Volume I

THE PUBLIC SCHOOL AND THE
COLLEGE

THE public school and the college have different aims, problems and ideals. To be sure they have a common, underlying purpose, and one object of this paper is to emphasize their essential unity, but, concretely considered, they differ fundamentally.

The primary purpose of the public school is to prepare the masses of our people directly, and as quickly as possible, for efficient service and for citizenship; the chief object of the college is to train men and women for leadership in the higher walks of life. The American college was established for the specific purpose of training and developing leaders. In the early days of New England the clergyman was the leader of the community, and the first aim of the New England college was the training of ministers. As in the course of time the leadership passed to other walks of life, the college, still true to its fundamental purpose, broadened its scope and more and more gave its attention to turning out doctors, lawyers, teachers, business men and engineers. The one institution exists primarily to supply to every child the fundamentals of education, and secondarily to select the chosen few who are worthy of higher training; the other exists primarily to train these chosen few for higher service, and secondarily to spread the light of true scholarship and culture throughout the community.

Not only are the fundamental purposes of these institutions different. From that From that very fact their problems and their difficul

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ties are not the same. Look for a moment at some of the concrete problems that are to-day facing the men and women who are shaping and directing our public school education.

The first and the most stupendous of these problems is that of taking the mass of alien boys and girls, foreign born or the children of foreigners, that throng the cities, towns, and even the country-side of our Atlantic states, of teaching them our language, our habits, our customs, our laws, of planting in them American ideals and standards, and of developing them into useful, efficient, American men and women, who will be a credit to themselves, and a help instead of a hindrance to our nation. I know of no problem that is just now more vital to our national life; I know of no agency that is doing more than the public school in the solution of this problem; and I can think of no instrument likely to be so efficient in aiding us to assimilate the constantly growing, ever renewing, alien element in our population. The second problem that presses upon the public school is that of developing efficient workmen and workwomen. In the industrial army the mass must be privates, not officers. The more intelligence, the more individual initiative these workers have, of course, the greater will be the efficiency of the army, but the first function of the public school is not the development of leaders, it is to train efficient workers in the ranks. And this brings the school face to face with the whole great problem of vocational training for the masses, the education of efficient laborers, mechanics, clerks, house-wives,

men and women who will be fitted to earn honest livelihoods, to be contributing members of the community, and who will have a foundation of skill and intelligence on which they may rise as far as their powers will allow.

A third problem thrust upon the public school is less fundamental perhaps, but none the less real and troublesome. It is that of combating the social distractions that society and parents allow, and even press upon, our children, especially in the secondary stage of education. Never have social pleasures and amusements played so large a part in the life of our people as at present, and never have these pleasures been regarded as so legitimate, and even so important, in the daily life of our boys and girls. It seems absurd that social gaieties should have to be regarded as constituting a difficulty in the way of preparing young people for their real work in life, but it is a fact that it is a genuine obstacle in the way of supplying a sound education to our adolescent youth, and it is one of the troublesome problems that confront school authorities to-day.

A fourth problem that is felt very seriously by the public school is that of retain ing its pupils beyond the elementary stage. With all of our belief in the advantages of education, the great majority of parents are still impatient of what they regard as, partially at least, a waste of time, and a surprisingly large proportion of our boys are impatient of the artificial restraints of school, and are anxious to get into what seems to them the freedom of actual life, to begin earning a livelihood, and to get started on their real work. It is said that only twenty per cent. of those who enter the high school complete the course and graduate, and to increase this percentage is one of the things that the public school is earnestly striving to do.

These are not all of the problems with which the public school is faced, but they are very real problems with which it has to grapple, and it is impossible accurately to appreciate its difficulties unless these things are clearly borne in mind. Very different are the problems that confront the college, anxious to send out into the world a line of men and women fitted as well as possible to serve as leaders in our civic, social and intellectual life.

The first problem faced by the college is that of securing students fitted by natural ability and by training to take full advantage of its opportunities. Naturally, it can do better work and secure better results, if its students come to it highly trained in habits of work and of concentration. Naturally, it can accomplish more if it can find in its entering students a foundation of that kind of knowledge which will be of most help in their college studies. The reason why the college fights so strenuously to maintain certain of its traditional requirements, is because it believes, rightly or wrongly, that, for one reason or another, through the pursuit of certain studies better mental training is secured than through others, and because it believes that certain kinds of knowledge afford a better background, and produce a better attitude of mind for college work than do some others. The insistence of the college, then, on certain requirements comes from its honest desire to do its specific work as well as it is humanly possible to do it.

The second problem of the college is to exclude those unfitted to benefit by its training, as well as those who will lower its tone and thus weaken and injure its work with the deserving students whom it ought to benefit. For social, athletic and other reasons entrance to some of our colleges is most earnestly sought by many who are intellectually undesirable. Some colleges

are unfortunately only too ready, for the sake of swelling their numbers, to accept almost any one, whether he is fitted to benefit by their training or not. Many of them, however, are honestly anxious to maintain high standards and to admit only those who are adequately prepared to do their work. Their apparent exclusiveness comes not from an intellectual snobbery, but from a sincere striving after high ideals.

A third problem of the college arises. from its ambition to give to its students the best possible training for future work in the professions or business, and at the same time to give the broadest possible outlook to those who are to be leaders in all walks of life. With the increased demands of professional training, and the raised standards of equipment in all forms of activity, the pressure upon the college to provide a high grade of preparation becomes very strong, and there arises a great temptation to exact from the schools as much as it can obtain, and to secure from them what it believes to be the best training for meeting the increased demands which the professional schools are urging it to make of its students. The higher standards of attainment called for in professional and scholastic life, then, are one of the causes that make the college unwilling to relax the demand in the way of preparatory work which it makes on the secondary school.

There is still a fourth problem confronting the conscientious college which can not be ignored in this connection. One of its undoubted functions is to spread the light of higher learning and of real culture throughout the community, and the college regards it as peculiarly its mission to combat the materialistic and the utilitarian tendencies of the age. It is not simply a feeling of conservatism that makes it reluctant to accept metal-working and typewriting as equivalents in its requirements for geometry

and French, it is not simply that it does not believe that these afford the same mental training as the older subjects, it is because it feels, mistakenly or not, that these represent a concession to utilitarian, or to what it calls "bread and butter" tendencies, and that it must stand for the higher things of life, for the deeper things of the soul, for those things that prepare a man for complete living, rather than for earning a livelihood.

These, again, are not all of the problems that confront the college, but like those of the school they are real and pressing, and they powerfully influence it in what it seeks to obtain in preparation for its work.

I have stated these considerations at some length, because unless we understand the specific problems that press upon these two great institutions, we can not rightly comprehend the broader, inclusive, problem of their relation to each other. The great, underlying aim of all education is one, but the specific aim of the two institutions are radically different, and he who would bridge the gap between them must know the ground on both sides.

The public school feels rightly that it must strive first of all to meet the needs of the ninety-nine per cent. of its pupils who will never see the inside of a college hall. The college feels that it must do the best that is humanly possible for the one per cent. who are to form such a large proportion of the leaders in our national life, and who are to play such a prominent part in shaping our civilization. Each is striving for a worthy end, and where they clash it is an honest conflict of ideals, not of prejudices.

It must be frankly admitted that both the college and the school have made mistakes, and that both have gone to extremes. In striving, for example, to make its work attractive, and to retain pupils in its courses, the school has sometimes lowered the stand