144 



home, and above all, to the future success of your boys and girls, when you 

 have a first-class consolidated school in your community. 



I wish I could transport you, as I have been transported, to some of 

 our consolidated communities, through the printed word and pictures, and 

 I feel assured that your interest and enthusiasm would be awakened, so at 

 least you would begin the agitation and work for a consolidated school in 

 your midst. 



SOME CONSOLIDATED SCHOOLS. J 



Let us go to Tate County, Mississippi, and view some of their large 

 two-story school buildings, with a large group of pupils in front, ranging 

 from the 6-year-old to the senior in high school. You know by the looks of 

 the buildings they contain the equipment for all the educational needs 

 of the country boy and girl. They are beautiful, sanitary and thoroughly 

 equipped to meet the needs of the child. 



When J. T. Calhoun, state rural supervisor, was asked, "Are the con- 

 solidated schools having any direct effect on farm life?" he replied: "Yes, 

 not only on farm life, but very often their influence permeates the whole 

 life of a county. Tate County people are using their schools to redeem the 

 county from an unsound business and farming system." 



When J. B. Snider, Jr., editor of one of their papers, was asked about 

 the financial condition of the county, he said: "Yes, we are hard hit. We 

 expected it; knew, in fact, that we could not escape. But and here is the 

 reason we are not downhearted we are building so this sort of col' apse 

 cannot happen again. When I say we are building to escape future ca'ami- 

 ties I refer to the schools." He means that their boys and girls are to be 

 educated in diversified farming and to love to work as well as in book 

 knowledge. Surely they are building well for the future. 



R. D. Jacobs, principal of one of their consolidated schools, says: "Our 

 school serves as a center for all the social and business activities of the 

 district." He gave it the title of "a service station for the community; a 

 place where everybody in the district can come for information and help." 



Couldn't we soon remove ignorance from the world if we could have 

 that kind of a school in every community? And it has been said that all 

 of the unrest, dissatisfaction, the hate, the envy, the jealousy, the divorces, 

 the ill health all of the difficulties and problems of life have two great 

 causes. These two causes are ignorance and selfishness. Ignorance must 

 be replaced with knowledge through a rieht school and home training, and 

 selfishness overcome by the spirit of service being developed for our fellow- 

 man and our love of God better demonstrated through this service. That 

 is the only way we can ever do it. [Applause.] 



I should like to transplant you to a $225,000 consolidated school in 

 southwest Kansas, in a rented farm district. It is an irrigated district, 

 where many acres of beets are raised. Surely, if they can build a building 

 like that for the present and to meet their needs for some time in the 

 future, Illinois can do equally as well, if she thinks so, but in many instances 

 the needs of a community can be met with much less expense. 



All of the boys and girls in the whole community are being educated 

 in a school that has no superior anywhere. Many of the children are 

 Russian and Mexican, with Italian and Greeks. The parents of these chil- 

 dren, many of them, objected to sending them to the school the first year, as 

 they wanted them to work in the beet fields, but when they saw what it 

 was doing for the boys and girls, they said they would not keep their 

 children out any more, as the school was worth more than the beets. 



But there it is not all book knowledge. The book knowledge is there, 

 but it is applied every day and every hour to the child, and they have to 

 learn to work as a part of their educational training. 



And this is what it does for all the children in that range of school 

 territory. They have a Smith-Hughes agricultural and manual training 

 instructor. They train on a twelve-acre tract in practical farming, in the 

 very soil and climatic conditions of that part of the country, in raising the 

 kind of crops and live stock beet adapted to that region. They make 



