Rural life in any community has a tendency to be monotonous and deadening to the finer qualities. Uninterrupted and unduly prolonged physical labor tends to the detriment of both the physical and the mental abilities of the individual. The isolation of the country home tends to narrow and restrict social intercourse, and the difficulty of travel and communication increases the monotony of country life. These circumstances do a great deal to offset the advantage of living in the country and have contributed a great deal to the stigma that has always been attached to the countryman. If there is to be any reform in this isolated social life of the community, the reform must come about through the schools. The Government can aid to a great extent through the provision of well-kept roads and by the establishment of means of communication such as the telephone and the telegraph. The man who is in touch with the large affairs of life forgets his own petty annoyances in the contemplation of problems of greater importance, while the man who has nothing to think about except the annoyances of his own life tends to become self-centered and narrow. Rural social center work in the United States has made great progress within the last few years and has been successful in practically all the places where it has been tried, especially if the teacher is a person of tact and intelligence. A great deal depends upon the attitude which the teacher has in this work, and it is not enough that the teacher should undertake such work as a burden added to the already overcrowded curriculum of the day, but the teacher should enter into the movement with a sincere desire to improve the condition of the community and bring the patrons of the district to a higher degree of efficiency as workmen and as citizens. In every community there are many young women and young men who are above the average school age who are compelled to work during the day, and who are fast becoming fixed in the monotonous life that has surrounded the older people of the community, who might easily be interested by the teacher and influenced through the formation of social clubs, so that they would form the nucleus for a better coming generation of citizens. The meetings of young people should partake of recreation as well as of serious study, and while the avowed intention of new clubs formed by the school should be for the purpose of bettering the social and civic condition of the people of the community, they must be placed in as favorable a light as possible, for it should be remembered that people will often undertake a movement which will have decidedly beneficial results if it is disguised under the form of recreation, when they would hesitate to give their continued assistance to such a movement if it partook entirely of the nature of serious study.