III, pages 253-259.

THWING: _The Recovery of the Home._ A Pamphlet.

PART III--SOCIAL LIFE IN THE RURAL COMMUNITY

CHAPTER XIII

THE COMMUNITY AND ITS HISTORY

97. =Broadening the Horizon.=--Out of the kindergarten of the home the
child graduates into the larger school of the community. Thus far
through his early years the child's environment has been restricted
almost entirely to the four walls of the home or the limits of the
farm. His horizon has been bounded by garden, pasture, and orchard,
except as he has enjoyed an occasional visit to the village centre or
has found playmates on neighboring farms. He has shared in the
isolation of the farm. The home of the nearest neighbor is very likely
out of sight beyond the hill, or too far away for children's feet to
travel the intervening distance; on the prairie the next door may be
over the edge of the horizon. The home has been his social world. It
has supplied for him a social group, persons to talk with, to play
with, to work with. Inevitably he takes on their characteristics, and
his life will continue to be narrow and to grow conservative and hard,
unless he enlarges his experience, broadens his horizon, tries new
activities, enjoys new associations, tests new methods of social
control, and lets the forces that produce social change play upon his
own life.

Happy is he when he enters definitely into community life by taking
his place in the district school. The schoolhouse may be at the
village centre or it may stand aloof among the trees or stark on a
barren hillside along the country road; physical environment is of
small consequence as compared with the new social environment of the
schoolroom itself. The child has come into contact with others of his
kind in a permanent social institution outside the home, and this
social contact has become a daily experience. Every child that goes to
school is one of many representatives from the homes of the
neighborhood. He brings with him the habits and ideas that he has
gathered from his own home, and he finds that they do not agree or
fuse easily with the ideas and habits of the other children. In the
schoolroom and on the playground he repeats the process of social
adjustments which the race has passed through. Conflicts for
ascendancy are frequent. He must prove his physical prowess on the
playground and his intellectual ability in the schoolroom. He must
test his body of knowledge and the value of h