re there is one big window
from near the floor to the ceiling, these buildings, costing from two
thousand dollars up, provide in every way for the health and comfort of
the children. The superintendent may go farther than to suggest in
Wisconsin, however, for if a school building becomes dilapidated he may
condemn it, and then state aid to local education is refused until
suitable buildings are provided. The law has proved an excellent
deterrent to educational parsimony.

Superintendent Kern, of Rockford, Illinois, has done particularly
effective work in beautifying his schools. Within the schools are
tastefully painted and decorated. Outside there are flower-beds, hedges,
individual garden plots, neatly-cut grass, and all of the other
necessaries for a well-kept yard. No longer crude and unsightly, the
Rockford school yards are models which any one in the neighborhood may
copy with infinite advantage. As the school becomes the center of
community life local pride makes more and more demands. Could you visit
some of the finer school buildings in Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin and
Illinois you would be better able to understand why men boast of "Our
School" in the same tone that they use when boasting of their corn
yields.

V A Fairyland of Rural Education

You will perhaps be somewhat skeptical--you big folks who have ceased to
believe in little people--when you hear that out in western Iowa there
is a county which is an educational fairyland. Yet if you had traveled
up and down the country, gone into the wretched country school
buildings, seen the lack-luster teaching and the indifferent scholars,
which are so appallingly numerous; if you had read in the report of the
investigating committee which has just completed its survey of Wisconsin
rural schools the statement that in many districts the hog pens were on
a better plane of efficiency than the school houses; if you had seen the
miserable inadequacy of country schools North, East, South and West, and
had then been transported into the midst of the school system of Page
County, Iowa, you would have been sure that you had passed through the
looking-glass into the queer world beyond. Yet Page County is there--a
fairyland presided over by a really, truly fairy.

The schools in Page County, Iowa, which, by the way, is one of the best
corn counties in Iowa, are little republics in which the children have
the fun, do the work and grow up strong and kind. Each school has it