

 in the community to read better books, to buy better pictures, to take 

 more interest in the things that make for culture and progress? I am 

 aware that there are special diflficulties in a country community. I know 

 that the rural teacher is usually a transient ; that she gets a city school 

 as soon as she can; that she is often poorly paid; that she is sometimes 

 inexperienced; that frequently the labor of the school absorbs all her 

 time and energy. I am fully aware that these things are so. but I am 

 also fully aware that they ought not to be so. And I don't believe that 

 we shall ever have the ideal rural school until we have conditions favor- 

 able to the kind of work I am speaking of, I think that the country 

 teacher ought to understand the country community, ought to have some 

 knowledge of the problems that farmers have to face, ought to have 

 some appreciation of the peculiar conditions of farm life. If I had my 

 way, I would require every teacher to have some knowledge of rural 

 sociology. And what do I mean by rural sociology ? Let me just suggest 

 the lines of work that were taken up this last semester in the University 

 of Michigan in a course of this character, one of the first in the country. 

 We studied first something about the business of farming, its importance 

 as an industry, its relation to other industries, the extent to which it is 

 progressing, the regions of country in which it is most flourishing. We 

 took up the movement of population from the farms to the cities, and 



