Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/645

Rh their work is chiefly that of a college preparatory school, or whether they are also the head and crown of the school system in which the child of the people finds his best school preparation for whatever career his future may hold. To sustain this double responsibility is more than the high school can do, unless perchance the colleges and the elementary schools can be so brought into harmony—by the modification of one or the other or both—that fitting for college and for general American citizenship shall become one and the same thing.

That the high-school course ought to lead to the door of the college was the unanimous verdict of the able committee whose Report on Secondary Schools has become so famous. But if this be interpreted as meaning that the colleges alone can set the pace for high-school instruction, or if the influence of that report should be to separate the high school from the lower schools, both in its aim and the personnel of its teaching force, then, indeed, it is certain that time must bring a reaction. There can be no fundamental reason for an explicit change of policy in the public-school work at the end of the ninth grade.

Since the high schools must sustain such intimate relations with colleges and lower schools, with public and private institutions, it would seem to be the necessary policy of their managers to keep them in fullest touch with both of the leading schools of current educational thought. And here we come face to face with what is perhaps the bottom fact in the situation. It must be confessed that in the educational world there are two types of thinking and thinkers, neither of them confined in its affiliations to the college or to the elementary schools, yet each having its own peculiar relations both with the one and with the other. The one type represents time-honored ideals, it may be of scholarship and culture, or it may be of practical forms and methods—ideals which experience has wrought out, and which are therefore held to be worthy of acceptance. The other type seeks to build up an improved system of education according to principles that are held to be fundamental; and, believing that "new wine must be put into new bottles," it does not scruple to turn aside, if occasion arises, from the standards of the past.

Nor is this true of education alone. It is the same in politics, in religion, in literature, and in every form of art. The traditional or conventional ideals coexist side by side with a newer philosophy, which seems antagonistic until a later view unites them both in its larger perspective.

In the educational world within two or three years these types in a measure seem to have focused themselves in two famous documents, the report of the Committee of Ten on Secondary Schools, and the later report of the Committee of Fifteen—or, as