Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 58.djvu/602

594 unless they have an opportunity to study a foreign language in the grammar school, they do not get it at all.

Other arguments for such sequence of our language courses as I am pleading for are near at hand; e. g., a pupil's knowledge of, and command over, his mother tongue gains enormously through the study of a foreign language—a modern language is as good for this purpose, for young pupils, as Latin, or even better than Latin; and a modern language in itself may have a commercial value which Latin never has, except, at present, for teachers.

Now, if we had two or three pre-high-school years of a modern language, followed by at least one year—the first high school year—of another modern language in the high school, and this followed by three years of Latin and two of Greek for those who care for the ancient languages, who can doubt that our present somewhat meager achievements in the classics in the high school would be greatly increased in quantity and that they would be vastly better in quality? This is the sensible language course of the future for those who study the classics in the high school, as I conceive it, when the high school is completely articulated to the grammar school. When that time comes I think, also, that we shall have precisely inverted the relative emphasis we now place on the classics and on the modern languages in pre-collegiate education for collegiate pupils. We shall follow the pre-high-school modern language courses by substantial high school courses in the languages, and so continue the real education of the pupil begun in the grammar school, instead of deferring it as we now do for the classical student until he reaches the college. For, at present, classical education in the secondary school, like the formal education that used to precede it in the elementary school, is, for most pupils, only an alleged preparation for education, not education itself.

When we articulate our pre-high-school courses in history, science, mathematics, manual training, and the rest, with the corresponding high school course, in some such way as has just been suggested for foreign language courses, we shall then make the pupil's school career a real and not a deferred education at every stage of his progress; and the historical disparity between the kind of studies pursued below the high school and those pursued in the high school will disappear. There will be no artificial separation of the high school from the rest of the school system. We shall have adjusted our educational endeavor to the real process of the pupil's unfolding development, and shall really make our schools minister equally to all classes of pupils, whether they have the good fortune to be born of wealthy and socially superior parents, or whether merely equipped with ability and earnestness, they are obliged to make the most of the brief educational career their circumstances will permit.