p because
it was the point most easily agreed upon by all the patrons,
particularly where the township is an administrative unit of the school
system. In some cases somewhat successful efforts are being made to have
such consolidated schools serve as social centers, but it is believed
that in the long run community life will flow to its natural centers and
that the seeming success of such social centers in the open country,
unless the neighborhood be an isolated one, will tend to weaken the
communities concerned. Usually a consolidated district of this sort will
contain parts of two or three community areas and the location of the
school at a point between them weakens the support of the community
centers to that extent. Here we encounter one of the many ways in which
our artificial unit of rural government--the township--interferes with
community progress.[41]

Formerly only the children of the upper classes who were preparing for
college received a secondary education, but during the past generation
there has been a rapid growth of public high schools which serve as the
"people's colleges." At first these were found only in the cities and
larger towns, but rural communities have demanded equal advantages and
state and national legislation has aided them in the cost of
maintenance. Federal aid for secondary education in vocational subjects,
now available through the Smith-Hughes Act of 1917, has encouraged the
establishment of rural high schools and has greatly increased the number
giving instruction in agriculture and home economics. Hundreds of rural
high schools are now giving agricultural courses better than the
agricultural colleges gave twenty-five years ago.

Rural high schools with full four-year courses have been found mostly in
the larger villages and towns, but the movement is now well under way to
divide the period of secondary education into a junior and senior high
school (the so-called "six-six" plan), and junior high schools,
including the seventh to ninth grades, are being established in many
smaller communities by simply adding a grade to the consolidated
schools. The educational forces of the country, as expressed by
statements of the U. S. Bureau of Education and the National Education
Association, are now committed to the policy of consolidated rural
schools wherever they are practicable and to the establishment of a
sufficient number of high schools so that every rural child may attend
high scho