Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/46

42 Of first importance among the causes of waste is the lack of coordination between the separate parts of our organization. Until recently the requirements which the college has made upon the high school have not been based upon any comprehensive view of the increasing scope and of the methods of secondary education. College courses have not been built upon the work of the high school. College instructors have failed to utilize some of the training which the student has received, and have complained loudly over the lack of what they have assumed a high school ought to give. An attitude of superior wisdom has furnished a cloak by which college instructors have concealed their ignorance of educational theory and practise. But with the changed attitude on the part of the high-school teachers from that of complaisant acquiescence to college domination to one of bumptious officiousness, we have suddenly come upon a situation that is full of promise for increased efficiency through better understanding. A new and strange spectacle in educational history was presented last year when the University of Chicago invited secondary-school teachers to visit its class-rooms for a period of several weeks, and based a two days' series of departmental and general conferences upon a critical discussion by these teachers of the methods of the university class-rooms. Another important step is being taken this year in the visitation by junior college instructors of high-school classes in Chicago and near-by towns, not in a perfunctory manner for an hour or two, but for successive days. It is safe to say that we shall soon be able to avoid no small waste at this point, due to a lack of knowledge and appreciation on the part of both school and college instructors of the work done on the opposite sides of the arbitrary line which has separated them.

But lack of coordination and the waste incident thereto is not found alone at the point of transition from high school to college; it is equally marked between the elementary school and the high school. The ignorance of the methods and content of high-school courses displayed by college instructors is, if possible, exceeded by the lack of definite knowledge displayed by high-school instructors of what goes on in the grades below. The abrupt change from the class-room organization of the elementary school with the careful supervision of the pupil's study to the departmental organization of the high school where so much emphasis has been placed upon home study and so little attention has been given to the method of the pupil's study, together with the sudden introduction of the pupil to so many new subjects, has been responsible in no small degree for the enormous percentage of failure and elimination in the early part of the high-school course. Again a prolific source of waste is found in the lack of correlation between different departments, particularly in the high school, of which a more detailed discussion will be given later.

Another source of waste is found in the character and training of