ave an
assembly room in which lectures, festivals, socials, public meetings,
and farmers' institutes are held. Acting as a center for community life,
the consolidated school takes a real place in the instruction of the
community. The big brick or stone building, well constructed and
surrounded, as it usually is, by well-kept grounds, furnishes the same
kind of local monument that the court house supplies in the county seat.
People point proudly to it as "their" public building. It is an
experience of note in traveling across an open farming country to come
suddenly upon a splendidly-equipped, two-story school, set down, at a
point of vantage, several miles away from the nearest railroad.

The consolidated school at Linden, Montgomery County, Indiana, for
example, situated in a town of scarcely three hundred inhabitants, is
equipped with gas from its own gas-plant; with steam heat; ample toilet
accommodations; an assembly room; and halls so broad that the primary
children may play some of their games there in bad weather.

One of the most widely discussed among consolidated schools is the John
Swaney Consolidated School, of Putnam County, Illinois.[22] The John
Swaney School occupies a twenty-four acre campus, lying a mile and a
half from the nearest village, and ten miles from the nearest town. The
agitation for consolidation in Putnam County led John Swaney and his
wife to give twenty-four acres as a campus for a local consolidated
school. Hence the name and much of the success which has attended the
work of the school.

The school cost $15,000, equipped. It is of brick with four class-rooms,
two laboratories, a library, offices, a manual training shop, a domestic
science kitchen, and a basement play-room. The building is lighted,
heated, and ventilated in the most modern fashion. The John Swaney
School thus came into existence with an equipment adequate for any
school and elaborate for a school situated far from the channels of
trade and industry.

The course of study organized includes all of the modern specialized
work which the effective city school is able to do. Securing good
teachers and possessing unique facilities, the school carries boys and
girls through a series of years, in which intellectual, experimental,
manual, recreational, and social activities combine to make the school
the center of community life and community influence.

The school campus is used as a laboratory and a play ground. The trees