Central High School

“ These smaller cities each supported a good High School, and the rivalry in boys’ sports among the five schools of this district had always been keen. 81
Now it was proposed that the girls should strive for the honor of the schools and it was reported from Lumberport and Keyport that the Girls’ Branches had been organized in the high schools of those towns with great enthusiasm. Centerport’s East and West schools were slower to respond. Central High usually led the way in most innovations. ”

“ In other trials it was the same—broad jump, shot-putting, relay race teams, and all the rest. There was developed in the freshman class a sprinter who almost bested Bobby Hargrew at first; but the freshmen had little, after all, to do when the big day came.
The main contestants for athletic honors were bound to be drawn from the junior and sophomore classes. It was a fact that the present senior class of Central High had not been as imbued with the spirit of after-hour athletics, or with loyalty to the school, as had the younger classes. ”

“ It was the intention of those backing the organization that the 36 girls of Central High should govern their athletics as much as possible themselves. Too much interference by the faculty always spoils a school society. ”

“ In the organization and management of the high school there are many real problems found in all, but their relative importance varies with the size of the school. The preparation of the teacher, his selection and efficient supervision are some of the most important considerations in working toward the standards of the North Central Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools here produced and representing the most advanced practical thought concerning the essentials of a good high school. ”

“ The third volume of the series, named “The Girls of Central High at Basketball; Or, The Great Gymnasium Mystery,” particularly related the fortunes of the representative basketball team of Central High, and of which each girl now gathered here on the ridge was a member.
Not long previous to this day in the Spring vacation when the seven were tramping toward Fielding, Jess Morse had made a great hit with her school friends and instructors, as well. ”

“ Sharp about the fire, and they were not disappointed.
“I am compelled to call the attention of the classes to an accident which occurred downstairs 48 in my office on Saturday,” he began. “When we are good-natured enough to allow the school property, entrusted to our care, to be used for purposes aside from the regular class work, we have a right to expect those pupils enjoying the privilege to be more than usually careful of such property.
“I mean this for the attention of the boys as well as the girls,” he continued. ”

“ Meanwhile Laura was saying, more thoughtfully:
“We’ve got to give our best attention to the inter-class and inter-school athletics when school opens again, girls, if we want Central High to stand first at the end of the year. You know we are being beaten right along by the East High and Keyport Just think! Central High only Number 3 in points that count when the June field day comes. We can’t stand for that, can we?”
“I should say not!” cried Bobby. “But we beat ’em last year on the water.”
“And we stand first in basketball,” added Dora Lockwood. ”

“ And the girls—many of them—were eager to learn basket-ball, captain’s ball, tennis, and other vigorous sports approved by the Girls’ Branch Association.
It was approaching that important day in the school year at Central High when the M. O. R.’s “touched” those girls selected for membership. That certain Friday afternoon was looked forward to by most of the sophs and juniors with much anxiety. The freshmen had no part in it. The faculty did not allow the freshmen to belong to the secret society; but it was something for the sophs and juniors particularly to strive for. ”

“ There remain for mention some other evils besides bad systems of promotion due to defects of organization. The school buildings are often with superstitious care kept apart exclusively for particular grades of pupils. The central building erected for high school purposes, though only half filled, is not made to relieve the neighboring grammar school, crowded to such a degree that it cannot receive the classes which ought to be promoted from the primary schools. ”

“ Bobby had hushed her sobs. But even when the wagon had started again and the Gypsy camp was out of sight, she was not willing to talk about what the Varey woman had told her.
CHAPTER VII—THE YELLOW KERCHIEF AGAIN
School opened the next Monday and the girls of Central High took up their tasks “for the last heat” of the year, as Jess Morse expressed it.
“And I’m glad,” she told her chum, Laura Belding, “Just think! next Fall we’ll be seniors.”
“Wishing your life away,” laughed Laura. “We were awfully glad to be juniors, I remember.” ”

“ It was a rule, too, that no girl could play without a physical examination as to her fitness, and the Central High team—the champion team of the school—was selected from among the strongest and best developed girls. ”

“ They started early, for although they were only juniors and would have another year to attend Central High before graduation, this last day of school would be a busy one for them as well as for the graduating class. 36
Billy and Alice Long, who were their schoolmates, lived in a much poorer quarter of the town; it was down toward the wharves, and not far from the Central High’s boathouses.
The street was a typical water-side street, with small, gaily painted cottages, or cottages without any paint at all save that put on lavishly by the ancient decorating firm of Wind & Weather. ”

“ The sooner the high school suits its work to the needs of fourteen and fifteen-year-old boys and girls, the sooner it will be filling its true place in the community.” Such opinions, voiced in this case by a man whose national reputation is founded on his splendid work as superintendent of the school system of Newton Mass., bespeak the attitude of the most progressive American high schools. ”

“ Students entering higher educational institutions in Denmark are well prepared and more advanced than high school graduates in the United States. Science and engineering courses in Danish universities are highly specialized. Upon completion of the program of studies, the successful student is usually awarded the candidatus scientiarum degree, which is roughly equivalent to a US master's degree. The magister scientiarum degree is awarded by universities to students who have concentrated in a single field of science and who have shown a particular aptitude for independent research. ”

“ I fully believe that a high school should be to-day just what it was originally planned to be back there in the first half of the nineteenth century—a school higher than the elementary, controlled by the community, in co-operation with the educational leaders of the State, serving the needs of the community, fitting its boys and girls for service in the community and discriminating, if at all, in the favor of the group of boys and girls who are not going to college, since that group is much the larger. ”

“ Because of the things that have been done, we can make college as universal in the 21st century as high school is today. And, my friends, that will change the face and future of America.
We have opened wide the doors of the world's best system of higher education. Now we must make our public elementary and secondary schools the world's best as well--by raising standards, raising expectations and raising accountability. ”

“ There must always be a place for classical schools, scientific schools, professional schools, which, in their respective courses of study, either anticipate or follow, in the career of the student, his four years of college life. With these conditions and limitations stated, the point I seek to establish is that a public high school can do the work usually done in such institutions more faithfully, thoroughly, and economically, than it can be done anywhere else. ”

“ It is much to be wished that similar colleges and schools, in connexion with King’s College, were established in all our great towns, in like manner as schools every where throughout the kingdom have sprung from that prolific parent, with which they are in union, the Central School in Baldwin’s Gardens. Our National Schools are well calculated early to train children in the path of godliness ”

“ But accepting our colleges and universities as they are, at the same time discarding the results of tradition and of half-hearted experiment, what should the high school do? By high school we mean the instruction in the public school for four years of school life from the age of 13 or 14 to that of 17 or 18, resting on the primary and grammar school on the one hand and presumably leading to the college on the other—in most cases the last of the years in which a student lives at home and goes to school. ”

“ While many of the members of the faculty do, and may continue to, give courses in the other colleges, they have a distinct, organic connection with the teachers college. The teachers college is also getting to have, as a vital part of its equipment, a model high school bearing to it the same relationship that the model, or practise, school bears to our normal schools. ”

“ The academy and college take young men from the district and high schools, and furnish them with additional aids for the business of life; but the Normal School is truly the helper of the common schools. It receives its pupils from them, fits these pupils for teachers, and sends them back to superintend where a few months before they were scholars. ”

“ For years it was difficult in many localities for a young man to secure proper preparation, and the total of poorly prepared students applying for admission to the colleges increased. The number of towns and cities which have established high schools or high school departments has since increased rapidly, 189 and today a larger and larger proportion of college students comes from public schools. ”

“ A high school education is included, by progressive communities, in the birthright of every child. Since only a small part of these children are preparing for college, the school must offer more than the traditional high school course. The principal of a great Western high school which housed nearly two thousand children, pointed to one room in which a tiny class bent over their books. ”

“ If four districts should be united in this way, they might erect a central house, C, for the larger and more advanced scholars, and four smaller ones, p p p p, for the younger children. The central school might be taught by a male teacher, with female assistants, if needed; but the primary schools, with this arrangement, could be more economically and successfully instructed by females. ”

“ The colored schools are taught exclusively by colored teachers, the grade schools being conducted by the graduates of the Washington Normal School almost entirely. The M Street High School, a leading sample of the best public schools of the country, has a teaching faculty of twenty teachers, most of them graduates of our best colleges, such as Howard, Yale, Oberlin, University of Michigan, Amherst, Brown and Cornell. ”

“ Those suggestions may seem entirely unnecessary to the colleges and universities in the northeastern part of the country, but they are greatly needed elsewhere, as in many parts of the South where the high school movement, though growing rapidly, is yet in its formative period. ”

“ In order to supply the need of a more thorough preparation, a preparatory department has been maintained in many colleges. The present aim and tendency of our educational system is to introduce the pupil from the high school to the rank of Freshman in college. ”

“ The progressive rural high school is taking a live interest in the one-room district schools which may be too far from the center for consolidation, and is seeking to interest their pupils in attending high schools through athletic meets, play festivals, and similar assemblages of all the schools of the community, which thus create a natural bond of interest and common enthusiasm. ”

“ The high school is securing a surer grip on the world with each passing day. It is reaching out toward the grades, calling the pupils to come; it is reaching out into the world, making places there for them to occupy. The modern high school has ceased to be an adjunct to the college. Instead, it is a distinctive unit in educational life, taking boys and girls between the ages of fourteen and nineteen and relating them to the world in which they must live. ”

“ Out there it is seen to possess a much larger function—assisting the child—every child—to form its own acquaintance and to begin the planning of its future. In other words, the thought on the firing line is that the high school is an institution established by a community for community purposes—to take its young people—all of them—and guide them thru the difficult and transitional period [Pg 56] of adolescence, directing, inspiring, shaping, checking, developing for the largest manhood and womanhood possible and providing the community with efficient workmen in various lines. ”

“ The university is coming to have greater respect for and more confidence in the high school and its work. Whereas in the earlier days all entrance work was rigidly prescribed, now, in nearly all of our higher institutions, several units are open to free choice from a list of accepted subjects. In a goodly number these units may be chosen from any subjects offered by an approved high school. ”