its appeal to the practical man is that there is a far more adequate return for the money invested.
The greatest drawbacks to the furtherance of consolidation are the reluctance of communities to give up their district schools and to substitute a new order of things, and the lack of legislation to permit and encourage it. The few real difficulties, such as bad roads, great distances to be traveled, long hours away from home, and cold lunches, which have been urged against consolidation, are also met with by those who attend district schools, and are on the contrary partially solved by transportation. In Indiana improvement of roads is following fast in the wake of the consolidation movement. The installation of domestic science enables the schools to furnish warm lunches. Those who make the complaint that expenditure is increased overlook the fact that the man who sends his children out of the district to a better school pays twice for their education, taxes in his own district and tuition in another, and the man who patronizes his own one-room school sometimes spends four times as much as the city man while receiving a poorer return for his money. The cost per pupil in a consolidated school is often the same or more than in one of the larger one-teacher districts; however, it is not cheapness that should be sought. The cost certainly should not be exorbitant, but it should be adequate to secure the best educational advantages. A recent study by Professor J. F. Bobbitt mentions the following objections which are being made to consolidated schools: attendance is not radically bettered, scholarship is not improved, and cheapness is not secured. Professor Bobbitt replies that while his statistical study shows there is not a great difference in attendance during the first five years, the attendance is much better in the upper grades. He also says that those who argue that scholarship is not strengthened base their opinion upon the results of formal examinations, utterly ignoring the fact that children in the consolidated schools have a broader curriculum, more individual attention from teachers and better social and sanitary conditions, all of which can not be measured by the traditional word examination.
On the whole it seems that consolidation has been tried long enough and in a sufficient number of geographically different localities to raise it above the experimental stage and to prove it a solution for some of the ills from which the country schools are suffering.
The student of the rural problem is next confronted by the question of means that have been found effective in furthering consolidation and in making consolidated schools more efficient. Those states possessing laws of a prohibitive, persuasive or constructive type have a basis of procedure the lack of which has prevented progress in other states.
From nearly every state superintendent to whom Professor D. D. Hugh sent a questionnaire asking for information regarding legislative
