42 STATE BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



hemmed iu, it may be, by large buildings on every side, the city school 

 is stamped with an artificiality which ought not to be there but which is 

 there in spite of the best the teacher can do. Now, transfer the teaching 

 to the rural high school and there you will find that the teacher may very 

 easily make reference iu the line of anything that may be taught in the 

 school. There can be taught in the school that which may have its 

 reference to the very life the child lives out of doors. Nature-study can 

 be taught in the rural schools as it cannot be in the city schools. "^ The 

 great men of our nation have been bred in the country. Why? Not, as 

 Supt. Harvey has well said, so much with reference to the little red 

 school house and the effect which that has produced upon the life; for, 

 if you will study the lives of those great men you will find that in addition 

 to the country school they added a little to the education which they got 

 in the country school by attendance upon high school and college. They 

 became great in the country because there they were surrounded by that 

 which makes for greatness in every way. It's a more difficult thing to 

 make a great man out of the artificial surroundings which are apt to be 

 characteristic of the city schools. You cannot so well produce a great 

 man out of a home where the house comes close to the sidewalk and which 

 is hemmed in by other houses close by. On the other hand, turn the 

 ambitious boy out in the country in God's free air, let him have contact 

 with the air, the soil, the water, the forest, the animal life, and all which 

 makes up God's nature, which is characteristic of the country, and his 

 soul will expand, his life will enlarge, he will take on greatness if the 

 possibility of greatness be in him. I prophesy that there will come a time 

 when there will be established an ideal school, a school that will do more 

 for the ordinary boy and girl than can possibly be done in the ordinary 

 city school. And we will be so pleased with the product of the rural 

 high school that then, instead of 17,000 pupils going from country homes 

 to city schools, the travel will be in the opposite direction. When I pre- 

 sented this thought in private conversation to a man eminent in educa- 

 tional work, he said "I will be glad to send my boys and girls to your 

 rural high school when it is established, certain that there they will get 

 an education which will be free from many of the limitations incident to 

 that which is gained in the city school." 



1 want us all to study the benefits that may come and will be certain 

 to come from the establishment of a rural high school. 



If time and your patience permitted I would be glad to speak more 

 definitely of plans and methods of consolidation. Week before last I 

 drove rapidly through eight districts in the county of Berrien in the 

 southwestern part of this State. I visited eight district schools. In not 

 one of those schools was there a larger attendance than thirteen. One 

 school had six pupils, another seven, another nine, and the largest num- 

 ber w^as thirteen; the average of those schools was eight. Now, can we 

 make a good school out of eight pupils? 



If I thought there were no Berrien county people in this audience 

 tonight I would characterize one of these schools. Here was one called the 

 Pollywog district. Here were two great thoroughfares, two main roads 

 included in this district. When they tried to establish the site for the 

 district school they could not agree, and as they could not agree, the 

 matter, under the law, went to the township board of school inspectors. 

 Down in a hollow, in the middle of the woods, in an obscure place, they 



