than in those of finding satisfaction in living, the country is far behind the corresponding grades of city life.

In one sense this dearth is due to a lack of intellectual stimulus and ferment. Reading has not been cultivated as a source of pleasure and a means of larger information. Social intercourse of a larger general nature is likely to be empty where an intellectual circulating medium is absent. A grasp and discussion of the more important social matters awaits the development of information.

Associations of a recreative and entertainment sort are little appreciated in the country. Men of the farms have not discovered the play life. Its possibilities have not been opened to them. Organized games for the children and recreation for the adults are among the greatest desiderata of rural communities. Opportunities for these will present themselves as soon as their appreciation is developed.

Deficiencies of social contact and co-operative stimulus are apparent. Cities abound in means and agencies to satisfy these ends. Isolation has seemed to insulate farmers from each other. It is an obstacle whose gravity must be realized although its prohibitive strength is likely to be overrated. Organizations for bringing about community co-operative activities for both economic and sociability purposes are highly desirable and necessary and are coming into existence as fast as the appreciation of their worth is discovered by the farming community.

3. There are certain fundamentals which are incident to the realization of this needed point of view. They must be obtained before the larger and better outlook can be fully and permanently rooted as a part of the working capital of rural society.

(a) Leadership of a residential and effective kind is necessary to enable the country to work out its destiny along the lines indicated above. A trained resident leadership is largely wanting in agricultural neighborhoods. Young men

and women who go to higher institutions of learning seldom settle in the country. Even the students from agricultural colleges must be included in this statement. The country is being sapped of its ability of the trained sort by the towns and cities. It has plenty of natural ability left but it is not developed into a working leadership. The country is therefore forced to look to other sources outside itself for initiative and organizing ability which is required. So long as this is the case it must suffer accordingly. Every class and community must ultimately expect to depend on its own intelligence and the sympathetic devotion of its own able managers. Even fairly intelligent communities are handicapped without them.

(b) The reorganization of rural education is a necessary step toward the realization of a changed viewpoint and a larger rural life. The country school is one of the few things that has remained practically unchanged during the last quarter of a century. While farms have grown, farming has been improved, houses and barns have become larger and better, the country church has been better housed and manned, the old schoolhouse has remained as it was, and the course of study has become little more adjusted to the needs of the times. To meet the demands of the situation some important modifications must be made in rural schools.

First, they must be depended on to furnish the resident leadership which is required. Higher institutions of learning cannot do this because of the leakages noted above, and because they cannot touch the life of every boy and girl directly in necessary ways. A leadership must be informed on the things which are close to farm life; matters of agriculture, marketing, organization for protective purposes as well as for constructive objects, the worth and value of sociability functions of the upbuilding sort, and the improvement of home life. In order to understand and appreciate those things it must have a training and culture in them during the education

period. Every one must be so informed and skilled that he or she may rise to take a leading part in the affairs of the community if the ability is present. This means that the schools of the region must contain and teach the matters which are crucial and intrinsic to farm life. Agriculture, domestic economy, rural sociology, are some of the necessary and pressing subjects which must be taught.

Second, the consolidation of schools constitutes another necessary step to realize the object denoted. The singleroom school-house is entirely inadequate to meet the situation. It cannot supply the grading, the able teaching force, the equipment and room for carrying on work of a vocational nature, the numbers of pupils needed to carry on organized play, the differentiated housing and facilities demanded for the sociability, recreational, entertainment, and cultural activities of the adults as organized into a social center, and other important neighborhood functions. Moreover, the consolidated school, while providing for all of the above essential needs, can extend its course of study so as to include high-school work as a further qualification of that leadership and to appreciate intelligence which the country neighborhood demands. The latter would afford time for the gradual and completer inculcation of the larger and finer ideals of life, and teach the things which will make the life of the average man and woman something more than a mere existence.

4. A closing remark may well be devoted to the proper point of view with which the rural problem is to be regarded. A very large part of the emphasis in the discussions of farm life has been laid on the necessity of improving it in order to keep the boys and girls from drifting to the cities. The assumption has been that the country needs them and that city attractions established in the country would be effective in holding them there. However effective this procedure might prove to accomplish what is urged, and its effectiveness may well be

doubted, it does not appear to be the highest motive which may be furnished.

A more just view regards the improvement of farm life as a procedure which of right belongs to that great multitude of good people who will always be rural residents. They have a humanity in common with the residents of the cities. They have needs of life and work which they ought to realize if they can only obtain a vision of their possibility and worth. They are the heirs of the products which the myriads of the makers of civilization have created and conserved and should of right come into the enjoyment of them. Country populations have a right in their own stead to enjoy all that life offers, even if they do not contemplate leaving the soil for the city. The great problem is to discover a way by which their outlook on life and society may be transformed into one which appreciates the worth of realizing the greatest satisfactions and possibilities which may come to them as rural citizens of the great republic.

THE SOCIAL CENTER: A MEANS OF COMMON UNDERSTANDING 1

WOODROW WILSON

I Do not feel that I have deserved the honor of standing here upon this occasion to make what has been courteously called the principal address, because five months ago I did not know anything about this movement. I have taken no active part in it, and I am not going to assume, as those who have preceded me have assumed, that you know what the movement is. I want, if for no other purpose than to clarify my own thinking, to state as briefly as possible what the movement is.

The object of the movement is to make the schoolhouse the civic center of the community, at any rate in such communities as are supplied with no other place of common resort.

Ready for Use - The Means of Concerting Common Life

It is obvious that the schoolhouse is in most communities used only during certain hours of the day, those hours when the rest of the community is busily engaged in bread-winning work. It occurred to the gentlemen who started this movement that inasmuch as the schoolhouses belonged to the community it was perfectly legitimate that the community should use them for its own entertainment and schooling when the young people were not occupying them. And that, therefore, it would be a good idea to have there all sorts of gatherings for social purposes, for purposes of entertainment,

1 An address delivered before the First National Conference on Civic and Social Center Development, at Madison, Wis., October 25, 1911.