Lower school

“ But the radical antagonism of our colleges to educational progress through their reactive influence upon the lower school system is only to be fully appreciated when we understand in what that progress consists. ”

“ Of course, one of the great difficulties with which we have to contend is the tendency amongst the lower classes to remove their children from school as soon as they are of an age to contribute at all to their own support, and the support of the family. The only remedies we see just now for this evil are, that school hours should be so arranged as to give opportunities to these little labourers to devote a certain portion of their time to education. ”

“ It's not the slightest scrap of good a few single girls going and airing their woes to the Sixth. They're not likely to listen. If we could show them that the whole of the Lower School is one big united body, pledged to resist,—well, they'd just have to give way. ”

“ The masters of the lower school walked up and down the great school together during this three-quarters of an hour, or sat in their desks reading, or looking over copies, and keeping such order as was possible. But the lower-fourth was just now an overgrown form, too large for any one man to attend to properly, and consequently the elysium or ideal form of the young scapegraces who formed the staple of it. ”

“ If ragged village girls, untutored and uncombed, studying aloud in school hours, and at recess leaping over the benches like wild goats, now study diligently and in silence, move gently, and are respectful to their teachers and kind to each other, a thorough foundation has been laid; and if, in addition to that, the literary attainments of the lower classes to-day exceed those of the pupils who first left the school, the superstructure rises at once beautifully and securely. ”

“ One of the things that strike visitors to the School is the look of happiness on the boys’ faces, and there is no doubt that there is none of the usual feeling of dislike for school life which one finds in institutions where the only object held before the boys is the passing of examinations. Examinations have been abolished in the lower classes, except once a year when tests of each boy’s progress are made by the teacher who has been teaching the boy himself. ”

“ Go on!" they cried eagerly.
"There are at present ninety-three girls in this school," continued Gipsy. "Twenty-two are in the Fifth and Sixth, and seventy-one in the lower Forms. Just compare those figures! Twenty-two Seniors and seventy-one Juniors! Why, our majority is simply overwhelming. Now, for an example let us take the Dramatic Guild. At a shilling a year a head, the subscriptions of the Upper School amount to £1, 2s., and those of the Lower School to £3, 11s. ”

“ It is the thing to do."
"I don't mind the subscriptions if the Guilds are fun."
"Well—um! I can't say they're very much fun for us. We're only Lower School, you see, and we don't get a look-in."
"What do you mean?"
"Why, of course it's all in the hands of the Sixth. They arrange everything. We mayn't so much as express an opinion."
"No, it's really rather too bad," said Hetty Hancock, joining in the conversation. "We Lower School aren't fairly treated. ”

“ The State compels no one to attend the higher school or the university. The children of the lower classes of the population, whose relatives are not in a position to provide instruction for them in their own homes, are all sent to the public elementary school. ”

“ But the moment you rise as high as a college, nature is violated. First, boys go off by themselves to their own destruction; secondly, home influences withdrawn; and, thirdly,—at Harvard, which the only college I ever visited,—the thorough comeliness which is found in the lower grades of schools does not appeal. The separation of boys and girls in school is a subject which has much talked about, but has not yet come to its adequate discussion. ”

“ Now, let us mark the result of children being withdrawn from school at this early age. I shall hardly express myself too strongly, if I say that it in a great measure stultifies all our efforts to ameliorate the social condition of the poor. It is acknowledged, I believe, by every one acquainted with the subject, that the great majority of the lower classes, if examined at the age of twenty-five, are found grossly ignorant of the most elementary knowledge. ”

“ That is, the lower schools which deal with a generation at its most plastic time, furnish the higher schools with minds inured to the pressure of accepting subject matter without independent inquiry or curiosity. ”

“ The lower schools (including the professional schools) are, in the ideal scheme, designed to fit the incoming generation for civil life; they are therefore occupied with instilling such knowledge and habits as will make their pupils fit citizens of the world in whatever position in the fabric of workday life they may fall. ”

“ Of course, just now, and for a great many years to come, by far the greater part of our school work must be in the lower grades of instruction. So long as it can be said, that in the Southern States eighty per cent. of the colored and thirty per cent. of the white population are illiterate; that there are not educational facilities enough to furnish fifty per cent. ”

“ Furthermore, what immediately follows has reference mainly to the lower grades, because there the child’s school habits are formed, but the teacher who is on the alert for principles that are fundamental will be quick to perceive that whatever laws are basal in the control and discipline of children in primary grades, are equally so for older pupils because they are laws that apply to all humanity. ”

“ If she had allowed herself to brood over her troubles, she would have been wretched indeed; but by throwing herself heartily into schemes for the general good of the community she succeeded in being, if not exactly happy, at any rate a useful and cheerful addition to the school. ”

“ Teachers in two of the larger schools asserted that with many pupils a kind of complacency existed to feel satisfied with a C, and to consider greater effort for the sake of higher passing marks as a waste of time. Such pupils openly advocate a greater number of subjects with at least a minimum passing mark in each, in preference to fewer subjects and the higher grades, which they claim count no more in essential credit than a lower passing grade. ”

“ Both grades find out what is going on in the school and get thereby a large feeling of fellowship, while the interest of the lower one grows and finds reasons for staying in school. The work of the older children is used, wherever196 it is feasible, in teaching the lower grades. Maps and charts made in drawing are used for less advanced pupils in nature study or geography; the printing shop makes the spelling lists and problem sheets for the whole school; the doctor in his health campaigns calls in the art and English workers to make posters and pamphlets. ”

“ But so much has been done by the upper classes in providing schools for the lower that education is gradually making its way, and many who can not read are ashamed of their deficiency, and desirous to have their children taught. ”

“ The same is true of parents in relation to college and university. Again I am thinking not of the youth who works and wins his way to and through college but of that type of family in which a college education for the children is as truly its use and habit as golf-playing by the father after fifty. The college-habit, I have said, is a bit of form when it is not a penalty visited upon a youth, who, after an indifferent or worse record at a preparatory school, must be forced into and through college. All of the consequences of college-education except a degree many somehow manage to avert. ”

“ By and large, only those children enter high school who do not need to work for a living. They enter about the time that children of the residual world enter life, at puberty. Their attending high school signalizes an invidious distinction between them and their contemporaries, [18] for the high school has been from its beginning a mark of “aristocracy.” Even the “commercial” high school, which is yet of low esteem beside the high school preparing for college, celebrates this invidious distinction. ”

“ A system that selected every student through class rank alone would exclude the star athlete or musician whose grades suffered because of daily practices and training. It would exclude a talented young biologist who struggled to maintain above-average grades in humanities classes. And it would exclude a student whose freshman-year grades were poor because of a family crisis but who got herself back on track in her last three years of school, only to find herself just outside of the top decile of her class. ”

“ Our huge city schools are manufactories rather than educational institutions—places where yearly a certain number of the youth of the country are turned out able to some extent to make use of the mechanical arts of reading and writing, and with a smattering of many branches of knowledge, but with little or no training for the moral and civic responsibilities of life. This is evident, it is urged, if we consider how little the school does to counteract and to supplant the evil influences of a bad home or social environment. ”

“ You know that scholars whose conceptions are slow, or who are temporarily disabled from excess of mental work, are allowed to remain at the Ecole three years instead of two; they then become the object of suspicions little favorable to their capacity. This often compels young men, who might later show superior capacity, to leave the school without being employed, simply because they could not meet the final examination with the full scientific knowledge required. ”

“ The increasing facilities for diminishing the drudgery of education and making every subject, however abstruse, less difficult, is overcrowding the curricula of all schools to an alarming extent. It is almost impossible to find time for the extra subjects which are now so numerous and varied in preparatory schools, where boys who have developed a taste for some subject not generally taught, are expected by their parents to carry it on at a public school on the expectation that it may be of use to them in their future career. ”

“ Where the school fails, it appears to the social workers to do so because it makes education a thing apart,—because it separates its work from all that makes up the child’s life outside the classroom. ”

“ If many of these elder statesmen rule by virtue of distinguished ability and early adulthood, most do by virtue of a privileged position that delays adulthood and prolongs infancy more literally. The locus of this position is the high school and the college, especially the college. ”

“ Following these physical examinations, the children who are clearly sub-normal are placed in special classes or special schools, where, under the direction of specially fitted teachers, they do any mental work for which they are fitted, in the interims of time between manual activities. Weaving, woodworking, folding and similar employments hold the attention of sub-normal children where intellectual work will not. The special school, freed from the throttling grip of an iron-clad course of study, studies the need of each child, and makes a course of study to fit the need. ”

“ 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 object of all schools is not to ram Latin and Greek into boys, but to make them good English boys, good future citizens; and by far the most important part of that work must be done, or not done, out of school hours. To leave it, therefore, in the hands of inferior men, is just giving up the highest and hardest part of the work of education. Were I a private school-master, I should say, Let who will hear the boys their lessons, but let me live with them when they are at play and rest. ”

“ I can not too earnestly impress upon your mind that we strongly feel the necessity of converting our Institution into a High School. The high rate of schooling charged at the Presidency College is prohibitory to many middle class youths, while their parents being opposed to their boys being sent to Missonary Colleges, they are obliged to give up academic education after matriculation. ”

“ 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. ”

“ To escape vulgar associates, the children of the house avoid the elementary schools—the schools called in America public schools—where there are trained, efficient teachers, good apparatus, and an atmosphere of industry, and go to one of those wretched dens of disorderly imposture, a middle-class school, where an absolute failure to train or educate is seasoned with religious cant, lessons in piano-playing, lessons in French “made in England,” mortarboard caps for the boys, and a high social tone. ”

“ The absorption in petty gossip, sports, class politics, fraternity life, suggests that too many undergraduates regard their college in the light of a glorified preparatory school where the activities of their boyhood may be worked out on a grandiose scale. ”