on
neighborhood center for both young and old, which shall stand as an
organizing, welding, vitalizing force, uniting the community on a basis
of common interests and activities. For while, as we have seen, the
rural population as a whole are markedly homogeneous, there is after
all but little of common acquaintanceship and mingling among them.
Thousands of rural families live lives of almost complete social
isolation and lack of contact with neighbors.

This condition is one of the gravest drawbacks to farm life. The social
impulse and the natural desire for recreation and amusement are as
strong in country boys and girls as in their city cousins, yet the
country offers young people few opportunities for satisfying these
impulses and desires. The normal social tendencies of youth are
altogether too strong to be crushed out by repression; they are too
valuable to be neglected; and they are too dangerous to be left to take
their own course wholly unguided. The rural community can never hope to
hold its boys and girls permanently to the life of the farm until it has
recognized the necessity for providing for the expression and
development of the spontaneous social impulses of youth.

Furthermore, the social monotony and lack of variety of the rural
community is a grave moral danger to its young people. It is a common
impression that the great city is strewn thick with snares and pitfalls
threatening to morals, but that the country is free from such
temptations. The public dance halls and cheap theaters of the city are
beyond doubt a great and constant menace to youthful ideals and purity.
But the country, going to the opposite extreme, with its almost utter
lack of recreation and amusement places, offers temptations no less
insidious and fatal.

The great difficulty at this point is that young people in rural
communities are thrown together almost wholly in isolated pairs instead
of in social groups; and that there are no objective resources of
amusement or entertainment to claim their interest and attention away
from themselves. They are freed from all chaperonage and the restraints
of the conventions obtaining in social groups at the very time in their
lives when these are most needed as steadying and controlling forces.
The result is that the country districts, which ought to be of all
places in the world the freest from temptation and peril to the morals
of our young people, are really more dangerous than the citie