EDUCATION OF RURAL PEOPLE 119 



school communities and school boards managing the 

 rural school and sometimes responsible for a rural high 

 school. 



Now all these agencies deal with agricultural educa- 

 tion to a greater or less extent. One of the great needs 

 in our agricultural work to-day is to secure the definite 

 cooperation of all these authorities, in order to make a 

 complete system of agricultural education. This will 

 have to be done by law and it probably will not be done 

 unless the farmers themselves insist upon it in both state 

 and nation. We are not suggesting merging all these 

 agencies into one, but simply the unification of plan and 

 effort for the sake of efficiency. 



We also need to make a much more extensive and 

 thorough-going plan for the scientific investigation of 

 our agricultural problem. A vast amount of work has 

 been done and is being done to-day. The modern 

 teaching of agriculture has been made possible by the 

 men of science in the experiment stations and the United 

 States Department of Agriculture. This need of en- 

 larged research is particularly evident in the fields of 

 economics and of social life. For years, the farmers 

 have been urging that the problem of distribution is 

 much more important to them than the problems of 

 production; yet only a fraction of the amount of money 

 spent for investigations concerned with the soil and the 

 plant and the animal has been available for making 

 studies concerning markets and other phases of the dis- 

 tribution question. Research must not stop even here. 

 We need some of the best minds of the time at work 

 on the basic problems of human life as they can be 

 worked out in a farm community. What are the fun- 

 damental problems of a rural democracy the world 

 over? We must train leaders for this rural democ- 



