d type of
rural school will be readily admitted. But it is entirely practicable
and possible in the reorganized consolidated school, and is being
successfully presented, in its general aspects, at least, in many of
these schools. It is only such an education as every rural child is
entitled to, and is no more than the urban child is already receiving in
the better class of town and city elementary schools. If the rural
school cannot give the farm child an elementary education approximating
the one out-lined, it has no claim on his loyalty or time; and he should
in justice to himself be taken where he can receive a worthy education,
even if he is thereby lost to the farm.

But the rural boy and girl need not only a good elementary education,
but a high school education as well. Let us next consider the rural high
school curriculum.

_The rural high school curriculum_

This section is presented in the full knowledge that comparatively few
localities have as yet established the rural high school. It now forms,
however, an integral part of the consolidated rural school in not a few
places, and is abundantly justifying the expenditure made upon it. In
other localities the tendency is growing to send the rural child to the
town high school, or even for the family to move to town to secure high
schooling for the children. In still other cases, and we are obliged to
admit that these yet constitute the rule rather than the exception, the
farm boy or girl has no opportunity for a high school education.

If we succeed in working out the so-called rural problem of our country,
in maintaining a high standard of agricultural population and rural
life, the rural high school must be an important factor in our problem.
For the children of our farms need and must have an education reaching
beyond that of the elementary school. And this schooling must prepare
them to find the most satisfactory and successful type of life on the
farm, instead of drawing them away from the farm.

It goes without saying that the rural high school should be an
agricultural high school. This does not mean that it shall devote itself
exclusively to teaching agriculture; but rather that, while it offers a
broad range of culture and information, it shall emphasize those phases
of subject-matter that will best fit into the interests and activities
of farm life, instead of those phases that tend to lead toward the city
or the market-place. Its four years of