TirO PROBLEMS IX EDUCATION. 591 



II. 



The other problem which I wish to discuss is closely connected with 

 the problem of electives. It is, in effect, how shall we overcome the 

 persistence of the artificial separation of the high school from the rest 

 of the school system — a separation that sometimes almost amounts to 

 isolation? Eeference was made above to the unsatisfactory condition 

 of our pre-high-school education in spite of the widespread endeavor to 

 improve it. The grammar school is still emphasizing, too much, a 

 very large remnant of the old formal curriculum. Arithmetic, English 

 grammar and political geography are still looked upon as the solid 

 studies of the later years of the grammar school, as they were before 

 the days of enriched programs. The work in foreign languages, 

 algebra, geometry, history, elementary science, manual training, where 

 any or all of these studies are recognized at all, is still looked upon in 

 most school systems as a new and more or less ornamental addition 

 to the real work of the grammar school.* 



In other words, we have not yet taken the newer studies in the 

 grammar school program seriously. Hence, as I have already men- 

 tioned, most high schools do not regard the work done in these studies 

 in the lower grades as really done; and so, in spite of the congested 

 grammar school programme, due to the insertion of the new studies 

 without elimination of the old ones, root and branch, from the last 

 years of the grammar school, the high school still assumes — and prob- 

 ably in most cases justly — that everything below the high school is 

 still chiefly a drill in the school arts, just as it used to be; and that such 

 beginnings of a real education as have been attempted in the lower 

 grades are not really beginnings — they are only trifling with higb school 

 subjects; and that, consequently, all those subjects must be begun over 

 again. The result is that the separation of the high school from the 



* The reluctance of some communities and some teachers to abandon the 

 old-time grammar school studies in the later years of the grammar school pro- 

 gram, and to substitute for them the studies that constitute a real education, is 

 largely due to the mistaken belief that the really unpractical and purely tech- 

 nical details of arithmetic and English grammar, and the statistical geography, 

 that still consume so large a share of the pupil's time and attention in the last 

 two or three grammar grades possess more practical utility, and have more 

 educational value than good courses in history, literature, foreign language, ele- 

 mentary algebra and geometry, manual training, sewing and cooking. It should 

 be said, also, that many principals and superintendents doubtless hesitate to 

 adopt the improved program because they have not in their corps a sufficient 

 number of properly equipped teachers — teachers who can be assigned to teach 

 both in a given high school and in the upper grades of one or more grammar 

 schools in its vicinity. But such teachers are not hard to find. Our colleges 

 -are sending t.Iiem forth by the score everv year. 



