girls. Of these about half
were in the primary and the grammar grades and about half in the high
school. Of the latter some twenty-five were tuition pupils from outside
of the district, so that the actual school group of the McNab
consolidated school, the children of the tax-payers, was in that year
eighty in number.

The difference between the social life of eighty young people and eight
or eighteen young people, which one may find in a one-room school in the
country anywhere, is very great. Needless to say that the John Swaney
school has athletic teams, tennis tournament, baseball games, literary
and debating contests and is a strong aggressive force lending life and
vitality to the whole countryside. The older families of the
neighborhood are Quakers. The newer half of the population is of
Germanic stock. The influence of the school is upon all its pupils. The
high school retains practically all the sons of the Quaker families and
some of the newer population whose interest in education is less.

But the crowning distinction of the John Swaney school is in its study
of agriculture, or broadly speaking in its industrial training. For with
agriculture must be classed manual training and domestic science. By
John Swaney's generosity twenty acres of land were presented to the
State for an experiment farm. This land adjoins the school grounds and a
regular part of the curriculum for the young men is the study of
agriculture. The result of this interpretation of country life in forms
of scholarship is that substantially all the graduates of the high
school annually go to the State University for training in scientific
agriculture, expecting to return to the farms and become rural residents
of Illinois. At the present time no more profitable training could be
given these young men and women. But aside from this economic
consideration, the social and moral value to the community in the return
of these young men and women to their own soil and the scenes of their
childhood is beyond estimation. The Quaker Meeting in this community is
not "laid down;" the church is not abandoned. Indeed all the activities
of the community are built up and the best of the community perpetuated
through the medium of this modern consolidated school.

To sum up this chapter, the improvement of the one-room common schools
is possible, but for the satisfaction of the needs of the modern country
community that improvement is inadequate. The one-ro