farmer increasing
contacts with the village and town centers and a broader knowledge of
the world at large.

During the past century modern ideas of transportation and the
development of industries due to inventions and scientific discoveries
have resulted in an enormous growth of city populations. The social life
of the cities is increasingly dominated by the interests of the
individual rather than those of the family, until the breaking down of
urban family life has become a world-wide problem. The family is no
longer the social unit of the city as it is in the country.

Now farm people are by no means as isolated from town and city as is
often imagined. Their brothers and sisters, sons and daughters have gone
to make up the increasing urban populations. Through correspondence and
visiting back and forth, through frequent trips to town, through the
daily city newspapers, and through the general reading of magazines,
farm people are in more or less close contact with the life and manners
of the cities. Inasmuch as slightly over half of our people now live in
towns or cities and only one-third live on farms, it is not surprising
that urban ideals and values and the urban point of view tend more and
more to dominate those of the countryside. There has been a natural
tendency, therefore, for the association of country people to center in
the country town and village, in the community center.

Better transportation and the inability to maintain satisfactory
institutions in the open country have made this process inevitable and
it will do much to abolish the evils of rural isolation. The increasing
difficulty of maintaining successful churches in the open country and
the growth of the village church, the dissatisfaction with the one-room
district school and the desire for consolidated schools and community
high schools, are evidences of this tendency.

The smaller size of the farm family has made it less self-sufficient
socially than formerly, and the fact that fewer near relations live
nearby and farms change hands more often has resulted in fewer
neighborhood gatherings. The different members of the family tend to get
together more with groups of their own age and sex coming from all parts
of the community, and definite effort is made for the organization of
such groups according to their various interests.

Attention is directed to these tendencies because in our present
emphasis on the relation of the farmer to hi