=The Teacher.=--"As is the teacher, so is the school." Mark Hopkins on the end of a log made a good college, compared with the situation where the building is good and the teacher poor. The teacher is like the mainspring in a watch. Without a good teacher there can be no good school. Live teacher, live school; dead teacher, dead school. The teacher and the school must be the center of life, of thought, and of conversation, in a good way, in the neighborhood. The teacher is the soul of the school; the other things constitute its body. What shall it profit a community to have a great building and lack a good teacher? If we were obliged to choose between a good teacher and poor material conditions and environment on the one hand, and excellent material conditions and environment and a poor teacher on the other, we should certainly not hesitate in our choice. =A Good Rural School.=--Now, if we suppose a really good teacher under the good conditions described above, we shall have a _good_ rural school. There is usually better individual work done in such a school than is possible in a large system of graded schools in a city. In such a school there is more single-mindedness on the part of pupils and teacher. These pupils bring to such a school unspoiled minds, minds not weakened by the attractions and distractions, both day and night, of city life. In such a school the essentials of a good education are, as a rule, more often emphasized than in the city. There is probably a truer perspective of values. Things of the first magnitude are distinguished from things of the second, fifth, or tenth magnitude. This inability to distinguish magnitudes is one of the banes of common school education everywhere--so many things are appraised at the same value. =The Problem.=--We have tried in this discussion to put before the reader a fairly accurate picture, on the one hand, of the undesirable conditions which have too often prevailed, and, on the other, of a rural school which would be an excellent place in which to receive one's elementary education. The reader is asked to "look here, upon this picture, and on this." The transition from the one to the other is one of the great problems of rural life and of the rural school. Consolidation of schools, which we shall discuss more at length in a later chapter, will help to solve the problem of the rural school, and we give it our hearty indorsement. It is the best plan we know of where the conditions are favorable; but it is probable that the one-room rural school will remain with us for a long time to come. Indeed there are some good reasons why it should remain. Where the good rural school exists, whether non-consolidated or consolidated, it should be the center and the soul of rural life in that community--social, economical, and educational. CHAPTER IV SOME LINES OF PROGRESS