reasons. In some regions it may be a necessity. It is often urged for financial reasons; but this in the long run is not reason enough. We maintain our canals and Government work at public expense. The State must cooperate in the maintenance of its detached schools, by direct appropriations, if necessary, to their localities, always on the condition, however, that all effective control does not pass out of the community. Consolidation of schools is much more than a school question. It touches the very quick of local pride and progress.

There is every reason to expect that consolidation of rural schools will proceed, and with benefit. The point is that it should come naturally and that it should not necessarily be expected to operate advantageously everywhere. It should come as a result of conditions, and should not be forced independently of conditions. It will undoubtedly be found that some districts will be better off without consolidated schools. There is no reason in the nature of education why both separate and consolidated schools may not each render service that the other can not render. It will be unfortunate if the question of consolidation of schools falls into the hands of advocates or partisans. The social welfare of the community, as well as the school work, must be considered in every case.

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The rural elementary school will be redirected by making it a natural expression of the community of which it is or ought to be a part. Education should develop out of daily experience. It is not necessary to have an entirely new curriculum in order to redirect the rural school. If geography is taught, let it be taught in terms of the environment. Geography deals with the surface of the earth. It may well concern itself at first with the school grounds, the highways, the fields and what grows in them, the forests, hills, and streams, the hamlet, the people and their affairs. As the pupil grows, he is introduced to the world activities. Similar remarks may be made for arithmetic, reading, and all the other customary work of the school. This is much more than what is now meant by correla'tion." The problem of the rural school is not so much one of subjects as of methods of teaching. The best part of any school is its spirit; a school can be conceived in which no agriculture is taught separately, which may still present the subject vitally from day to day by means of the customary studies and exercises. The agricultural colleges, for example, have all along made the mistake of trying to make farmers of their students by compelling them to take certain "practical" courses, forgetting that the spirit and method of the institution are what make the work vital and what send the youth back to the land. The whole enterprise of elementary schooling needs to be developed natively and from a new point of view; for in an agricultural country agriculture should be as much a part of the school as oxygen is a part of the air. We should not isolate

agriculture from the environment of life in order to teach it; we should teach the entire environment.

If the foregoing points are well taken, we then see that the problem of training teachers to teach agriculture in elementary schools is much more than providing them with an equipment of agricultural subject-matter. Here and there the special teacher of agriculture will be needed in elementary work, as in certain consolidated rural schools, and in well-graded city or village schools. Now and then teachers will be needed to supervise the work in agriculture in several related schools; but experience will probably demonstrate that in most cases this will be only a temporary means of handling the subject, in order to organize it and to start it.

It is not alone a new kind of teacher that the rural elementary school needs, and no rural school constituency should be allowed to feel that emphasis should be put on teachers alone. In fact, the kind of teacher is usually an expression and result of the type of effort that exists in the district. The school is worth no more than the district pays for it. The same is true of a horse or a plow or a farm. The rural school premises are often unattractive or even repulsive. No work with spirit in it is likely to be accomplished under such conditions. Moreover, there is no equipment in most of these schools; and teaching can not, any more than farming, be well accomplished without facilities and appliances.

The school building is first to be considered. From Maine to Minnesota one will see in the open country practically one kind of schoolhouse, and this the kind in which our fathers went to school. There is nothing about it to suggest the activities of the community or to attract children. Standing in an agricultural country, it is scant of land and bare of trees. If a room or wing were added to every rural schoolhouse to which children could take their collections or in which they could do work with their hands, it would start a revolution in the ideals of country-school teaching, even with our present schoolteachers. Such a room would challenge every person in the community. They would want to know what relation hand training and nature study and similar activities bear to teaching. Such a room would ask a hundred questions every day. The teacher could not refuse to try to answer them. A room of this kind, containing perhaps a plow and a few agricultural implements, would itself constitute one of the means of training teachers.

Eventually, the entire school will partake of the informal character that is suggested by the single workroom. The pupil will be allowed. to express himself; and it will be the part of the teacher to direct and shape this expression to the best educational ends. Unless the elementary-school teacher has some such outlook as this, his teaching of agriculture is likely to impose another task on the child.

We may next consider the equipment of land. A good part of all our laboratories should be out of doors. In the argument for separated rural schools, one is struck with the plea that good laboratories may be secured. A good part of this argument comes from college men. It does not at all follow that our four-wall laboratory methods are as useful for the elementary schools as for colleges and high schools. In fact, it is a question whether much of our college laboratory work is really worth the while as compared with good natural field work under the conditions that are everywhere at hand. The school land may be used for plantations of trees and shrubs, for school gardens, for experimental plats, and utilized as an arena of the natural wild life of the neighborhood. Equipment of land should go far toward developing a really effective nature teaching, redirecting some of our present laboratory methods. Laboratory teaching may be pedagogically just as incorrect as book teaching. If the school is fairly well equipped outside and inside, a good part of the difficulty of securing teachers will subside; for the good places naturally attract the good teachers.

It is well to consider briefly what may be taught in the elementary school, whether a town school or a country ungraded school. In some cases separate classes in agriculture may be organized, but in most cases the work for the present must be incidental to other teaching. In any event, the content of the agricultural work must be carefully considered, for this will have direct relation to the training of the teacher. The main effort of primary and elementary teaching, so far as the agricultural phase is concerned, should be to put the pupil in touch with himself and his environment. Before the sixth grade, or its equivalent, there should probably be no agriculture as such. Generalized nature study should here control the work. This will underlie and prepare for all future work. It will be a mistake to try to force formal technical agricultural work in any grade below the high school.

Every teacher should understand that the term "nature study is a misnomer. It does not stand for a "study." It is not a subject. It is not a "method," as this term is understood by teachers. It is an attitude, a purpose, a point of view, a mode of education. It is spirit. It is a fundamental educational intention, inasmuch as nature is the condition of our existence and as it is our duty to live in effective harmony with our conditions. Its underlying principle is oneto teach the things that are near at hand and that are naturally a part of the child's environment and activities, and to teach these things for the sake of the child, rather than to promulgate a subject. It will be seen, therefore, that no good subsequent teaching of agriculture is possible without the nature-study training.

The nature-study process and point of view should be a part of the work of all schools, because schools train persons to live. Particularly should it be a part of rural schools, because the nature environment is the controlling condition for all persons who live on the land. There is no effective living in the open country unless the mind is sensitive to the objects and phenomena of the open country; and no thoroughly good farming is possible without this same knowledge and outlook. Good farmers are good naturalists. It would be incorrect to begin first with the specific agricultural phases of the environment, for the agricultural phase (as any other special phase) needs a foundation and a base; it is only one part of a point of view. Moreover, to begin with a discussion of the so-called "useful" practical" objects, as many advise, would be to teach falsely, for, as these objects are only part of the environment, to single them out and neglect the other subjects would result in a partial and untrue outlook to nature; in fact, it is just this partial and prejudiced outlook that we need to correct.

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We must have it in mind that the common elementary schools do not teach trades and professions. We do not approach the subject primarily from an occupational point of view, but from the educational and spiritual; that is, the man should know his work and his environment. The mere giving of information about agricultural objects and practices can have very little good result with children. The spirit is worth more than the letter. Some of the hard and dry tracts on farming would only add one more task to the teacher and the pupil if they were introduced into the school, making the new subject in time as distasteful as physiology and grammar often are. In this new agricultural work we need to be exceedingly careful that we do not go too far, and that we do not lose our sense of relationships and values. Introducing the word agriculture into the scheme of studies means very little; what is taught, and particularly how it is taught, are of the greatest moment. It is to be hoped that no country-life teaching will be so narrow as to put only technical farm subjects before the pupil.

We need also to be careful not to introduce subjects merely because. practical grown-up farmers think that the subjects are useful and therefore should be taught. Farming is one thing and teaching is another. What appeals to the man may not appeal to the child. What is most useful to the man may or may not be most useful in." training the mind of a pupil in school. The teacher, as well as the farmer, must always be consulted in respect both to the content and · the method of agricultural teaching. We must always be alert to see that the work has living interest to the pupil rather than to grown ups, and to be on guard that it does not become lifeless.

Probably the greatest mistake that any teacher makes is in supposing that what is interesting to him is therefore interesting to his pupils.

In a rural community all the surroundings and customary activities should find expression in the school, as a means of putting the pupil into touch and sympathy with his environment: (1) The natural objects in the region and the character of the country; (2) the means by which people in the community live; (3) the household, or domestic affairs; (4) civic affairs, or the way in which human activities are organized and governed. All this is nature study in its best. and broadest sense. These subjects may be taught in separate periods or classes; but the fundamental means is a complete redirection of the school activities so that vital and experience work will be a very part of the school life and dominate it. This redirecting of schoolteaching, in both country and city, is taking place at the present time, although silently and unobtrusively.

As the child matures, nature-study work may become more concrete. In grades 6 to 8, it may be nature-study agriculture, perhaps following the suggested outline of the Report of the Committee on Industrial Education in Schools for Rural Communities to the National Council of Education, July, 1905 (pp. 44–45):

After the explicit nature study ceases with the fifth grade, the pupil in the rural school may then be taken through the elements of agriculture in the sixth, seventh, and eighth grades. The work in these three grades should really be nature study, but agricultural subjects are the means. Some will prefer to call it nature study rather than agriculture. Its purpose is not so much to teach definite science as to bring the pupil into relation with the objects and affairs that are concerned with the agriculture of his region. When the pupil has completed his nature study in the fifth grade, he should have a good knowledge of the physiography of his region, and of the common animals and plants. He will then be able to carry his inquiries into the more specific field of the agricultural practice and operations. When he has completed his eighth year, he should have a well-developed sympathy with agricultural affairs and he should have a broad, general view of them. Entering the high school, he will then be able to take up some of the subjects in their distinctly scientific phases.

The general plan recommended by the committee is as follows: Sixth year, first half, the affairs of agriculture; second half, the soil; seventh year, farming schemes and crops; eighth year, animals.

If the agricultural work in the grammar grades is to be of the nature-study kind and not of the science kind, it can then cover a somewhat wide range. In these grades, the pupil should not be put into agronomy," "economies," and other technical subjects, but he should be brought into relation with his agricultural environment.

A statement is now given of what is actually accomplished in a one-teacher district school in New York, where special classes can not be organized. The teacher has been successful in interesting his pupils in various experiments and tests that have relation to farming. He gives all the pupils nature-study work, including the younger ones. Suggestions are had from books, from the State syl