Junior high school

“ They entered the third grade in school at the age of 6 years, and at the time of report they had achieved the seventh grade and were engaged in junior high school work at the age of 9 years.
They are not prigs: they are attractive, animated, sociable children, with a bubbling sense of humor. They are popular with their playmates. They can take charge of a gymnasium class in which most of the members are two to four years their seniors, and preserve excellent attention and discipline. They speak mature but not pedantic English, and they speak French with the fluency of a native. ”

“ It's a privilege which I'm sure many educators must envy, teaching in Ridgeville, for our new school is a fine one, and our academic standards are high. On the other hand, the fathers of most of my students work for the Commission and a constant awareness of the Commission and its work pervades the town. It is an uneasy privilege then, at least sometimes, to teach my old-fashioned brand of science to these children of a new age.
"That's very nice," said Marjorie. "What does a junior achievement group do?" ”

“ As Hillary and I have learned, parents can't wait to plan for college until their children are in their junior or senior years of high school. In fact, education experts say it's essential that parents sit down with their kids as early as the sixth grade to start charting a course toward college. In the crucial middle school years, parents must encourage their children to take challenging classes. Research shows, for example, that students who take algebra and geometry by the end of the ninth grade are much more likely to go on to college than those who don't. ”

“ 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! ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I can see, and know from experience, that the elective system is not wholly practical in high schools, nor for girls and boys who are not yet eighteen years old: because boys and girls need a stated amount of general knowledge, which they get in the high schools; because they are not sufficiently decided in their own minds and feelings,—not sufficiently developed, mentally, to really know what is best for them to study; and because so many boys and girls will shirk the hardest studies. ”

“ 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 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! ”

“ Do you know that about one-fourth of all students who enter the freshman classes of our high schools, thruout the United States, drop out before the close of the first semester? Do you know, too, that the elimination continues right along until that one-fourth is made more than one-half before graduation day arrives? Now, these boys and girls enter full of hope and expectation, eager and ambitious for what the high school is supposed to do for them; they do not plan to drop out before completing the course—nor do their parents plan to have them do so. ”

“ Thus, between 1900 and 1930 the high school population has multiplied ten-fold; the total number of pupils today is between five and six million. And more than a million young men and women are enrolled in the colleges and universities. High school and college are considered “advantages,” and the essence of the advantage is a social infantilism imposed upon a biological maturity. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ He looks beyond the rewards and position that his own school offers. It is not enough to be in the highest form, not enough to be in the first eleven. He must improve himself so as to be able to take a high place in the next stage of his career. A public school boy, on the other hand, regards the honours that his school has to offer as an end sufficient in themselves. ”

“ The children enter the kindergarten at the end of the toddling age, and the little lads and lassies sit side by side in their delightful rooms and make their first songs of life, as they end them, together, their little arms and hands making the first efforts at rhythm together, awkward movements full of grace. They pass at eight years to the primary department and begin the toilsome upward pull of real study, and here their ways part,—the boys for the Peers’ School and the ruder ways of masculine effort. ”

“ From the seventh grade up, promotion is by subjects entirely, and not by grades. If a student elects art, she may follow up her art work for the next six years; similarly, a boy may follow shop-work, or a girl domestic science or millinery. In order to fit the school more quickly to the pupils’ need, we make a division at the beginning of the eighth grade of those pupils desiring to take academic work and those desiring to take industrial work in the high school. The latter group does extra sewing or shop-work twice each week. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The latter depended solely on his seniority “in college.” The junior in college was the last boy whose nomination succeeded in finding a vacancy in any given year; and he remained “junior” till the admission of another boy next year, when he had one junior below him, and so on. Thus it might happen, and constantly did happen, that a boy’s junior in college might be much above him in the school, either from having come in at a later age, or from being a better prepared or cleverer{124} boy. ”

“ As far as the younger students and the bachelors at colleges were concerned the extant regulations in regard to their exercises, amusements, incomings and outgoings, suggest that they were treated much like the junior and senior boys in a rather strict public school in the first half of the nineteenth century; and perhaps the senior graduate members were treated somewhat like residents in colleges at the same period. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”