correspondingly broader and
richer.

It is therefore no longer possible to express the educational status of
a community in the percentage of people who can merely read and write.
Educational progress has become a national ideal. The elementary schools
in towns and cities have been greatly strengthened both in curriculum
and teaching. High schools have been organized and splendidly equipped,
and their attendance has rapidly increased.

But all this development has hardly touched the rural school. The
curriculum offered is pitifully narrow even for an elementary school,
and very few high schools are supported by rural communities. In fact, a
large proportion of our rural population are receiving an education but
little in advance of that offered a hundred years ago in similar
schools. This is not fair to the children born and reared on the farm;
it is not fair to one of the greatest and most important industries of
our country; and it cannot but result disastrously in the end.

If the rural school is to meet its problem, it must extend the scope of
its curriculum. It was formerly thought by many that education, except
in its simplest elements, was only for those planning to enter the
"learned professions." But this idea has given way before the onward
sweep of the spirit of democracy, and we now conceive education as the
right and duty of _all_. Nor by education do we mean the simple ability
to read, write, and number.

Our present-day civilization demands not only that the child shall be
taught to read, but also that he shall be supplied with books and guided
in his reading. Through reading as a tool he is to become familiar with
the best in the world's literature and its history. He is not only to
learn number, but is to be so educated that he may employ his number
concepts in fruitful ways. He must not only be familiar with the
mechanics of writing, but must have knowledge, interests, experience
that will give him something to write about. The "three R's" are
necessary tools, but they are only tools, and must be utilized in
putting the child into possession of the best and most fruitful culture
of the race. And, practically, they must put him into command of such
phases of culture as touch his own life and experience and make him more
efficient.

The rural school cannot extend the scope of its curriculum simply by
inserting in the present curriculum new studies related to the life and
work of the farm. The modif