damental agreement gives the unity and wholeness which makes the ultimate task of high school and college one.

The difficulty into which we have fallen seems to me in large measure to have arisen in the course of the effort to enlarge the curriculum of the old time classical high school for the purpose of fulfilling the rôle just mentioned. The movement was a thoroughly sound one. It is inevitable that into the secondary school those studies should be admitted which touch the lives and the vocations of future citizens. The difficulty has been that in our haste to enrich and to diversify the curriculum we have to some extent lost our ideal of what education means. To learn a little about many subjects, to dip superficially into the study of English and Latin and chemistry and psychology and home economics, and a dozen other things, is not education. Only that human being has gained the fundamentals of an education who has acquired soundly a few elementary branches of human knowledge, and who, in acquiring these, has so disciplined his mind that it is an efficient instrument ready to be turned to whatsoever task is set before it. The high school student is led to believe that education is attained by learning a little of each of many things; he gains, therefore, a superficial knowledge of many subjects and learns none with thoroughness. He lacks the hard fibre of intellectual discipline. Such a youth has not been educated. That only is education which sets a boy on the way to use his own mind for his pleasure and his profit; which enables him to attack a problem, whether it be in school or in business, and to think out the right answer. Education, rightly understood, is a power-producing process; and the serious indictment against the secondary school system to-day is that its graduates do not acquire either discipline or power. The real struggle in the American high school is between that influence which makes toward thoroughness and that which makes toward superficiality; and if the high school is to become the true training-place of the people, the ideal of thoroughness must supplant the ideal of superficiality.

But it must be remembered that thorough teaching can be had only where the individual teacher keeps within reasonable limits. The city high school with twenty or thirty teachers can cover a large area without sacrifice of quality; the village high school with two or three teachers is at once limited to a small number of possible subjects. Elective range is desirable only if the high school staff is competent and relatively large. A small high school with a limited number of teachers can do as good work in the preparation of girls and boys for college as a large high school, but it can do this only by confining its curriculum to a limited

number of subjects. A small high school which attempts to give many courses is sure to be weak in most of them.

In visiting a college recently in one of the older and richer states a state very backward in the development of its secondary school system I was struck by a remark of the officer in charge of admission which bore upon this matter. After looking over with him the admissions to his own college, I inquired the name of the high school from which he obtained the best prepared students. He answered that the best prepared students came from a high school in a small village, conducted by two teachers, a man and his wife. This result arose out of the fact that here were two competent teachers attempting to instruct pupils in only such subjects as they could teach effectively.

This is no argument against the enriched curriculum of the secondary school, provided the enriched curriculum does not lead to dispersion and so defeat the end of all education. But let the boy understand that if he desires to study agriculture, for example, he cannot study all the other subjects in the curriculum; let him take with agriculture one or two things which will form the trunk of his educational structure and learn them well and soundly. For only in this way can he gain the intellectual discipline and the intellectual strength to make his way either in college or in a vocation.

Illustrations of divergent tendencies may be taken from curricula for high schools set forth by state boards of education. Thus in Oregon one of the state regulations governing the high school course is that "no pupil shall carry more than four subjects at any one time." In Kansas the college preparatory course for high schools having three or more teachers contains no more than four subjects each term, with certain variations and elections. On the other hand, in North Carolina the Latin-Scientific course is made up each year of six distinct studies, aggregating twenty-five hours a week in the first two years, and twenty-six hours in the latter years; and in Maryland a similar requirement of six studies is made, whose recitation hours equal twenty-seven each week. In the Boston Latin School the student carries six studies, except in the last year, with the work each year containing twenty-three hours a week.

The boy who desires to enter college and the boy who desires to enter business alike need to be well grounded in fundamental studies and to gain a real mastery of a few things. In a word, the same ideal of education which will send up to college competent candidates will also send into the business world well-trained beginners. This lesson is one which has to be retaught, not only

to each generation of youth, but to each generation of schoolmasters. Each generation finds new studies which it believes to be specifics for the training of the youth of its own time and its own country. There are, however, no educational specifics which fit the varying temperaments, tastes, weaknesses, and ambitions of the youth of a nation. Perhaps the matter has never been more clearly stated than in the saying recorded by Thucydides, "We should remember that man differs little from man, except that he turns out best who is trained in the sharpest school." To a very large degree the disciplinary side of education in both high school and college has been forgot in the past twenty years. During the same period the family discipline has also been softened. The total effect is seen in the unreadiness of the great mass of youth to face a hard, steady pull, whether in college or in business.

Our educational curricula to-day, both in the high school and in the college, resembles closely the bills of fare which one finds in the hotels, on which are set down dozens of dishes under highsounding names; and yet one looks in vain through all this medley for a simple and wholesome meal. The high school scholar, whether his ambitions lie in the direction of a college or not, can do well only a few studies in each year of his high school course. To do these well is to make the beginning of an education. To study a large number of them superficially is to treat one's mind somewhat as one would treat his stomach if he ate faithfully something of every article on the bill of fare. There is nothing in the conduct either of the high school or of the college admission requirements which points toward a simple and thorough ideal of study.

To such an argument as this the high school teacher and the high school superintendent are much inclined to reply that the high schools must include all the things which the American people are ambitious to know; that they must teach their pupils something of a great many things in order to satisfy popular demand. Everywhere in the high school, as in the college, the cry is, "We must keep up with the competition of our rivals." This competition makes not for educational efficiency, but for educational display.

It is true, as it seems to me, that the high school breaks down in both its functions and for the same reasons. It appears clear, however, that the educational ideal which makes for a simple and thorough curriculum for the individual serves equally well the boy who looks toward college and the boy who goes directly from the high school into a vocation. These two functions are not incompatible under a right educational conception.

V. THE REORGANIZATION OF EDUCATION

[From the Third Annual Report of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1908, pp. 152-153.]

It seems clear that the work of the next two decades in American education is to be a work of educational reorganization, and this reorganization must include elementary and secondary education as well as higher education, for the problem of national education is really one problem, not a series of isolated and unrelated problems. To-day our schools, from the elementary school to the university, are inefficient, superficial, lacking expert supervision. They are disjointed members of what ought to be a consistent system. The work of reorganization is so enormous that one is almost at a loss to answer the practical question: Where should such organization begin? The answer to this question must come in the end from the intelligent leadership of teachers themselves, and from the coöperation of teachers in all parts of our system of national education. I venture to point out certain considerations which seem to me to be essential as forming the groundwork from which improvement and progress must proceed.

It is, I believe, admitted by those who are most familiar with the conditions of schools throughout the United States that the weakness and inefficiency of the elementary and secondary schools, arising in the first place from a lack of clear conceptions of what these schools should actually seek to do, are apparent, first, in the effort to teach too many things and, second, in the lack of competent teachers. In other words, the elementary and secondary schools, like the institutions of higher learning, have attempted too many subjects to the neglect of the fundamental intellectual training common to all education. The remedy is to be found in clearer definitions of purpose, variation of school types, and more simple and thorough curricula. We cannot teach all subjects in one school, but we can provide a wide variety of schools, each of which may do its own work thoroughly.

It is clear that the lack of efficient teaching is one of the most expensive national weaknesses, and that the inefficiency of our school system is in great measure due to this lack is evident. For example, mathematics is a subject which has been a standard study in our schools from the beginning. Students who pass through our high schools and enter college spend in the nine years corresponding to the period covered by the German gymnasium, 75 per cent more of the time of instruction on mathematics and yet receive a training vastly inferior to that of the gymnasium.

Progress has been made in the last two years toward equipping a larger number of competent teachers. The growth of teachers' colleges in connection with the universities is a most notable gain. Before the matter can be rightly solved, public opinion must be educated to appreciate the dignity and importance of the teacher's work and the absolute necessity for such strengthening of the security and recompense of the teacher as will attract to that calling able men and women in larger numbers.

It is clear also that the elementary and secondary system of education must in its reorganization meet the present-day demand for industrial training. Our public school system did not undertake originally vocational training. In the modern industrial state that training is a part of public education, and one very serious problem to be met in the reorganization of education is the provision for vocational schools and their relation to the elementary school system.

It is not possible at this day to outline a complete system of such schools. Clearly the vocational school will vary with the locality and will minister to local conditions. The experience of other nations would, however, seem to indicate that elementary schools will continue to be devoted to the general education of children up to the age of fourteen years, but that its last two years will see the introduction of certain industrial exercises and studies. The vocational schools, resting on the elementary schools, are likely to be two-year, and in some cases three-year, high schools. The high school, devoted to general training, is under such conditions likely also to tend toward a similar length of curriculum. In a word, the curriculum and the length of time spent in the high school would be materially modified by an increased efficiency in the lower schools and by the effort to meet the demands of vocational training.

VI. REORGANIZATION OF SECONDARY EDUCATION

[From Report of the Committee of the National Education Association on Economy of Time in Education. Bulletin No. 38, 1913, United States Bureau of Education, pp. 25-27.]

(c) SECONDARY EDUCATION SHOULD BEGIN WITH THE TWELFTH AND END WITH THE EIGHTEENTH YEAR

If the previous contentions with regard to elementary and collegiate education are established, the period of secondary education