e fourth.

The life in the typical rural school is not sufficiently interesting and
attractive to secure a strong hold upon the pupils. The dreary ugliness
of the physical surroundings has already been referred to. And even in
districts where the building and grounds have been made reasonably
attractive, there is yet wanting a powerful factor--the influence of the
social incentive that comes from numbers. In hundreds of our rural
schools the daily attendance is less than a dozen pupils, frequently not
representing more than three or four families. The classes can therefore
contain not more than two or three pupils, and often only one. There is
no possibility of organizing games, or having the fun and frolic
possible to larger groups of children. Add to this the fact that the
teaching is often spiritless and uninspiring, and the reason becomes
still more plain why so many rural children drop out of school with
scarcely the rudiments of an education.

Here, again, the consolidated school, with its attractive building, its
improved equipment, its larger body of pupils, and its better teaching,
appears as a solution of the difficulty. For it does what the present
type of district school can never do--it makes school life interesting
and attractive to its pupils, and this brings to bear upon them one of
the strongest incentives to continue in school and secure an education.

Finally, much of the work of the school has not appealed to the pupils
as interesting or valuable. This has not been altogether the fault of
the curriculum, but often has come from the lack of adaptability of the
work to the pupils studying it. Through frequent changes of teachers,
poor classification, and irregularity of attendance, rural pupils have
often been forced to go over and over the same ground, without any
reference to whether they were ready to advance or not. In other cases,
careless grading has placed children in studies for which they were
utterly unprepared, and from which they could get nothing but
discouragement and dislike for school. In still other instances the
course pursued has been ill-balanced, and in no degree correlated. Often
the whim of the child determines whether he will or will not study
certain subjects, the teacher lacking either the knowledge or insistence
to bring about a better organization of the work.

The unskilled character of the rural school-teaching force, and the
impossibility of securing any reasonable sup