Chaos or Cosmos in American Education

I

EDUCATION suffers in America from confusion of purposes. Justified a hundredfold in our faith in schooling as an instrument of democracy, we have cared more for the spread of education than for its fitness for specific ends. We have been interested in quantity rather than quality. For the most part our public enthusiasm for education has been uncritical, and the actual arrangement of subjects in our school programmes has been largely the result of tradition, harried here and there by the raw winds of pedagogical theory. Not even in vocational schools do we know exactly what we want, to say nothing of the more difficult question of how to get it. In liberal education we are so far from clarity and agreement as to the ends to be served and the means to be used that the situation, in spite of a certain fixity, is little better than chaotic. Our professional students of education have been devoting their energies, perhaps inevitably, to the development of techniques for a scientific attack on the problems of the curriculum, and it is only within the last few years that the light of penetrating analysis has been turned on to one of the most important problems in our whole educational undertaking — the problem of what to teach in our secondary schools. So far we have made small headway, and tradition remains generally undisturbed. College requirements have kept Latin enthroned and protected, but nearly futile as a means of education. Mathematics has been struggling with some success to find its most fruitful form. Modern languages are just beginning to mean something in favored spots; history and science have been stifled; English drags; and such subjects as home economics and other forms of practical arts have had no freedom to find their place and proper goals. The root of the difficulty lies in the relationship between the secondary schools and the colleges; it is that relationship with which this article is finally concerned.

Our confusion as to purposes is one of the reasons for the lack of a coherent system of schools in this country. There is no discernible consistency in the multiplicity of our educational units and their endless variations. Sixyear elementary schools stand alongside eight-year and seven-year elementary schools. We have three-year and two-year junior high schools, or no junior high schools, together with proposals for the four-year junior high school. We have ‘regular’ four-year high schools and senior high schools of three years. The junior college, a two-year unit beyond the senior high school, has been added in a rapidly increasing number of cities, chiefly in the West, and without exact definition of its functions. The traditional fouryear college is matched by new collegiate units of two years, three years, and six years. The variations in vocational secondary schools, vocational colleges, and graduate and professional schools, and their requirements and connections, form an intricate educational tangle. Endowed and preparatory schools constitute a completely disassociated system, internally somewhat more coherent, but hidebound by college requirements and by a purely external imitation of the great public schools of England, with their ‘forms’ and the fashions of their school life. In general, the organization of our schools, whether public or private, offers no testimony that we have translated into a definite scheme of schooling any clear and progressive philosophy of the social consequences of education. Our schools form a maze, a labyrinth, with any number of entry points and exits. Our procedure lacks not only simplicity but integrity. It is a sprawling, spineless profusion of educational ‘opportunities.’

With this condition of things we might be measurably content if only the spawning liberality of our provision for schooling had led to any new vitality or effectiveness of teaching. But no one can speak with pride of the quality of our product. It is as if we were trying to turn out an enormous quantity of goods, roughly finished in an indistinguishable pattern. What our students learn in school they do not learn well, and they are very far indeed from the point at which learning is transmitted into understanding. They acquire no mastery of subjects as means for the interpretation of life. Their history does not enable them to view the present broadly in the light of the past, nor does their science enable them to see facts as the outward expression of laws. They develop no general criteria of taste or principles of criticism, no standards of judgment, no grasp of methods. They come to college ‘prepared,’ but with hardly the beginnings of an education. Contrasted with the students in English and Continental secondary schools, they must be rated, age for age, markedly inferior. In certain measure and in their own way the schoolmasters of England, France, and Germany seek the integration of what they teach into a coherent, flexible, and broadly applicable system of facts and conceptions; they expect their efforts to result in the development of cultivated intelligence. Because they do expect such results, they teach thoroughly, for it is clear that knowledge cannot be used before it is possessed. American teachers seem to entertain no such vaulting ambition. Our general attitude gives tacit assent to the view that no one needs to know anything very thoroughly unless he is going to be a teacher, with the consequence that thorough knowledge is uncommon, even among teachers. College professors, to be sure, are expected to know their subjects, although even that expectation has been weakened by the tendency to accept credentials and degrees as prima facie evidence of knowledge. School-teaching remains a craft, or even merely a job, often a temporary job.

So far as we aim at thoroughness at all, it is the superficial thoroughness of circumnavigation. Even our college graduates too often secure only a series of passing views of the islands of knowledge, including a view from the air. Their paper records may be complete, beginning with an orientation course and ending with a couple of seminaries or courses of research, but only in a few institutions is there vigorous effort to find out at the last whether or not students have really possessed themselves of a field of knowledge and learned to think in terms of its facts and principles. Our colleges, and indeed our graduate schools, suffer from the disease that keeps our secondary schools permanently enfeebled — ' credititis,’the itch for credits, points, units, and semester hours. We are in the midst of a generation of students and teachers obsessed with the notion that organization counts more than the actual outcome of the educative process in the intellectual and spiritual condition of the pupil. Educationally we are a nation of credit hunters and degree worshipers. Even our graduate students, preparing to teach, talk of how many semester hours they have ' taken with Dr. X or Dr. Y. To have ' had work ’ with Dr. So-and-so, to say ’I had his work last semester,’is offered as a substitute for knowledge of the subject and independent views as to its issues. Everywhere the emphasis is on machinery and bookkeeping. Standardization has laid a deadening hand upon us. There is much attention to processes and little assessment of results.

II

This picture of American education is undoubtedly discouraging and may seem one-sided and unfair; but when one starts to examine our educational procedure from the standpoint of its consistent bearing on clearly defined and widely accepted aims, it is difficult to find much that will support a more optimistic view. No doubt I have massed the colors to make a sharp impression. There are bright exceptions that might be noted in a more detailed analysis and values that would appear if the picture drew upon a fuller palette. To paint our education in terms of expenditure, buildings, numbers of students, ingenuity in method, provision of textbooks and facilities, earnestness of effort, administrative elaboration, and business efficiency, or faith in the entire process, would yield a different and a more inspiring canvas. But the time has come to question our schooling as to its actual results. What of the outcome, considered in relation to the time, energy, and money expended on the process? This is the inquiry which seems to me most to merit our present attention, and in these terms the account I have here presented is neither unfaithful nor misleading.

We have many requirements, and we put thousands of young people through the mill; it is high time that we began to examine the final product with a closer scrutiny. This is especially true of college preparatory work. When we ask how much the students who are working under the influence of college entrance requirements know of the subjects we force them to study, or, more pertinently still, how much we expect them to know and what use we expect them to make of their knowledge, our procedure offers no satisfactory answer. We are not clear as to our aims. We have compromised, relaxed requirements here and there, clung to certain traditions, insisted on a little mathematics or an elementary knowledge of a second modern language or a certain amount of laboratory work in science; but seldom have we carried through and applied in our colleges or schools a searching inquiry into educational values. Our discussions tend to degenerate into academic logrolling. The weighting of a subject for admission credit or the maintenance of a specific requirement for graduation becomes a political storm centre in a college faculty or an association of school and college teachers, much as does the duty on a given product in a new tariff measure in the national Congress. We avoid fundamental educational discussion. Great college presidents carry out educational reforms that deeply affect the whole educational programme, and educational theorists establish movements of importance in the schools; but in college preparatory education, where the tides meet, there is still confusion and uncertainty.

The trouble, I believe, lies very deep. It is not due to any natural perversity in educators, either schoolmasters or college professors, although there are penalties which must be paid, of course, for the wearing of the academic cloth. It is an historic accident, or perhaps a series of historic accidents, which keeps us in confusion. It has come to pass with us, as perhaps nowhere else in the world, that liberal education is divided between two separate and almost discontinuous institutions, the secondary school and the college; and it is the break between school and college, perpetuated and deepened by unfortunate decisions as to entrance requirements, which makes our secondary education so largely abortive and affects adversely our efforts to improve education in the college. This, I believe, is susceptible of demonstration; but it is far easier to point out the difficulty than it is to designate the remedy.

Certainly there are directions in which it would be quite futile to seek the remedy, and one of these is the rejection or repudiation of our widespread effort to provide free schooling. It is always foolish to throw out the baby with the water you wash him in. To make our secondary education less democratic would be to sacrifice its most outstanding virtue. If our education sprawls, it is because we have been trying to meet an unprecedented variety of needs with the minimum penalty for false starts, without much counting of costs, and with steadfast refusal to debar anyone from ‘educational advantages.’ Our standards have suffered because we have tried educationally to be all things to all men. The American public has demanded the teaching of more and more subjects, and our educational leadership has not resisted the demand or insisted on concentration and accomplishment.

But in the effort to raise our standards we need not deny the democratic principle. We are rich enough to ‘make universal education not only universal, but also education’ — which means providing more education for a great many people without reference to their ability to pay, yet making our offering more consistent and definite in its lines of effort. We can and should set up a greater variety of curricula in our schools and see that they lead on to definite ends, many of them vocational, some of them non vocational. The richness of our offering should not be sacrificed. What we ought to abandon is our willingness to smatter, to dissipate, to make a curriculum a patchwork. Every curriculum beyond the elementary school should have its centre, its essential character, its definite goals. A curriculum may be embroidered with subjects taught for interest, for enjoyment, for appreciation; but its major values should be realized in a small group of related subjects in which achievement of a clearly recognized sort may be expected and demanded. And all curricula that are not wholly and immediately practical ought to have some outlet into higher education, but not necessarily into the traditional college of liberal arts.

We have in one sense too little variety in our colleges as well as in our secondary schools. More colleges of more kinds, more school curricula of more kinds, but clearer definition of the kinds — this would be a formula which would at least lead us away from counting up ‘units’ of this, that, and the other and calling the sum an education. Such a scheme would require guidance for all students from the junior high school on, and it would mean that false starts would entail some loss, and that a closer selection of students capable of pursuing the more difficult curricula would debar many for the sake of better results for those who remained; but there would be nothing undemocratic in all that. Our present practice seems to imply that taking a little of everything and not learning much of anything is good for us because it makes us all alike. Surely we may develop some community of understanding and some unity of purpose among Americans without making education the same for everybody because it has no distinguishing character for anybody.

To keep the democratic variety of our school offering and yet to crystallize the whole programme into lines of cleavage that will permit the achievement of distinctive and substantial results is a task of the greatest difficulty and complexity. If the realization of our need for concentration is an insight of any value, it must be matched with other insights as it is worked out into its application in the schools; and the undertaking cannot be entrusted to amateurs. The remedy for the present situation does not lie in scorn for the scientific study of education and the professional training of teachers and school officers. The scientific study of education is in its infancy, and it has been largely concerned, so far, with its own tools. To most laymen and to many teachers such technical instruments as psychological examinations, standardized tests of school achievement and statistical studies of school problems are altogether unimpressive or forbidding. But in fact they constitute one of the surer promises of our educational salvation. Technique alone will not save us, but we cannot move far without it. It is said of money that there are many things of greater worth, but you have to have money to get them; the technical means and methods of educational investigation are in like manner indispensable to other ends. Our directors of educational policy need at least an adequate understanding of what can be done by way of measuring educational accomplishment, analyzing statistically an educational problem, and studying in exact and quantitative fashion the conditions under which an educational enterprise must be pursued. Laymen and the nontechnical among teachers may point out problems and suggest reforms, and the technicians ought to welcome the insights of the intuitive and the experienced; but in most cases the technicians must come into the undertaking before reforms can safely be consummated. Education is no longer a field for the inexpert. If our professionals have not saved us from the awkwardness of our present situation, we must not therefore dismiss the professional attack upon education as of no avail. The study of education should be broadened, rather, and raised to higher levels. Teachers colleges and university schools of education have suffered from the same superficiality and credit-counting externality as the rest of our educational scheme; but that is no ground for leaving the direction of schools in the hands of those who have given no study to their problems.

If our trouble arises from an unfortunate relationship between schools and colleges, it might seem as if the best chance of improvement would lie in an attack on college entrance requirements and college entrance examinations, or, more generally, on the theory of college education itself as it affects the freedom of the schools. There have been plenty of attacks, in all conscience, on admission regulations and admission procedures, and the last radical change in entrance policy — the New Plan — was unquestionably a change for the better. The New Plan accepts a creditable school record and requires examinations in only four subjects, whereas the Old Plan permits the piling up of entrance ‘points’ by the taking of examinations in one subject after another: the change from Old to New is obviously in the direction of concentration. Even the New Plan, however, leaves the secondary schools hesitant about simplifying their curricula and distinguishing sharply between them. One can go far, for example, without finding a secondary school that has set up a scientific curriculum, without Latin and without a distracting burden of study in other fields, in which a selected group of pupils is carried well beyond the introductory stage of scientific study. Rut no renewal of attacks on college requirements, in the old style, is likely to bring about any such result. To decry entrance examinations is futile, for some scheme of examination the colleges must have. Experiment in the form of examinations is desirable and is in rapid progress; but at bottom it is the theory of the relation between school and college that must be reconsidered, and this is not so simple a business as is the study of the relative merits of the various plans of selection for entrance, given the present theory and the present situation. The problem of admission to college involves both the theory of secondary education and the theory of college education. There can be no hope of accomplishing anything of importance by taking the point of view of the school and hurling complaint or defiance at the college, nor by taking the point of view of the college and casting scorn and accusation at the school.

From the point of view of the school, it must be recognized that some scope and freedom is a necessity. Schools must have the opportunity to prepare selected pupils for college without denying to them or to the rest of their pupils the opportunity for an education. Concentration, continuity of effort, and excellence of results in a relatively narrow field should be feasible and should be accepted as duly preparatory for college; but along with that it should be possible for schools to do interesting and genuinely educative work in general science, or world history, or even in the much despised study of civics, or in general mathematics, or in the purest informalities of auditorium exercises, club meetings, and ‘projects,’ without anxiety about success in strictly preparatory studies.

On the other hand, the facts as to the progress of college education should be accepted. The college is no longer a continuation of the secondary school. When the programme of the Boston Latin School was redefined in 1798, it consisted of nothing but Latin and Greek, and the programme of Harvard College consisted of little else. There is no such continuity now, and there cannot be. The college has taken up a far-reaching range of studies, of truly university character: philosophy, psychology, economics, government, comparative literature, the sciences, fine arts, the modern languages, higher mathematics, and much besides. The college has also adopted university methods, and is working out a new theory of its aims and procedures. To try to obstruct or reverse this tendency would be like trying to stop a glacier. The junior college can have no meaning or success as a mere effort to do the work of the college in a shorter period, and if it leaves secondary-school work the thing of shreds and patches it now is, adding a smattering of college subjects as a border or headpiece, it will be a positive influence for evil. The commanding problem of liberal education in America is the problem of unifying secondary education and collegiate education without denying the essential character and the modern development of either.

The need for working out a fundamentally new answer to this problem may best be shown by a closer examination of the kind of secondary education we accept and designate as preparatory. It is in the schools that prepare directly for the college of liberal arts, as now constituted, that we can probably best begin to change our educational chaos into something approaching a cosmos.

III

The preparatory school is a truncated and impoverished institution. It finishes nothing. The subjects to which it devotes its attention and on which its students spend precious years in the golden period of youth need not be brought to fruition and in fact are largely abandoned at the college gates. The college starts a new and more rewarding type and kind of study, and its requirements have been formulated with very little reference to the completion of what has been begun in school. So far as the college programme has reference to school work, it expresses only lack of confidence in what the schools have done, requiring English composition, for example, because the schools have not taught boys and girls to write effectively. This lack of connection between school and college breeds confusion of thought and accounts for much of the ‘milling around’ in our educational discussion, which seems never to reach any fundamental and productive conclusions. In the preparatory schools it leads either to slackness of effort or to the kind of rigidity in routine, without illumination, which appeals to moral principles and conceptions of ‘character,’ buttressed by marks and punishments and personal pressure, as a substitute for intellectual satisfaction in study. In the college it leads to repetitions of school work and delay in beginning the distinctive business of higher education. It has more to do than has been generally noted or admitted with the perfunctory character of much collegiate study and instruction. Our college students — I borrow the figure of speech from a brilliant woman who knows them well are more interested in the labels on their intellectual luggage than in what it contains; and so far as this is true it is largely because they have been taught at school to look no further than the customs inspection at the collegiate port of entry. Or, to shift the metaphor, school work is only a purgatory which precedes the heaven of college life, and ‘getting by’ is the rule for both. In spite of all the devoted effort of schoolmasters, their work is often baneful in its results, even when they are highly successful in ‘getting their pupils into college.’ The institution in which they work is not final and has no true aims of its own; nor is it in any exact sense even preparatory. School work, therefore, cannot be educative, and it will continue to induce wrong habits of mind until the school secures more freedom to aim at end points instead of halfway stations on roads that go no further. The present situation produces no attitudes that are profitable even for the college.

Consider Latin as a preparatory study. It is highly regarded and very widely required; but what do our secondary schools accomplish in the actual realization of the values of classical instruction? The preparatory school cannot make its work in Latin strictly a groundwork for what is to come in college, for a large proportion of its students will drop Latin on entering college; and besides, the time is too long to keep the students at mere preparatory drill, especially if they start Latin at twelve. Yet the time is not long enough to achieve the higher and more important values of the subject, and the pressure of college requirements in other subjects, together with the general atmosphere of postponement and the pervasive schoolboy spirit of the institution, discourages effort of any genuinely scholarly character. There are very few schools that go beyond Cæsar, Cicero, and Vergil, and of these only the required books and orations. Granted that boys may get valuable linguistic discipline from two years of Latin, why keep them at it longer unless they are to get the more important results that would come if they continued their Latin beyond what the colleges require for entrance, reading Horace, Catullus, and other lyric poets, Terence and Plautus, the historians, Lucretius, more of Vergil, more of Cicero, and securing besides a wide view of Roman civilization? Our boys at entrance to college have no Latinity. Yet they need not get any, for they can drop their Latin, and most of them do. Even if they take Latin in the freshman year they are often so poorly ‘prepared’ that they get from it less than they should. The whole scheme of our education tends to prevent anything that could by courtesy be called classical scholarship. We cannot be thorough to-day with those who might respond and learn, as once we were thorough unduly, prescribing the classics alone for every type of mind.

In differing degrees this same condition obtains in every subject of the secondary school. The schools send up to college boys who have studied history but who have no historical sense and no developed interest in historical study; boys who have studied science but who have not grasped the scientific method; boys who have studied foreign languages but who have no Sprachgefühl. The schools can do nothing better, for their work is preparatory only and done in a preparatory spirit. They do not dare to concentrate their programmes into a few consistent and thorough curricula, leaving Latin out of some of them, for Latin is heavily weighted for entrance credit. The New Plan would permit greater consistency and sharper selection of students for specialization, as for example in science; but the schools would be uneasy in the attempt and the colleges do not seem to favor it. There is no chance in our schools to do the type of thoroughly scientific work done in a German Oberrealschule or Realgymnasium, even as far as our schools can go. The break ahead prevents it.

Meanwhile the colleges find it necessary to repeat much that the schools have taught because they have no confidence in the results. Some favored schools can, to be sure, anticipate the English composition of the freshman year, but there is much boredom and perfunctory teaching and learning in college because there is overlapping of subjects, a general ignoring in the college of what has gone before, and a tendency to look upon it, in any case, as a mere set of intellectual exercises preparatory to real work, now that the schoolboy has become the college man.

Is it any wonder that the insidious doctrine of formal discipline flourishes among us? This is the technical name for the belief that such a study as geometry is valuable because it ‘trains the reason.’ The total value of any programme of studies is covered by the statement that it has ‘trained the mind.’ Perhaps no doctrine in the history of education has done so much mischief, nor has any been more thoroughly discredited by analysis and by experiment; yet it persists, and it is significant that it flourishes most in America, where secondary schools, being unable to accomplish results of any importance in the actual achievement of knowledge, outlook, standards of taste or judgment, or methods of work, fall back on the esoteric claim that their teaching ‘disciplines the faculties.’ The effects of any such belief are disastrous, for the disciplinarian forgets the true aims and values of his subject and uses it merely as a pedagogical club, or as a set of intellectual dumb-bells or chest weights. Its delights, the points of view to which it leads, what it means, and its relations to other subjects — all these values are set aside as of minor importance. And our teachers are tempted to accept the doctrine of formal discipline because they cannot see the transforming effect of any satisfactory progress in their several subjects. College teachers do not appeal to ‘disciplinary’ values in their own teaching. The college teacher of history expects those who specialize in history under his instruction to remember much that they learn, crystallize much into general views, gain some power of critical understanding of the past and of the present, and be in general more intelligent in their judgments of men and events. That, if you like, is a training of the mind, but it is not a ‘discipline of the faculties’ and it accrues only by reason of interest and effort and accomplishment in history. But even college teachers are inclined to look upon the studies of the secondary school as ‘disciplinary.’ The stigma of their purely preparatory character is upon them.

And why consider the actual choice of subjects in the secondary school important, after all? Have we not invented psychological tests that serve better than the entrance examinations in the subjects as a means of predicting success in college? The College Entrance Examination Board has a so-called Scholastic Aptitude Test, a psychological examination, the results of which have been expounded with gruesome statistical completeness in a supplement to the latest report of the Board. It may not take the place of examinations in subjects, but no college would be risking much that took the students who do well in that test, no matter what subjects they had studied or when or how. For colleges do not call upon students to carry their subjects of secondary study to completion. They ask only, ‘Are you fit for college work?’ The rest is of no significance. The development of psychological tests for college admission is a fine technical achievement and it has an important bearing on many problems; but it is in one aspect a comment on our educational system which may well arouse the laughter of the gods.

As to the pupils, can they be blamed for an attitude of acquiescence? What reason has the boy in a preparatory school for considering his studies anything more than payments demanded for the fun of being in school and the later privileges of college life? If he does not do well in his studies he is kept out of athletics — a policy wholly mistaken, so far as the boy’s respect for study is concerned. If he does not get good marks he will not get into college, but he knows he can drop the ‘stuff’ he is studying as soon as he has ‘cashed in’ at the entrance gates what he is now learning in school. The system makes studies mere counters. The accepted aim of study lies outside; its true values are obscured. Of course this is due in part to parents and in part to the ‘general state of culture’ in America; but our relegation of school studies to the rôle of ‘preparation’ for a purely ulterior object is responsible for the perpetuation of an utterly wrong attitude of mind in all concerned. It is surprising that any schools — even the better ones — do as well as they do.

There is another subtle effect of our separation of school and college which should be brought clearly to light. It lowers the standards of scholarship, skill in teaching, and educational understanding expected of our schoolmasters. A German Studienrat is expected to be master of his subject and is highly trained as a teacher. He is a pedagogue in the finest sense of that rather underrated word. Our schoolmasters, on the contrary, need not be scholars, although of course some of them are. As a class they have been called ‘grossly ill-equipped, ill-rewarded, and lacking in distinction.’ So far as this is true, is it not due to the fact that they are expected only to drill their pupils for the college examinations? Why ask them to be scholarly, when they have no chance to bring their pupils to any point of fruitfulness in scholarship?

There are evil effects on college teachers, too, and on college requirements. The intellectual snobbishness of college teachers toward secondaryschool teachers is a result of the separation of school and college into two distinct systems, one altogether preparatory to the other yet in no sense continuous with it. And such educational absurdities as our college requirements in modern languages, whereby continuity and achievement in one language is sacrificed to a smattering of a second language, or even a third, are by no means unrelated to the fact that we have all lost sight of the student, his growth, the need of unity and persistence in his application to a limited field of study, in our obsession with credits, and the balance between hours in this and hours in that. If liberal education were one indivisible unit, continuous although varied, with a clear goal for each subject in each of the different curricula, we should think in terms of educational values in both school and college. As it is, who ever hears of what a subject may contribute at any given stage toward the student’s understanding of himself and his world ? One hears of units, entrance points, semester hours.

The resentment of parents and schoolmasters has centred on college entrance examinations; but examinations in themselves are not an evil and may indeed be made valuable from every point of view. The point at which examinations come makes all the difference. If an examination is final in the sense that it comes at a point at which the values of a subject may be realized, summed up, organized, and displayed, it is indispensable. In mathematics, for example, there is a point — so the mathematicians say — at which mathematics for general understanding, mathematics for ‘culture,’ may find an appropriate end. To get there, one must have studied the calculus. At that point a general, endpoint, or leaving examination would be highly desirable and appropriate, and it could knit together all the mathematical studies that had gone before, from their very beginnings in arithmetic. That is where the German youth takes his Reifeprüfung. That is where we ought to have a general examination in mathematics, even if it has to come at the end of the freshman year in college. Those who enter college on a school programme concentrating in mathematics should meet such a test at entrance or else be held to taking freshman mathematics and meeting such a final test at the end of their first college year. There are end points of similar character in all or at any rate in most of the school subjects. Whereas we now examine here and there and encourage students to forget what we have tested, assuring them that their ‘points’ have been put into the refrigerator of the entrance record, we should encourage them rather to look forward to an examination that will test them at a stage of reasonable mastery of the subjects in which they elect to specialize, and make their further progress depend on that.

IV

The principle, it seems to me, is clear, and the temptation is strong to work out a detailed scheme for applying it. Concentration and distribution, with general examinations at the final stages of progress in the subjects of concentration — the governing ideas in the plan of instruction established in Harvard College under President Lowell — if this plan makes college study educative, whereas before it often failed to be more than an instructional veneering, why not use it in the secondary school?

But the difficulties, it must equally be clear, are many, and the whole subject should have further consideration. The change can be made. The colleges must take the lead. They can so adjust their requirements for entrance and their regulations governing the work of the freshman year that the schools will look ahead, from the seventh grade (the beginning of the junior high school) to the end of the twelfth grade, or even beyond, to the meeting of tests in certain subjects that are tests of truly educative teaching. The college that takes the lead in this direction will deserve the blessings of schoolmasters. Yet schoolmasters should have a large part in the necessary readjustment, burying their own differences and their extreme claims for the educational virtues of their individual subjects in an effort to meet the colleges in a true reform. Schoolmasters know what American boys and girls can do, and with the help of parents they can be relied upon to safeguard the health and physical development of American youth against intellectual demands that might easily be made oversevere, especially during the earlier years of adolescence. They have become familiar with the possibility of using intelligence tests as a means of choosing the more gifted pupils and giving them an enriched curriculum without hurrying them forward at the expense of health or growth or social adjustment. They will have in mind also the needs of the boy or girl who is not a good candidate for college but who should, nevertheless, have a wellconducted secondary schooling. They will know what can be done in subjects for ‘distribution,’ subjects supplementary to those selected for concentration. In meeting these and other problems, some of which are with us already, some of which will appear or be sharpened by the application of the principle of concentration, schoolmasters should work hand in hand with college authorities. They are engaged in one business, the task of liberal education, the aim of which is not erudition or any imitation of learning, but general understanding — a true picture of men and things, with a genuine intellectual penetration of some phase or aspect of human experience.