'' COJVFIJS SIGNS'' OF A TEACHER. 625 



their work is chiefly that of a college preparatory school, or 

 whether they are also the head and crown of the school system in 

 which the child of the people finds his best school preparation for 

 whatever career his future may hold. To sustain this double 

 responsibility is more than the high school can do, unless per- 

 chance the colleges and the elementary schools can be so brought 

 into harmony by the modification of one or the other or both 

 that fitting for college and for general American citizenship shall 

 become one and the same thing. 



That the high- school course ought to lead to the door of the 

 college was the unanimous verdict of the able committee whose 

 Report on Secondary Schools has become so famous. But if this 

 be interpreted as meaning that the colleges alone can set the pace 

 for high-school instruction, or if the influence of that report 

 should be to separate the high school from the lower schools, 

 both in its aim and the personnel of its teaching force, then, 

 indeed, it is certain that time must bring a reaction. There can 

 be no fundamental reason for an explicit change of policy in the 

 public-school work at the end of the ninth grade. 



Since the high schools must sustain such intimate relations 

 with colleges and lower schools, with public and private institu- 

 tions, it would seem to be the necessary policy of their managers 

 to keep them in fullest touch with both of the leading schools of 

 current educational thought. And here we come face to face 

 with what is perhaps the bottom fact in the situation. It must 

 be confessed that in the educational world there are two types of 

 thinking and thinkers, neither of them confined in its affiliations 

 to the college or to the elementary schools, yet each having its 

 own peculiar relations both with the one and with the other. 

 The one type represents time-honored ideals, it may be of scholar- 

 ship and culture, or it may be of practical forms and methods 

 ideals which experience has wrought out, and which are therefore 

 held to be worthy of acceptance. The other type seeks to build 

 up an improved system of education according to principles that 

 are held to be fundamental ; and, believing that " new wine must 

 be put into new bottles," it does not scruple to turn aside, if occa- 

 sion arises, from the standards of the past. 



Nor is this true of education alone. It is the same in politics, 

 in religion, in literature, and in every form of art. The tradi- 

 tional or conventional ideals coexist side by side with a newer 

 philosophy, which seems antagonistic until a later view unites 

 them both in its larger perspective. 



In the educational world within two or three years these types 

 in a measure seem to have focused themselves in two famous 

 documents, the report of the Committee of Ten on Secondary 

 Schools, and the later report of the Committee of Fifteen or, as 



TOL. L, 46 



