Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/53

Rh elementary-school pupils took the same work as those who had had no previous manual training, has also been remedied.

By using whatever the pupils bring from the elementary school and building upon this their first work in the high school, we have secured a high degree of correlation between the work of the two schools, which has resulted in reducing to a minimum the shock of change from one school to the other. By reducing the amount of unnecessary reviewing and the repetition of material in successive years we have saved one year from the elementary school without undue forcing of pupils, without loss of anything of value, and with positive gain in the mental attitude and habits of the pupils.

It is probably neither possible nor desirable to save still further time from the elementary school. There remains for us to consider the period of secondary education. It should be observed at the outset that the four-year high-school course does not represent the actual range of secondary education either as regards the natural development of the pupil or as regards the material and method of instruction. Most of the work of the first and much of that of the second year in college is secondary, both in content and method. In earlier times when the range of subjects taught in high schools and academies was small and the college requirements were few in number and specific in content, the student on entering college continued in the same subjects and from the same point at which his work had ended in the lower school. But with the greatly expanded scope of high-school courses and the corresponding increase in the range of subjects accepted for admission to college, it has become necessary for the college to offer elementary courses in almost every subject of the curriculum. We find in college beginning courses in Greek, French, and German, and in Latin the courses corresponding to the second and third year of the high school; elementary courses in all sciences; in mathematics one half the courses offered in any first-class high school; and in history a repetition of most or all the work of the high school.

The practise of colleges to admit students with conditions sometimes equivalent to a year or even more of high-school work indicates the acceptance on the part of the college faculties of the fact that the first year or more of the college course is concerned with secondary work. The latest statistics of the colleges and universities of the North Central Association illustrates this.

This table shows that of the seventy-three institutions on the list of