48 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



SECONDARY SCHOOL PROGRAMMES— FRENCH AND 



AMERICAN. 



By GEOEGE W. BEAMAN. 



THE general subject of American secondary school programmes 

 has been of late years a most prolific one. What with the 

 relative or particular importance of the mother-tongue, classical 

 studies, history, modern languages, and, more recently, manual 

 training, the educational essayist has been rather embarrassed by 

 the multitude of the topics presented him. As the result of much 

 discussion, contention, and wordy warfare, we have, however, to- 

 day, certain secondary school programmes, generally speaking 

 quite similar in their character, marking in a more or less defined 

 manner the routes along which our boys are traveling on their 

 respective journeys to college, to scientific school, or to practical 

 business life. While there is to be noted a decided advance and 

 improvement in pedagogical methods in our secondary schools 

 within the last few decades, it yet remains true that no intelligent 

 reader of the programmes, as exhibited in the catalogues of our 

 leading endowed fitting schools, and public grammar and high 

 schools, can fail to be struck by a certain lack of co-ordination, 

 system, and, in most instances, by an apparent want of a genuine 

 appreciation of the real demands that the present age makes 

 upon modern secondary schools. Once outside the old fixed lim- 

 its of the classics, there is to be observed much disagreement 

 among the schools themselves, both as to the proper subjects to 

 be included in the programme and the relative time to be devoted 

 to the studies that are placed in the school curriculum. When 

 comparison of these programmes with those of other countries is 

 made, we have at once afforded us a most striking exemplification 

 of how far we still are in this country from any well-defined con- 

 sensus as to what the modern secondary school programme really 

 should be. In view of the revolutionary period through which 

 the schools have been passing during the past thirty years, this is 

 perhaps hardly to be wondered at. The broadening of the college 

 requirements for entrance, largely brought about by the demands 

 of a public sentiment, no longer fully satisfied with purely medi- 

 aeval curricula, has in itself served to call for many modifications 

 of the secondary schools' programme. With Harvard and Johns 

 Hopkins opening their doors to students unequipped with the tra- 

 ditional Greek, there has of course arisen a demand for prepara- 

 tion in other prerequisites which have necessarily been substi- 

 tuted for- Greek. In response to the general outcry for them, the 

 courses in modern languages, in the mother-tongue, history, and 



