High school

“ This is as it should be, for after all, while the high school prepares students for college, its chief purpose is to act as a finishing school for those larger numbers of students who never go to college. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Her course through the high school was marked by the same devotion to duty, the same high ideals; yet so unassuming, so beloved by all, she never seemed to realize that she was a marked scholar, the pride of her teachers and of the visiting school-board. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The high schools with a million students, and the universities, colleges, professional and normal schools with three hundred thousand more, constitute an increasingly important factor in education; at the same time, for every seven students in these higher schools, there are ninety-three children in the elementary grades. The proportion is so unexpected that it staggers us—more than nine-tenths of the children who attend school in the United States are in the elementary grades! ”

“ The great question, after all, is not how much learning have you been able to put into him, but how much of the finer ambitions, how much power, how deeply and strongly they hunger for the very best. An ounce of inspiration at this time is worth more than a pound or a ton of learning; I am no foe of learning, either. The high school is and will remain the people's college. ”

“ Examine a course of study and you will find revealed much of the judgment and mental caliber of the teachers49 of the school. It is not uncommon to find high schools proper with university curricula. High-sounding names, often, are an attempt to hide the fact that it is an ordinary high school and many times very ordinary indeed. ”

“ Following logically the function of the high school, is the discussion of the educational value of the different studies. Tradition has prevented until recently any such scientific examination of the studies pursued in the high school. ”

“ Beautifying the schoolhouse and schoolroom, having a library and a few pictures and casts, and making school life attractive are suggestions to be worked out, and the value of teaching sewing, cooking, the care of babies to girls, and manual training to boys.
IV—HIGH SCHOOLS
The subject of the high schools will naturally succeed this and the first paper may take up the question, Why do so few boys and girls go to high school? Is it only because so many go into business life? Is the preparation for college adequate? ”

“ The high school, built in 1806, for many years a familiar object on the west margin of the Links, gave way to the academy, a handsome and commodious structure, to which are drafted senior pupils from the numerous board schools for free education in the higher branches. ”

“ One may contend, and with some success, that the high school régime is [35] better adjusted to the younger pupils, with the consequent result that they are more successful in its requirements. The distractions of more numerous social interests may actually accompany the later years of school age. ”

“ But the boy who does not begin to go to school until he is eight years of age finds himself at fifteen, in a city, merely fit to enter a high-school, and not a very high school either. Some of the most noted men in our country’s history graduated from college at sixteen or seventeen years. The curriculum of a college in those days was not as high as now. Nevertheless, the graduates certainly gave a very good account of themselves from their earliest entrance into public life. ”

“ Public sentiment.—In view of the school sentiment that obtains in the community the eighth grade is practically as populous as the first grade. Attendance upon school work is a habit of thinking both with the children and with their parents, and school is taken for granted the same as eating and sleeping. If a boy should, for any cause, fail to graduate from the high school, every patron of the school would regard it as a personal calamity. ”

“ In the early years the real purpose of the high school was considered to be that of preparing the pupils for college, and the courses of study included only such subjects as were suited to that purpose. ”

“ A high school education will make your boy a more positive force in his community, his state, and the nation, socially, economically, and politically.—With many noted exceptions, in the future as in the past, our real constructive men, men whose monuments are their work, will be men trained and disciplined in the best schools of the country. ”

“ The High School has a graded course of studies, instructs in mathematics, the sciences, language, history, literature, etc., and prepares pupils for college, has accomplished all that its early advocates and friends claimed for it, and is now a permanent factor in the educational agencies of the town. ”

“ The high school period is a most important one in the boy's life, and the father should see to it that the high school boy is occupied for several hours each day, either in his own place of business or in some other establishment. ”

“ To help such children succeed in school, meet the State academic standards that all children are expected to meet, and graduate from high school prepared for postsecondary education and the workforce without the need for remediation. ”

“ Girls, there are twenty-eight hundred boys and girls that attend our high school and I don’t think that counts the pupils in the junior high. That is more than half as many people as are in our home town! ”

“ The majority of these pupils are lost from school—whatever the cause—before the completion of their courses; and, again, the majority of those who do graduate have on graduation ended their school days. Consequently, it becomes more and more evident how momentous is the influence of the public high school in conditioning the life activities and opportunities of our youthful citizens who have entered its doors. ”

“ The general tone of the school is undoubtedly most satisfactory, while the distinguished success of late years of a considerable proportion of the pupils at the University classes and in the University and other public examinations, bears ample testimony to the suitableness and the value of the instruction given in the several subjects comprised in the school course. There is every reason also to believe that at the present time the Boys' High School possesses in a very large measure, the confidence and good-will of the parents of the pupils, and the general public. ”

“ There are numerous examples of pupils in graded schools, who, with very limited school terms, prepare for the high school at the age of fourteen. Under the guidance of painstaking and intelligent parents or private tutors, children cover, in a very brief time, the studies of the grammar school. All have noted, under favoring conditions, a surprising development, at an early age, in understanding of history, literature, and common phenomena, a growth far beyond that reached at the same age in the schools. These [Pg 56] facts simply show the possibilities of the period of elementary education. ”

“ If we wished to explain the plan of the organization of a high school, it would be satisfactory to divide the pupils into freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors, even though, in any particular school, there might be a few special and irregular pupils who belonged to none of these classes. ”

“ For advanced work in the senior high school and for the introductory college course reason and practice both favor a separation of these subjects, with close correlation and constant consideration of the interrelations. ”

“ High school teachers should be, and, if the high school is a good one, are, broad gauge, scholarly men and women, educated in our best colleges, normal schools and universities.—For a boy to come in close contact with such manly men and womanly women as should and do form the faculty of good high schools is above all money value to the boy. ”

“ Barbers, tailors, bootblacks and prize-fighters had as much right as the dancing master to assume any title that might have a commercial value. Teachers of high schools prepared students for advanced entrance in college. If the college teacher of geometry is called professor, why should not the distinction be extended to the high school teacher of the same subject? Moreover, what is the difference between a college and a high school? ”

“ The heavy emphasis upon this subject should be reserved for the later grades of the elementary school.
In the high schools, a little is being accomplished. In the academic high schools, those who take the classical course receive no civics whatever. ”

“ The literature group is as distinctly of college character as the elementary group is admittedly high school work. It is here, in fact, that the best ideals of the American college find the fullest opportunity. This is true both for the teacher and for the student. In the elementary group, pedagogical skill and a fair mastery of the language are the chief prerequisites of a successful teacher. ”

“ In any senior high school we may have pupils who have not had the advantages of a good foundation in the grades or in junior high. Again, there are those who acquire manual dexterity with great difficulty. ”

“ Our universities assume part of the high school function along with their own. The German Gymnasium and French lycée include the equivalents of the American college Freshmen and part of the Sophomores. They finish up the drill and discipline stage of education. ”

“ The Normal School, of something over 100 pupils, nearly all the girls being graduates of the High-school, was admirable in drill, in literary training, in calisthenic exercises. The High-school is also admirable, a school with a thoroughly elevated tone and an able principal. Of the 600 pupils at least two-thirds were girls. ”

“ They forget that the high school of to-day is called upon to serve a much more diversified group of pupils than ever before, and it is not always able to determine in every case just the type of work that the boy or girl needs in order to make a success in life. ”

“ These ideas persisted through the college careers, especially among the boys, many of whom felt they were misplaced in college at 15 years of age. Entering high school near the thirteenth birthday, a child saves time, and yet is not made subject to the tensions which may result from trying to meet social and physical requirements for which he is too immature. ”

“ Records are being kept of the graduates of the elementary school. Most of them go into the high school of the university, where there is every opportunity to watch them closely. They find no unusual difficulty in keeping up with the regular college preparatory work, and their marks and the age at which they enter college indicate that their elementary training has given them some advantages over the public school pupils in ability to do the hard formal studying. ”

“ My own feeling is, too, that out of the greatly increased attendance of the high school an even larger number than at present would find their way to the university, and that they would be better equipt in point of view and purpose than are many who enter under present conditions. ”

“ The misery of our system, whether in town or country, is that it assumes that the chief end of man is to figure in some one of the so-called “learned” professions. So the high school is keyed up to the standard of admission to the college and university. The grade school exists to qualify pupils for admission to the high school. ”

“ The first life class ends between the eighth and ninth years; the second between the eleventh and twelfth, and since an even more marked change of interests and tastes occurs at the period of adolescence, there are distinct high-school classes. The work within the group is then arranged to give the pupils the experiences which are needed at that age for the development of their bodies, minds, and spirits. ”

“ Her parents encouraged her desire to pursue a higher course of instruction, and consequently, after a successful entrance examination, she became a student of the Girls' High and Normal School, as it was then called. ”

“ Aside from the curriculum, what is the atmosphere that a boy breathes as soon as he sets foot on a college campus? Is he trained in honesty, in politeness, in high ideals of speech, in lofty conceptions of character? Does he have to obey orders? Is he taught to be neat, prompt, and industrious? Such questions are of things too often taken for granted, and too often lacking. ”

“ In college mind meets mind in the severe competition of recitation and annual examination. The bright boy—one of a small class at home, who had it all his own way there—now finds a score or more of leaders whose unvoiced challenge he is compelled to accept, and how he does knit his brow, close his eyes, summon his strength, school his will, force his flagging energies, and grapple problems that he may hold his own, outstrip his rivals, and win prize and place for the sake of his family’s fame and for his personal satisfaction! ”

“ College sits in excelsis. The topmost turn of the educational system, it sets the standards and defines the ideal both of knowledge and conduct. Secondary-school students consequently prepare for college in a far completer way than is recognized. They emulate and reproduce the whole pattern and structure of “college life,” with its fraternities and other societies, its athletics, its hidden sex interests, and all the rest. ”