is perhaps more
instructive than the comparative amounts. The income of the rural
teacher is barely a living wage, and not even that if the teacher has no
parental home, or a gainful occupation during vacation times. Out of an
amount of less than four hundred dollars a year the teacher is expected
to pay for a certificate, a few school journals and professional books,
and attend teachers institutes or conventions, besides supporting
himself as a teacher ought to live. It does not need argument to show
that this meager salary forces a standard of living too low for
efficiency. It would, therefore, be unfair to ask for efficiency with
the present standard of salaries.

Nor is it to be overlooked that efficiency and salaries must mount
upward together. It would be as unjust to ask for higher salaries
without increasing the grade of efficiency as to ask for efficiency on
the present salary basis. It is probable that the eighteen- or
nineteen-year-old boys and girls starting in to teach the rural school,
with but little preparation above the elementary grades, are receiving
all they are worth, at least as compared with what they could earn in
other lines. The great point of difficulty is that they are not worth
enough. The community cannot afford to buy the kind of educational
service they are qualified to offer; it would be a vastly better
investment for the public to buy higher teaching efficiency at larger
salaries.

No statistics are available to show the exact percentage of increase in
rural teachers' salaries during recent years, but this increase has been
considerable; and the tendency is still upward. In this as in other
features of the rural school problem, however, it will be impossible to
meet reasonable demands without forsaking the rural district system for
a more centralized system of consolidated schools. To pay adequate
salaries to the number of teachers now required for the thousands of
small rural schools would be too heavy a drain on our economic
resources. Under the consolidated system a considerably smaller number
of teachers is required, and these can receive higher salaries without
greatly increasing the amount expended for teaching. In this as in other
phases of our educational problems, what is needed is rational business
method, and a willingness to devote a fair proportion of our wealth to
the education of the young.

_Supervision of rural teaching_

Our rural school teaching has never had