Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 37.djvu/68

58 programme shows that the instruction of these 6,360 recitation hours are distributed as follows: Mother-tongue, 1,000; modern languages, 1,160; history, 360; geography, 280; mathematics, 1,080; science studies, 960; drawing, 960; penmanship, 160; bookkeeping, 80; morals, 40; legislation, 80; political economy, 40; philosophy, 160. The ages of the pupils average eleven years in the first and sixteen in the last class. The recitation hours of a pupil passing through the last two grades of the grammar school, and the four years' course of the English High School in Boston are, barring certain changes on account of options, as follow: Mother-tongue, 1,111; modern languages, 494; history, 570; geography, 152; mathematics, 722; drawing, 760; book-keeping, 95.

Here, again, as in the case of the French classical lycée course, the instruction in the mother-tongue is found to be less than in the American representative school. The hours devoted to modern languages (1,160) are, in fact, somewhat in excess of those given to French (1,000), and, it may be added, are in most marked contrast to the time allotted to the same study in the Boston High-School programme (494), even after the latter has received a credit under this head for a certain number of hours that in point of fact are used by many pupils for Latin.

Mathematics, which, as has been seen, plays but a subsidiary rôle in the classical lycée course, in the secondary special course assumes more prominence comparatively, the average being 4 hours against 3 hours' recitation per week in the typical American programme. Yet even here it is not up to what may be termed the United States standard. A tabulated exhibit of the hours of the classical courses of the two countries shows that an average of only one hour and fifty minutes per week is given to mathematics in the classical lycée course, compared with an average of three hours and forty minutes in the Boston classical school course. A comparison of that course with the French secondary special programme develops also the fact that a typical American classical school not only devotes more hours to mathematics than the French consider essential for a preparatory scientific course, but also exhibits the further surprising fact that the Boston English High-School course, with two years of grammar-grade school prefixed to it, actually gives less time to mathematics than is devoted to that study in the six years' course proper of the Latin School. And this is not by any means peculiar to the Boston school courses. The programmes of other schools exhibit a treatment of the mathematical subjects quite similar. At Phillips Exeter precisely the same number of hours is given to mathematics in the classical and scientific courses. At Williston, even after adding the course in surveying to the mathematics, the