debating clubs in the winter, with occasional neighborhood entertainments
utilizing home talent, contests in cooking and various other phases of
home economics, in corn-raising and other agricultural interests,--the
possibilities are endless for making the school the vital social center of
the rural community. It will all take time and energy and ingenuity. It
will cost vitality, as all life-sharing does. But though it costs, the
sharing of life is the greatest joy, and it is the teacher's privilege in
large measure. It is the measure of his true success as well as his
happiness. Investing one's life in a group of boys will yield far greater
results in the country than in the city where their lives are already so
full they would little appreciate it.

Professor H. W. Foght says three things are now required of the teacher of
a rural school. "(1) he must be strong enough to establish himself as a
leader in the community where he lives and labors; (2) he must have a good
grasp on the organization and management of the new kind of farm school;
and (3) he must show expert ability in dealing with the redirected school
curriculum."[39] In short, if he lives up to his opportunity as a rural
leader, he will train his boys and girls distinctly for rural life, giving
them not only the rudiments of agricultural training, but an enthusiasm
for farming from the scientific side as the most complex of all
professions; utilizing the vast resources the country affords for teaching
objectively, not merely through hooks, and thus bridge the gap between the
school and life.

_The Call of the Country Church_

The modern college man is not attracted to the ministry of the country
churches which are conducted along old lines. If that ministry is to
consist merely in preaching once or twice a week to half a hundred people,
conducting a mid-week service for one-fifth of that number and doing the
marrying and the burying and the parish calling for a fraction of a rural
community divided among three struggling churches, then the college man
refuses to be interested. Consequently we find most of such churches are
manned by untrained men. They usually receive the wages of an unskilled
laborer. Trained ministers usually receive a living wage. The college man
demands at least a man's job; a chance to invest his life where his whole
personality will count and where his energy and perseverance will be
allowed to work out his problems to a successful