of the clanging cars and the
rushing whirl of crowded streets. The unsmoked blue of the sky is over
the country, as are the fragrance of flowers, woods and mown grass; the
stars are brilliant by night, and by day the birds sing, and the cows
and barnyard fowls talk philosophically together. The children have room
to run and play between their periods of work, which is very near of kin
to blessedness, because, aside from being instructive, it binds the
child into the family group in a way that factory work can never do. The
country cries health and enthusiasm to the world-weary soul as it does
to the barefoot boy. Whittier was very near the heart of things when he
wrote:

Blessings on thee, little man,
Barefoot boy, with cheek of tan!
With thy turned-up pantaloons,
And thy merry whistled tunes;
With thy red lips, redder still
Kissed by strawberries on the hill.

Despite the loneliness, isolation and overwork in some country places,
the rural life is, on the whole, very rich in--

Sleep that wakes in laughing day,
Health that mocks the doctor's rules,
Knowledge never learned of schools.

Country life holds a great promise for the future--a promise of vigorous
manhood and womanhood, and of earnest, sane living. Through the rapidly
progressing country school, more perhaps than through any other agency,
this promise may be fulfilled. There are two possibilities in the
development of the country school. On the one hand, several one-room
schools may be consolidated into one central graded school, to which the
children are transported at public expense; on the other hand, the
old-time, one-room school may be reorganized and vitalized.

II Making Bricks with Straw

Even the doughtiest son of the soil must needs admit that the farmer of
the past, living secluded in his house or village, was provincial,
narrow, bigoted and individualistic. Times are rapidly changing,
however, and out of the old desolation of rural individualism there is
arising the spirit of wholesome, virile co-operation, which has
transformed the face of many a country district almost in the twinkling
of an eye. Nowhere is this co-operative spirit better expressed than in
the consolidated country schools, which are organized, like the city
school, by subjects and grades.

Considered from any viewpoint, the consolidated school is superior, as a
form of organization, to the district school. Rather, the consolidated