Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 58.djvu/600

592 lower grades—the 'gap' as it is often called, between 'the grades' and the high school—still exists, very much as it always has.

This curious break, in what is intended to be a thoroughly unified educational scheme, is such a contradictory phenomenon, in spite of its serious reality, that it would be incomprehensible if it had not followed naturally from the different origins of our elementary and our secondary schools. Our secondary schools originated as (Latin) grammar schools, i. e., as college preparatory schools, designed for a particular social class, and hence possessing no essential articulation with the public elementary schools. The academies, although not class schools to the same extent as the older 'grammar schools,' still concerned themselves little, if at all, with the elementary education of their pupils. When the high schools were founded on the combined model of the 'grammar school' and the academy, these traditions of secondary education were perpetuated—below the high school not a real education, only a preparation for education; education itself was deferred to the high school. Hence, the gap between the high school and the lower grades—the artificial isolation of the high school from the lower grades, which still persists in spite of our recent and contemporary endeavor to bring them together.

Nevertheless, the remedy is really not difficult to apply. We have already made so much progress that the final steps ought not to be difficult to take. We shall take them when we discontinue elementary English grammar as a distinct study, at the end of the sixth grade, and begin there a modern foreign language; when we cut out all the arithmetic in and after the seventh grade, and substitute elementary geometry and algebra; when we similarly cut out most of the political geography in and after the seventh grade, and gradually transform all our nature study during the same time into elementary natural science. When we make these and some other equally important changes seriously, and add them to the other improvements already substantially accomplished in our contemporary pre-high-school grades, we shall bridge the gap between elementary and secondary education; and the artificial isolation of the high school in a system of which it is really intended folic an integral part will he outgrown.

I should like to discuss the effect of these suggested changes more at length, but I must content myself here with touching only one of them. It will be noticed that 1 have spoken of a modern language, not of Latin, as a suitable foreign language for pre-high-school pupils. The reasons for this suggestion are not far to seek. Latin is a difficult language, and when begun at an early age. and without any previous study of a foreign language, is not economically acquired. By economically, I mean the minimum expenditure of time and energy required to make substantial progress in the language. This is