IN WHAT PARTICULARS DO THE DEMANDS OF THE COLLEGES HINDER THE WORK THAT THE HIGH SCHOOLS SHOULD BE DOING FOR THE PEOPLE AS A WHOLE?*

The current phase of educational unrest seems to have to do chiefly with the high schools and the colleges. For the time being the kindergarten, country schools, and even southern education seem to be having, comparatively speaking, a year off. It is alleged on broad, general terms that our whole higher educational system is a failure; —that it does not train young people for the lives which they they are to lead; that high school children are being overworked; that nobody is going to the high schools on account of their lack of adaptation to the needs of the rising generation, and so on. Like nearly all such upheavals in the whole course of American educational history, it is probably nine parts of vague dissatisfaction to one part of conviction as to just what is wrong, accompanied by the facts to back up the said conviction. We are notified by a certain element in the business world that the graduate of the average high school is of no account whatever; by another section of the business world, represented for instance by Mr. E. H. Harriman, that given an education through the high school something can be made of boys in the business world. Simultaneously certain leaders in the industrial world are asserting with every appearance of conviction that the time spent on the traditional culture subjects is worse than wasted; while certain other leaders having occasion to employ a high grade of technical'talent are asserting that prospective engineers ought to be given a thorough training in Latin Before studying engineering. Much capital is made of the alleged fact that an appallingly small fraction of pupils ever see the high school at the very time when both high schools and colleges throughout the land are enrolling a larger fraction of the total school membership than ever before in their history, and when at the same time the said proportion is steadily and rapidly going up. The most casual reader of current educational history must be familiar with the fact that the high school enrolment of the entire country for the last twenty years has increased utterly out of proportion to the increase in population or to the increase of total enrolment in the schools. The talk of which we hear so much to the effect that only 5 per cent of our children go to high school is the sheerest nonsense, having a basis only in the minds of superficial statisticians and in the utterance of irresponsible demagogues. As a matter of fact, more than 50 per cent of all the children in our own state, including those from the remotest country towns, go to high school. Of all those who graduated from the grammar schools of New Hampshire in June, 1908, 88 per cent entered the high schools. These are not inferences from statistics; we can produce the children if necessary. While it may be true in certain of the great metropolitan cities that a very small portion of the children ever see the high school, it is not true in the country at large, and certainly not true in New Hampshire. High'schools and colleges may both be in a bad way, but there appears to be strong "ground for thinking that the public, taken as a whole, want theirs that way nevertheless.

This perpetual educational unrest with its periodic waves of aggravation will doubtless continue until, as a whole people, we are prepared to recognize squarely that no enterprise of any sort can ever be efficient except it is willing to obey the natural laws of all efficiency as expressed in terms of competency, discipline, and subordination of all who are engaged upon the enterprise. If the business men who are past-masters in the art of such organization would turn their attention for a time to the organization of our school systems and let alone the courses of study upon which their grip is at the best insecure, almost everything they desire would, without much doubt, be added unto them. No sane person will question that our whole educational effort stands in need of a progressive adaptation to the needs of those upon whom it works. There is no doubt that our education needs to be more practical, provided you know what the term means. I yield to no man in my conviction that both our program of study and our method must be adapted to the needs of a society whose basis is industrial democracy, but I assert, without very much fear of successful contradiction, that one city in which the superintendent of schools is given the same control over the school system which an industrial superintendent has over his system and then is told to get results or get out; in which teachers in their turn are told to get the results or get out, is of infinitely more promise for the successful solution of educational problems, even though the said city be teaching the program of two hundred years ago, than is a system with an entirely up-to-date program in which the whole school system is in the nature of a five-o'clock tea rather than a serious effort for the accomplishment of results.

I feel it necessary to make these statements as a preliminary to what I have to say later because I am unwilling to stand up and be counted with those who are assaulting our whole system of higher education as if it were responsible for all our educational shortcomings. Our schools, and indeed our colleges, are in the hands of the people; and when the people seriously want something better, they will undoubtedly get it.

The topic of this period is. however: In What Particulars Do the Demands of the Colleges Hinder the Work that the High Schools Should Be Doing for the People as a Whole. The question is phrased in such a way that I take it to answer in general terms rather than in terms restricted to Dartmouth College. I presume that all secondary school people here present would be in substantial agreement that in so far as the college is at fault as an hindrance of the free development of the high schools, Dartmouth is one of the least of the offenders, while some of the women's colleges as a class are the worst offenders. This is peculiarly unfortunate because, while it is pretty hard to kill a boy with overstudy, it is comparatively easy to kill a girl that way.

It is of little use to keep up the perennial discussion of the correlation of the secondary school and the college, unless the colleges will first settle for themselves a question which is of necessity precedent to the others That question, I take it, is this: Is the New England college going to be in the future an exclusively private institution, or is it to become an integral part of the public system of education? If the first, then it must renounce the whole connection with the public school system, including all financial connection with the state, and leave room for state universities to develop in its place. If the second, it must put itself in touch with the felt needs of the people, both as to subject matter of instruction and as to methods. The college cannot continue to straddle the fence. It must be either a public service corporation with ready and efficient adaptation to the needs of the whole people, or else it must frankly renounce its entire public connection in order to exist as a private institution for the service of those who prefer that the education of their children should be outside of the public school system.

The high school has no right to question either attitude of the college. It has a right to object to the college's attempting to occupy both positions at the same time. If the college expects to be an entirely private institution with no felt responsibility to the educational needs of the people as a whole as the people feel them, then it is futile to keep up conferences of the nature of this which we are now attending.

In coming here we, of course, assume that the college in spirit, without question, intends to occupy the position of servant of the whole people as much as does the high school ; and when I say college, I mean not Dartmouth College, but practically the entire group of New England endowed institutions.

The particular which naturally first suggests itself as one way in which the college hinders the work of the high schools for the people as a whole is the, widespread feeling that the college requirements in specific subjects are excessive; that too much quantity is demanded. This 'matter is, of course, subject to differences of opinion in which the opinion of the great majority is undoubtedly on the side that the requirements are excessive in quantity. It is usually asserted that a far better quality could be obtained it less quantity were demanded. It is very easy and very unprofitable to run races of opinion upon matters of this sort. We either have facts at hand which can be gathered together and the conclusions drawn, or else our first duty, as scientific people, is to secure the necessary data before drawing our conclusions. Mere dicta, with no other bases than the fact that those who utter them have had several years of experience in teaching school, are not of much consequence.

I should say in view of the facts which are at my disposal that the case is very far from being made out that the requirements of the colleges, of which Dartmouth is a type, are in themselves excessive in quantity. In the first place, the returns made to the department of public instruction by all the high schools and academies of this state show that, in the case of almost every subject required for admission to college, a goodly number of schools have done more than the entrance requirement; and these schools are by no means all of them city schools. "In the number are several of the smaller village high schools. Obviously, the schools would not be doing more than the college entrance requirements if the col. lege entrance requirements were excessive in respect to the subjects in question. In the second place, as a matter of fact, it is almost in the nature of a law that less quantity in the existing requirements results in poorer quality. It is easy, of course, to assume that less quantity means better quality, but it does not necessarily follow. Quality depends primarily upon teaching skill and power and not primarily upon the ground to be covered, unless the ground is manifestly excessive. I should say that the doctrine that less quantity produces superior quality has yet to make out its case. In the third place, it happens that here and there, where breaks have been made in the traditional question-and-answer style of recitation, there has been a very great increase in the facility with which quantity can be handled and quality produced. This is notably true with modern languages, than which no other subject has probably improved more in the last five years, albeit there is doubtless room for still further improvement. It so happens that no high school subject has in recent years been taught with a keener sense of the principles of scientific teaching than the modern languages. The result is that during the last year 20 per cent of the high schools teaching first year French, for instance, exceeded the Dartmouth requirement, which is approximately twice that of the recommendations of the last N. E. A. report upon uniform college entrance requirements, and of this number all but two were smaller village high schools. So far as excessive quantity is concerned, therefore, I think the fact remains to be proved, but I should not attempt to assert that it cannot be proved. I suggest that the high schools are bound, first, to inquire whether it is the amount of study which their pupils as a whole do which overworks them, or the round of athletics, debating societies, class dances, late hours at home, etc.

The lack of uniformity among college entrance requirements is certainly a needlessly hampering condition and at the same time a type of a class of hampering conditions. The city high schools, particularly, which are preparing pupils for several different colleges are practically under the necessity of having as many sections as there are colleges; and when this condition is aggravated by the requirement that certain subjects shall be finished within a certain time limit before entrance to college, the condition is one which is intolerable. The situation is so entirely familiar and it was presented with such ability from this platform a year ago that I do not think that I need to go into details, beyond calling attention to the lack of uniformity as in a practical sense one of the conditions which is most formidable in preventing the high schools from doing their legitimate work.

Doubtless each college will differ from others in its views of its own entrance necessities; but the existing condition of affairs is precisely the same kind of childish individualism which in the realm of religion has made Protestantism a hundred warring sects and in the political world would have, if it could, made the United States of America forever impossible. The New England colleges owe it to themselves, indeed to their very existence, after all these years, to get together on this matter of uniformity, or else entirely renounce any connection with the high school. The governing bodies of high schools, and I mean by this, of course, the school boards, owe it to the institutions over which they preside and to the people whose servants they are, to refuse to allow the high school to prepare anybody for institutions whose requirements are so eccentric as to necessitate a disproportionate amount of time and effort for the very few who contemplate attending them. It should be remembered by the high school that it is under no obligation, either statutory or otherwise, to prepare for any particular type of college.

An hindrance kindred to that of lack of uniformity is what I should characterize as departmental sectarianism within the college itself, and I regret to say that I think Dartmouth is an offender in that particular. Sectarianism is, I suppose, rooted in differences of opinion as to what is the essential to salvation, which opinions neither have been nor can be verified. Its peculiar earmark is that it makes men exalt their differences and minimize their points of agreement. You get this feature notably in the count system, or in the point system, of evaluating subjects which prevails at Dartmouth and in New England generally, as compared with the unit system which prevails nearly everywhere else. Now a program of study adopted by a New Hampshire high school, for instance, which would do as well for the people as the people are willing to afford, would answer first-rate as a college entrance program, provided the universally recognized principle of four subjects five periods per week prevailed. Such a course could be maintained in every New Hampshire hamlet large enough to support a high school at all; and indeed is maintained in practically all of our existing schools. It gives, of course, sixteen units; which is one and one-half units, if I remember correctly, more than the Carnegie Foundation considers necessary college entrance requirements. Rut when you go further and say that one year of Latin shall count not as one unit, but as practically one unit and one-half; and that one year of modern language shall count as only one unit and so on; and then go still further and say that a candidate for the degree of A. B. must present at least three elective points in language; and that a candidate for B. S. must present two in science and may present only two in history, then the high school principal begins to wish that he were almost anything else but a schoolmaster. He can make up a program very nicely from sixteen units, which gives him twenty recitations per week, but if he has to observe the niceties of departmental evaluation, then he finds that he must often have twenty-one, sometimes twenty-three or twenty-four, recitations a week for a certain group of pupils, which is manifestly out of all reason and —which unfortunately at the same time includes some things which the legislature has thought essential to the education of boys and girls.

I doubt if there is any other one thing upon which the high school and college are at cross-purposes which is so entirely unjustified either in administration or psychology as this arbitrary rating of certain courses. I may think that four years of Latin are so very valuable that each year ought to count as 50 per cent more than anything else on the program, but I can't prove, it, nor can you. You may think that the Greek studied for three years is 25 per cent more valuable than either modern language studied for the same length of time, and I shall not dispute you, but only remind you that you can't prove it. These things are merely matters of opinion. Generally speaking the English department will not agree that Latin is 50 per cent more valuable than English; nor will the science department, as a general thing, agree that ancient history is 100 per cent more valuable than physics. Or you may answer that the science department doesn't always rate preparation for college in physics so highly as preparation for college in ancient history. But don't you see that the high school teacher, or the superintendent of schools, has got a pretty hard task before him if he is going to prove to the average parent that the history of Greece and Rome is twice as valuable for his boy as physics ?

A great hindrance to the high schools' adaptation to the real needs of all the people would be swept away if the New England colleges would put themselves in line with the rest of the country and adopt the doctrine that, if a subject is good for admission to college at all, it is as good as every other subject, or at least that you can't prove that it isn't.

The practice of rating one subject differently from another, the practice of rating Latin as being more important than any other subject, is, of course, rooted psychologically in that doctrine of formal discipline which has been pretty thoroughly exploded in the view of nearly every competent student of educational psychology in the country. So long as the theory held good that studies in school and college were much like the various pieces of apparatus in the gymnasium and that just as the development of the biceps by the use of the appropriate apparatus would make the biceps equally good for any of its purposes; so the training of the various assumed faculties of the mind, such as judgment, reason and so on, by sundry subjects would make the said faculties equally good for any of their purposes, then there was some justification for holding certain subjects as being of peculiar value for disciplinary purposes. Unfortunately this theory never stood the test of scientific investigation. It undoubtedly belongs with various doctrines which have been good working theories in their day, but have gradually been replaced in the presence of more light. It is curiously like asceticism as a spiritual weapon and, in its exemplification in our schools, singularly akin to the doctrine of infant damnation.

If you would enable the high schools to put themselves in touch with the felt need of the people more completely, you will have to reject the principle of formal discipline and admit other subjects as college entrance units which have never been held to have that particular kind of discipline.

First among these I should name American history and the study of government. The public may be wrong, but there is a manifest feeling expressed in the acts of the various governing bodies that people who graduate from high school ought to know something about the government of the state at whose expense they have been educated. Remembering that the constitutional basis of our entire expenditure for public school purposes is education for citizenship, it is not surprising that people think that a year's work in the study of our institutions is quite as valuable as a year's work in the study of those of Greece and Rome. We have here, 100, an important practical need. The lawmaking body has required reasonable instruction in the Constitution of the United States and of New Hampshire. Conceived as a study of the constitutional history of the United States, this subject would be admissible as a college entrance unit in most colleges outside of New England. In New Hampshire the high school principal is confronted with the necessity of teaching this subject and then receiving no credit for the same when he sends his boys and girls to college.

But a year's work in the study of the history of our institutions is not sufficient if the high school is to do its full duty for the people as a whole. It is a pitiful thing to see the lamentable ignorance which a considerable proportion of the graduates of our high schools and colleges display with reference to the commonest principles upon which our institutions are founded, and in obedience to which they must be conserved and developed. When the ignorance of the educated world is contrasted with the exceedingly efficient knowledge of that part of the public which preys upon public institutions, it is not surprising that our country has passed through political experiences which we would fain forget, to say nothing of others to come which we would gladly avoid. There should be other courses in our high schools, competently taught, dealing with the whole question of the machinery and the ethics of civil government in a more vital and more extended way than we now do. There is a call for such courses. Will the college accept them as admission units, even if they have to be substituted for a corresponding amount of Latin, or even mathematics ?

In view of the immense and vital interest which the general public has in matters of public health, as well as in matters of private health, there is a crying need of good instruction in general biology, in human physiology, and in the principles of hygiene. Physiology and hygiene have become practically unknown in a secondary course. In an elementary way they are taught in the lower schools. Biology holds a precarious position in a few schools and, so far as mv observation goes, is under the contempt of the biological departments of the colleges. Considering the fact that the whole art of living must be understood very largely with reference to biological principles, and considering that the thought of the modern world is so very largely in terms of biology, is it too much to assert that every person who expects to call himself educated should at least have the opportunity of thorough training in this subject? The need of understanding on the part of the educated person of that particular phase of biology, usually included within the meaning of physiology and its hygienic applications, is too obvious to urge upon an intelligent audience. Can the colleges help the high schools to put themselves in touch with the felt needs of the people by admitting a year of biology and a year of physiology and hygiene as entrance units?

We are living in a highly organized commercial epoch. The life of every educated person touches the commercial order at innumerable points. Sometimes he has cause to regret that this is so. The high school has for the last quarter of a century been vaguely feeling its way along to put itself in touch with the commercial order in society, and to train boys and girls who would have some educated insight into the spheres of commercial life. Commercial courses in high schools have had a checkered career. It is safe to say that at present they are far from being snap courses and nearer to being taken seriously than at any other time in their history." The college has followed suit and has registered in the undergraduate department, and indeed in some cases in the graduate department, its feeling that its education must touch this exceedingly important phase of the life which all of its graduates must in some way or another lead. And this movement, I think, has a deeper significance than that expressed by its purely utilitarian side. It means not only a form of education which outs its graduates in touch, more or less, with the bread-winning career, but, what is of even more . important significance, eventually to educate a generation into such an understanding of commercial life as shall scorn commercialism. If the colleges could admit a certain amount of high school commercial work of high grade as an entrance unit, they would go far to help the high school put itself in touch with all the people.

Precisely the same, thing may be said with reference to a certain amount of cultural shop work. Although the college cannot turn itself into a technical school, in so far as elementary and secondary courses in shop work have been shown to be cultural, as well as vocational, they become a proper subject of consideration as possible entrance requirements.

In no direction is there a better opportunity for more important and practical helpfulness than in a change of spirit in the attitude of the college toward physics and chemistry. The high school physics and chemistry are, of course, already college entrance units; but they are only too apt to occupy a position midway between the contempt of the scientific layman and the contempt of the college professor. In the first place, the college deliberately rates them as being of small importance. In the second place, the influence of the college classroom upon the technique of instruction applied through the entrance examination, through the text books and through the high school instructors who have received their education in college, has made the instruction in physics and chemistry a thing utterly beyond the appreciation and understanding of boys and girls of high school age, except In those comparatively rare "instances in which you find a man or woman with the genuine spirit of the naturalist in the laboratory. It is not at all an uncommon thing to find boys who can determine the latent heat of melting ice with a commendable degree of skill, but who can't for the life of them tell why the ice cream freezes. There has never been a time in the history of our own state, at least, when the high school laboratories were so thoroughly well equipped as now. May I venture to express the hope that, in the first place, physics and chemistry will each of them be given a rating equal to those of other subjects; and in the second place, that the science departments of the college and of the high schools will so far modify their positions as to endeavor to keep touch with the intellectual capacities of the adolescent child and the need of physics and chemistry as practical interpreters of the phenomena of everyday life rather than as introductions to the realm of pure science.

I have outlined this evening some of the directions in which it seems to me, speaking from a single "point of view, the college must modify its policies if it would enable the high schools to do full justice to the needs of the people as a whole. There is a great deal of buncombe about that term "the people as a whole." It is too apt to carry with it the implication that we have in this country a select class and "the people as a whole." Of course nothing can be more absurd. When we speak of the people we mean all the people; rich and poor, learned and ignorant. We don't" know anything about educated families or college families. The high school has no divided duty, in part to one section of the people and in part to the other section; it has but one duty and that is to the rising generation of boys and girls who are to become the people of America. When the college so modifies its policy as to make it possible for the high school to do its only duty, then the college is itself getting into a position in which it on its part can do its only duty. To return to the point from which I started, the New England college is at the parting of the ways. It is being called upon all through these days to choose which purpose it will serve. Is its future to be that of a private institution, reaching a select class of people, with great state universities to reach the whole people; or is it to continue to be what it has been through the present generation, every whit as much a people's institution as is the high school itself? All that I have said, or can say, upon the subject is summed up in this: Our educational structure must grow from the bottom up in obedience to the laws of child and youthful life; it cannot grow from the top down in obedience to the behests of educational dogmatism.

* A paper read. at the ninth annual Teachers' Conference, at Dartmouth College, May 14, 1909,

Henry C. Morrison, Superintendent of Public Instructionfor the State of New Hampshire