three to five rooms, to which the children are carried in vans from areas four to five miles square, and have proven their general superiority. The writer was changed from a doubter to an advocate by making a thorough inspection of a number of these consolidated rural schools in Ohio, and he has yet to hear of any one who has made a thorough inspection who does not believe that this form of school, in all regions where good soil makes farming profitable and supports a fairly dense rural population, will largely displace the little schoolhouse. These schools are superior to the honored little school in the following ways: 1. The course can be lengthened so as to include the freshman and sophomore years of highschool work. 2. Children remain in school longer, are not so often tardy, truant, or absent, and the school year is lengthened, thus increasing the total number of "days' schooling" secured by the people of the district. 3. These schools, requiring fewer but better teachers, who are better supervised, and have their work better systematized in grades, can give better instruction. 4. Pupils are less exposed to storms and have less wet clothing; the schoolhouses are better heated, lighted, and ventilated, have more appliances, and may be situated on demonstration grounds, where practice lessons in agriculture may be provided for. 5. The future farmer becomes acquainted with the people of the township, instead of a small school district; the whole community is drawn together, the school vans often serving to carry parents and children to lectures, entertainments, and even to church services. 6. The "chores" and other industrial work on the home farm, which gave the education of the little school half its value, are here retained as an exceedingly important educational adjunct to the rural school. 7. Such schools help to retain more of the best people in the country homes, and will articulate with agricultural high schools. 8. While the combined cost of the vans, teachers, and schoolhouse may be a little above that of the old way, the cost is less per day of attendance, and far less per unit of value received by the district. It pays in dollars and cents, pays in better civilization, and the sooner adopted the better.

AGRICULTURAL HIGH SCHOOLS.

The agricultural high school, such as has been established in each Congressional district in Alabama, will serve as the secondary high school for farmers, as the city high school serves the city people. Necessity, "the mother of invention,” is largely responsible for the first experiment in the line of an agricultural high school, the Minnesota School of Agriculture. The home requirements of the boys and girls, as gradually unfolded to the teachers in that school, have largely determined the direction in which the instruction has developed. The course covers three winters of six months each, leaving the student on the home farm during the six crop months, where the industrial, business, and social position is retained unbroken. Eighty-two per cent. of the graduates remain in agriculture, 70 per cent. actually return to the farm. This school now has five hundred students, and the State Legislature is equipping it for double its present capacity.

A large, thoroughly equipped agricultural high school, such as can be easily supported by ten counties in coöperation, as is being arranged for in Alabama, will surely succeed, while a small agricultural high school, supported by a township or county, would be at a disadvantage. Neither the equipment nor the force of teachers in the county agricultural high school could be such as to satisfy so well the vigorous farm boy or girl. Since the students must be away from home, boarding in private families, or in dormitories. supplied by the State, they can better afford to travel a little farther and have the advantages of the well-equipped school supported by a group of counties, and the expense per county will be less if ten coöperate in supporting the large school. The North Dakota Agricultural College, at Fargo, and the University of Nebraska, at Lincoln, have followed the Minnesota plan, and each now has an agricultural high school, with several hundred students.

While the School of Agriculture holds an annual session of six instead of nine months, nearly all of the students work the other six months in practice work in farming and home

t

making, generally at home, and get more of real education per year than does the average city boy or girl who attends the city high school for eight or nine months. The improvement made in the young man or woman by this three years' course of study and training is so rapid as to cause constant comment from observers. A large part of the students who enter this school expect to remain on the farm, and would not be so much attracted to other schools, and probably would not go beyond the rural school. Common experience proves that the city high school, with its nine months' work in general studies, weans country youth from the farm. It emphasizes other things, does not give special preparation for farming, and the business position in the home farm is often disarranged, the result being that the student is educated away from the farm. The agricultural high school, on the other hand, has been found adapted to educate toward the farm and into good farming. Agricultural high schools will provide our rural schools with teachers, trained to carry inspiration for the country life into our rural schools, while teachers trained in city high schools too often have the opposite influence.

A large class of farmers, educated in their speciality under a common system, where each student gains a wide acquaintance with his fellows in primary, secondary, and collegiate schools, will be able to overcome the present difficulties in coöperative effort in rural affairs. That colleges can do much to promote extensive coöperation is shown in Minnesota by the influence the college and station exerted in bringing about a magnificent system of coöperative creameries. The Minnesota and Illinois stations have successfully inaugurated systems of co-operation in the breeding and dissemination of varieties of wheat and corn which yield from 10 to 20 per cent. more value per acre without additional cost of tillage. With the assistance of a large body of exstudents, organized to promote coöperative business, social, and other merged efforts among farmers, the agricultural college, agricultural high schools, and experiment stations

would be profoundly influential in civic as well as in educational affairs. The rural delivery of mails, country telephones, experimental research in agriculture, and coöperative enterprises in dairying, and in fire and hail insurance, are doing so much for the farmer that he is more than formerly ready to have faith that even country roads and education for farmers may be greatly improved. These two last-named difficult problems are worthy of still more discussion and experimentation.

A prominent lecturer on economics truthfully stated to his class that to conduct a farm in a proper manner requires a knowledge of more facts and more principles than to successfully conduct a bank. An educator who was brought up on a farm truly said that the boy who goes from city life to live in the country has much more to learn than the boy from the country has to learn upon entering city life. Our educators are commencing to see that the book of nature, and especially the volumes containing the stories of the industries and of our homes, are gaining a place of great interest in our public education. The body of thought along these lines is being put into pedagogical form, and has already gained a strong place beside the accumulations of general subject matter. Our stores of literature are gaining a wider audience, because our industrial classes are bringing their vocations and their lives up where time and means can be afforded for general culture. Most of the poetry of life has not been transcribed from nature to books. More of the practical and scientific in our education aids us to read nature and to understand the interpretations of nature written by man. on the farm is growing sweeter, broader, and truer. farm home is becoming stronger.

Life

The

GOT.

Under the head of Propriety of Diction, Hart gives the following, clipped from an English publication:

I got on horseback within ten minutes after I got your letter. When I got to Canterbury, I got a chaise for town, but I got wet through before I got to Canterbury; and I have got such a cold as I shall not be able to get rid of in a hurry. I got to the Treasury about noon, but first of all I got shaved and dressed. I soon got into the secret of getting a memorial before the Board, but I could not get an answer then; however, I got intelligence from the messenger that I should most likely get an answer the next morning. As soon as I got back to my inn, I got my supper and got to bed. It was not long before I got to sleep. When I got up in the morning, I got my breakfast, and then got myself dressed, that I might get out in time to get an answer to my memorial. As soon as I got it, I got into the chaise, and got to Canterbury by three, and about tea-time I got home. I have got nothing more to say, and so adieu.

The reader who is at all observant will have no trouble in discovering that there is perhaps no one word so variously misused as the word "got." There is no event in history, no fact in science, no hypothesis in philosophy, no theory in art, which may not be expressed by this convenient drudge.