Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/165

Rh year, variations from which showed a tendency to carry it over to the last year.

No recommendation of the committee has been more generally observed in practise than the one placing botany and zoology in the second year. However, these two subjects, at first closely associated, show an unmistakable drift from their moorings, botany moving downward toward the first year, as shown in Miss Weckel's investigations, and zoology moving toward the third year or being eliminated. Botany is subjected to two opposing influences, which will probably divide it into two distinct portions. . The introduction of agriculture below the high school is already resulting in the injection of much elementary botany into the elementary grades, while the leading botanists insist on giving high school botany a character that would move it in the other direction. The migration of zoology to the third and fourth years, to be followed by physiology, as located by the Committee of Ten, would make possible an evolutionary treatment of the combined subject that is much to be desired.

The recommendation of the committee regarding physics and chemistry has not been respected. It will be recalled that the conference to whom the committee assigned those subjects recommended a placement identical with the one now prevailing; but owing to their division of physical geography into an elementary and an advanced portion, the committee reversed that order so that physics might precede and prepare for the advanced work in physical geography. The reason for this reversal not proving well founded, the recommendation of the conference should prevail. This would agree with the present evident tendency to relieve the physics difficulty by putting its elementary phases into a first-year science course and leaving the more technical and quantitative treatment for the last year of the course.

The proverbial inertia of school curricula makes unsafe any laissez faire method of establishing the sequence of high school sciences. But it must not be thought that the present sequence is to any considerable extent the result of neglect. What then are the influences that have established this order of treatment?

Doubtless authoritative recommendation of competent committees have been a strong influence. Also, the accrediting system of the colleges and universities, by requiring a certain character of work offered in admission, have indirectly determined its location in the course. And an increasing complexity and supposed dependence of subjects has been a component of the final result. The tendency to place general and prescribed courses before special and elective courses has been a strong influence. Other temporary causes are the supply and demand of scholarship in high school teachers and their preparation for the