Giving the Bright Student a Break

by EUGENE YOUNGERT

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THE Oak Park and River Forest High School is a coeducational school in a suburban community west of Chicago. It enrolls about 2500 students, and it is organized for practical purposes in eight groups for administration, counseling, and guidance. It employs 132 persons certificated as teachers. The community has high educational ambition and is willing to support good education. Our graduates of the last four years are now in some 300 colleges throughout the land. In a school of our size it is a challenging but not herculean task to offer courses differentiated to the abilities and motivation of the students.

In our public high school, here is the mathematics program that we offer an intellectually competent student who is interested in mathematics. In the ninth grade he will have a strong course in elementary algebra. As a sophomore he will complete both plane and solid geometry. His fare in the junior year will consist of intermediate and college algebra, and trigonometry. In the senior year he will undertake an integrated course covering analytic geometry and an introduction to differential and integral calculus.

I would rather offer this intellectually able youth an integrated program in which, from the ninth grade on, the mathematical concepts would be presented whenever they would add to understanding. But the mobility of the American people forbids so sharp a break with tradition. Last year, some 175 of our students moved away and entered other schools, and some 140 new students moved into our district. Those who moved away had to fit into a course elsewhere, and those who came to us had to fit into our pattern. Our courses in mathematics must not too seriously discommode these students, and at the same time must provide good secondary school mathematics education.

The day will come when nationally we shall have a better-conceived mathematics program than we now have. It lakes a long time to bring really new ideas into education, as it does into most other walks of life. Fortunately, we have two committees of high school and college teachers now at work on a modernized secondary school mathematics program, at a time when the ferment is active for some really significant contribution to mathematics teaching. Furthermore, the hard facts of the international scene dictate that we had better provide stronger education in mathematics if we want to keep our position among the nations of the world. So we shall hope, and if the mountain labors and brings forth a mountain, we shall rejoice.

To see clearly what high schools are trying to do and ought to do, one must understand two trends that have been operative in American secondary education. Back in early colonial days, the secondary school was a selective institution, by which I mean that it selected the youth of the area capable of mastering its curriculum and becoming prepared in college for professional leadership. That concept of selectivity was challenged often, notably by Benjamin Franklin. The challengers insisted that the secondary school should accept all comers and select for them the facets of its curriculum that would minister to their abilities and vocational futures.

However, the early theory that the school should be selective as to those it taught persisted until well into the twentieth century. In fact, it has been estimated that successful completion of the typical curriculum in the American high school of the early years of this century called for an I.Q. of about 110, which means that that school could serve well only a minor fraction of boys and girls of high school age. What that 110 I.Q. high school would do to a true cross section of American youth is easily imagined. It would slay them.

But in time the high school had to take on the job of the education of all American youth. Our expanding industrialization freed our society from the need of the labor of young adolescents, and at the same time it made increased education of our young both necessary and desirable. Accordingly, high school enrollments grew, both because youth wanted to go on in school and because society through new laws made them go on.

In most places, the vast majority of high school students were not planning for college, and the old curriculum was not suited to their abilities and vocational futures. What should the school do with them? An easy answer was to flunk them out, and for a while the failure rate was pretty high. But that didn’t make sense to teachers or to parents or to society. The young people needed education, both for themselves and for the general welfare, and they could not get a sound education through being held to standards they could not meet, with failure as the inevitable result.

The sensible answer to the new problem was the adaptation of curriculum to the students, but sensible answers are not always easy. What was going on in the schools was to many school people a revolution, and to many college teachers a catastrophe. To a considerable extent it was a time of perplexity and confusion. But patterns began to emerge and they called for new attitudes and devices in the instruction of students.

Teachers wondered what to do with those in their classes whom we euphemistically call “slow learners.” Special classes seemed the ready answer, and the result was the process known as homogeneous grouping. Fast learners were not as quickly recognized as troublesome, for in general they got their lessons with or without the aid of their teachers, they got good marks, and they successfully made their way into the colleges of their choice. Gradually, though, they too got into special classes — usually classes in which they did more of the things that were done in what we may call regular classes. In English they read more books, in geometry they did more exercises.

Now the bandwagon cry is for well-adapted classes for the gifted in high schools, and school and college people are climbing aboard as though each person, individually, holds copyright on a new idea that he has thought up all by himself. It is the fetish of the day.

Oddly enough, there is the countercry that setting up separate classes for the gifted is undemocratic and will raise up a crowd of snobs unable to get along with their fellow men. From experience in our own school I can say not only that this is not true, but that gifted youth will be less likely to turn into snobs in classes where they have to work hard to get along than in classes where they shine with little work.

But schools have always had opportunities for the gifted. The boy who can make a boat that not only will float but is a mighty good boat is given every encouragement to make that boat. The girl who can type at 110 words per minute accurately and take dictation at the same rate as a court stenographer is not held back lest she turn into a snob. Students who can blow a horn are given special lessons, so that the school can have the best high school band in the country. And in athletics, no expense will be spared or adulation withheld to assure a championship team.

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THE school I serve long ago developed courses for the whole range of intellectual capacities represented in its student body.

In the first place it established a wide range of offerings, including in addition to the academic branches beginning and advanced courses in music, art, home economics, business education, and industrial arts. Thus there was breadth of curriculum suited to the interests of all students, whether the more than eighty per cent who are college bound or those going from school directly into employment. Secondly, there were levels of instruction within courses, as well as individual subjects, through which were presented genuine opportunities for success to pupils who industriously try to do their work.

At the upper end there were high-level courses from which our graduates often gained advanced standing in college, sometimes without credit and sometimes with. These classes were not thought of as college level except for trigonometry and college algebra, but they were so well taught that many colleges, in all parts of our country, accepted them as college level. Frequently they used college textbooks and materials. So the realization grew that many students actually do achieve college ability during their high school years.

The first department to be organized throughout for students of high intellectual competence and high motivation was mathematics, as I have said. This may have been because the subject matter is stable, so long as one stays within traditional dimensions of high school and early college mathematics. However, it would not have been possible except for the venturesomeness of devoted teachers who were willing to give the new idea a fair chance and see how it would work. For mathematics teachers, let me indicate the integrity of our fourth-year course by stating that the basic textbook is Fundamentals of College Mathematics by Johnson, McCoy, and O’Neill, a book used in many liberal arts colleges. Trigonometry and college algebra are taught from standard college texts.

In English, in the first semester of the ninth grade we gave a rather difficult test, and those who survived it and certain other requirements were permitted to move immediately into the regular tenthgrade classes. That is, they by-passed the second semester of the ninth grade. Thus they achieved senior English status in the middle of the junior year and proceeded to take three of our somewhat extensive list of senior English electives. It was really by early access to senior offerings that English was strengthened. This proved to be a good transitional move, as the acceptance of our graduates into advanced college standing proved.

But now we are embarked upon an improved road in English. Beginning this year, those who meet the requirements in the ninth grade move immediately onto a completely new track upon which they will remain until graduation. The goals will largely be a discriminative sense of writing and a critical sense of reading. Assignments in the fourth year will be on the college level. (I should add that there will be a sufficient number of escape hatches in both mathematics and English for students who come to believe that they have bitten off more than they can chew.)

In the modern languages our task in adding strength was fairly simple. Our teachers in this department must be able to use their “foreign" language in a way satisfactory to educated nationals of that country. With that requirement of the faculty, we have been able to teach languages as a means of communication — whether in talking, or writing, or reading, or listening— rather than primarily as discipline; and upon that foundation we have made good progress. It has been a constant experience to have our graduates granted advanced college standing in modern languages. Now we are beginning the strengthened classes in the sophomore year, and are surely achieving college standard in the senior year. By college standard I do not mean in the elementary stages which colleges themselves teach to beginners, but in reasonable ability to use the language.

Our college-type classes in natural science are in chemistry, botany, and zoology. In chemistry we use College Chemistry by Sister, VanderWerf, and Davidson; in zoology, Animals Without Backbones by Buchsbaum; and in botany, The Plant World, Revised Edition, by Fuller. We should like to offer a truly college course in physics, but we are not certain that our advanced mathematics students gain a hold on the calculus early enough for that.

We teach a good major in music. I think there is no question that the two top courses in this sequence are of college quality. Certainly the students think so, for it is their conslant gripe, or boast, that these are the toughest courses in the school. I am certain that this is a boast, for it is impossible to get the students to sell the course textbooks back to us for resale in our used-book market. These textbooks are Harmony by Piston and Introduction to Music by Bernstein.

Our history courses are already strong, as evidenced by scores made by our history students in the College Entrance Examination Board’s tests. When we decide what more to do in history, it will probably not be to add further courses, but to provide an experience in historical method. We can accomplish this by asking an intellectually able student to do a good piece of historical research into a subject of real interest to him, and to develop and keep a well-documented file and notebook on his study. Were he to show such evidence to history departments in colleges, we are sure that he would there receive preferential treatment in history.

I realize that I am talking about a large school and that the problem is far different in small schools. Most high schools in our country are small; indeed, the median high school in the United States probably has not fifty seniors. There is not much room there for differentiation, and yet from such schools do come occasional graduates with more than the equivalent of a good high school education. Those young people are usually the product of devoted and discerning teachers, although some of them have gone ahead under their own steam.

As we talk of strengthened courses in high schools, we must remember the difficulty of this problem for small schools. We have a lot of small schools, and they deserve our most intelligent attention.

The nub of this matter is that we must not fall into the egregious sin of lack of faith in how much our youth can learn if we but give them a chance to learn. Nor does this chance to learn mean merely that we will put subject matter into the presence of the boys and girls. It means that we will teach them with all the wiles and skills that the schoolmaster possesses, that we will help them understand the purpose and value of what we give them for learning, that we will be constantly alert to opportunities for motivating into learning, and that we will have faith in the ability of boys and girls to learn.