The New Education Part 10

The high school is not a training ground for colleges, nor is it a repository of cla.s.sical lore. As an advanced school it differs no more from the elementary school than the six cylinder automobile differs from the four cylinder car. Though its work is more complex, like the elementary school it exists for the sole purpose of helping children to live wholesome, efficient lives.

II An Experiment in Futures

Children who get stranded in the seventh or eighth grades may have failed in one subject or in several. Over age and out of place, they lose interest, become discouraged and at fourteen drop out of school to work or to idle. In Newton, as in every other town, there were a number of just such children whom Mr. Spaulding decided to get into the high school.

"There they will be among children of their own age," he explained.

"They may take a new line of work and acquire a real interest."

"But they will fail in their high school work as they have failed in their grade work," protested the doubters.

Mr. Spaulding, smiling his quiet, genial smile, tried his experiment all the same. From the seventh and eighth grades of the Newton schools he picked the boys and girls who were fifteen or more at their next birthdays. These pupils, seventy in all--forty girls and thirty boys--were transferred, without examination, into the high school.

"These youngsters were going to drop out of school for good in one year, or two at the outside," explained Mr. Spaulding, "so I made up my mind that during that year at least they should have some high school training. They went to the regular high school teachers for their hand-work; but for their studies, I put them in charge of three capable grade teachers, who were responsible for seeing that each child was making good. I put it to the grade teachers this way: 'Here are a lot of children who have got the failure habit by failing all through their school course. Unless we want to send them out of our school to make similar failures in life, we must teach them to succeed. Take each child on his own merits, give him work that he can do and let him learn success.'

"We gave these boys and girls twenty hours a week of technical work (drawing, designing, shop-work, cooking and sewing) and ten hours a week of academic work (English, mathematics, civics and hygiene). Shop costs, buying of materials and simple accounting covered their mathematics. Those were the things which would probably be most needful in life. The boys got deeply interested in civics, and we let them go as far and as fast as they pleased. With the girls we discussed hygiene, dressing and a lot of other things in which they were interested.

"When those children entered the school they were boisterous and rough.

The girls dressed gaudily, reveling in cheap finery. By Christmas, to all appearances, their cla.s.ses differed in no way from the other high school cla.s.ses. They all brushed their hair. The boys were neater and the girls were becomingly dressed.["]

Most of the seventy children stayed through the year. Twenty-seven of the forty girls and seventeen of the thirty boys entered the regular high school course the next fall. They were thus put into compet.i.tion with their former seventh and eighth grade comrades, although they had had only two-fifths as much academic work as the regular eighth grade pupils. There was the test.

Could these derelicts, after one year of special care, take their places in the regular freshman high school work? After the end of the first quarter, a study made of the 800 children in the high school showed that on the average there were fifty-four hundredths of one failure for each scholar. Among the twenty-seven girls from the special cla.s.ses, however, there was but seventeen-hundredths of a failure for each girl, or one-third as many failures as in the whole school. The boys made an even better showing. Of the entire seventeen, only one boy failed, and in only one subject.

III The Success Habit

"We had given them something they liked and could do," Mr. Spaulding concluded. "They succeeded a few times, got the success habit, learned to like school, went into the regular high school course and succeeded there."

As an ill.u.s.tration of the way in which the new plan works, take the case of James Rawley. James was in a serious predicament. Time after time the court had overlooked his truancy and misdoings, but James had taken the pitcher once too often to the well, and the open doors of the State Reform School stared him grimly in the face.

"It will be best for him in the long run," commented the judge. "Each month of this wild life makes him a little less fit to keep his place in the community. He has had his last chance."

Yet there was one ray of hope, for James lived in and out of Boston, a city located near the Newton Technical High School. This fact led James's custodians to propose to the judge that he give James one more trial, this time in the Newton Technical High School. The judge, also of the initiated, agreed to the suggestion, and James, a dismal eighth grade failure, entered the Newton Technical High School in one of the special transfer cla.s.ses.

Just a word about James. He began life badly. His mother died when he was young; and his father, a rather indifferent man, boarded the boy out during his early years with an aunt, who first spoiled him through indulgence, and then, inconsistently enough, hated him because he was spoiled. Growing up in this uncongenial atmosphere, James became entirely uncontrollable. He was disagreeable in the extreme, wild and unmanageable.

The people with whom James was boarding grew tired of his continued truancy and he was placed on a farm near Boston. There, too, he was discontented, dissatisfied and disobedient. Time after time he ran away to Boston. He went on from bad to worse, falling in with vagrants, learning their talk and their ways, acquiring a love for wandering and a distaste for regularity and direction. Taken into custody by the Juvenile Court, and placed on probation with a family outside of Boston, James again ran away to mingle with a crowd of his old a.s.sociates in Boston. It was at this point that the court decided to send him to the Reform School. It was likewise at this time that some friendly people took him in charge, found him a home in Newton, and started his life anew in the Newton Technical High School, which James entered with a special transfer cla.s.s. Promoted to the regular freshman cla.s.s on trial, James has renewed his interest in education and bids fair to make his way through the high school.

James is doing well in the Newton Technical High School. Though he does not like all of the regular high school work, he has a full course, and is working at it persistently. Heretofore school has never appealed to him--in fact, he hated it cordially--but the school at Newton offered him such a variety of subjects that he was able to find some which were attractive. Since then he has been working on those subjects.

There are many cities in which every school door would have been closed to James, because he did not fit into the school system, but the superintendent of the Newton schools believes in making the school fit the needs of the boy. A fantastic theory? Well, perhaps a trifle, from one viewpoint; nevertheless, it is the soul of education.

IV The Help-Out Spirit

As a result of this special promotion policy, there are practically no over-age pupils in the grammar schools of Newton. Instead of square pegs in round holes, the Newton High School can boast of sixty or seventy children who come, each year, in search of a new opening for which they are technically not ready, but into which they may grow. After coming to the high school, two-thirds of them find an incentive sufficient to lead them to continue with an education of which they had already wearied.

The Newton High School, recognizing its obligation to serve the people, strains every nerve to enable boys and girls to take high school work.

The printing teacher pointed to his cla.s.s of twenty.

"Only three of them do not work on Sat.u.r.days and after school. They couldn't come here if they didn't work. Hiney, there, was in a bakeshop all day at three and a half a week. We got him a job afternoons and Sat.u.r.days that pays him three dollars. That tall fellow will send himself through high school on the six dollars a week that he gets from a drug store where he works outside of school hours."

"We aim," added Mr. Spaulding, "to do everything in our power to make it possible for the boys to come here. If their parents cannot afford to send them, we find work for them to do outside of school hours."

That is virile work, is it not? And the result? During the past eight years the number of pupils in the Newton schools who are over fourteen has increased three times as fast as the number of pupils who are under fourteen. The school authorities have searched the highways and byways of the educational world until one-quarter of the school children of Newton are in the high schools.

V Joining Hands with the Elementary Schools

The same result which is attained informally at Newton is accomplished more formally by the organization of the junior high schools which have sprung up in Berkeley and Los Angeles, California; Evansville, Indiana; Dayton, Ohio, and a number of other progressive educational centers. The child's school life under this plan is divided into three parts--the elementary grades (years one to six), the junior high school (years seven to nine) and the high school proper (years ten to twelve). The break, if break there must be, between the elementary and the high school, thus comes at age twelve and at age fifteen, instead of, as formerly, coming at age fourteen, when the temptation to leave school is so strong. Then, too, the sharp transition from work by grades to work by departments is made easier because the junior high school combines the two, leading the pupil gradually over from the grade method to the department method.

Though the junior high school has so great a popularity, its work is eclipsed by the still more revolutionary program of those educators who advocate the complete abolition of any line between the elementary and the high school, and the establishment of a public school of twelve school years. This plan, coupled with promotion by subjects rather than by grades, replaces the machine method of promotion and the gap between elementary and high schools by an easy, natural progression adaptable to the needs of any student, from the end of the kindergarten to the beginning of the university.

Superintendent Wirt of Gary, Indiana, has established such a twelve-year course in the Emerson School. The grades, numbered from one to twelve, are so arranged that a girl may take half of her subjects in school year eight (last grammar grade) and the other half in school year nine (first high school grade). In order to make the harmony more complete, Mr. Wirt places the elementary rooms, containing the second grade pupils, next door to the rooms which shelter high school seniors.

On this side of the hall is a kindergarten; directly across from it is a cla.s.s in high school geometry.

The same plan, on a larger scale, has been adopted by I. B. Gilbert, princ.i.p.al of the Union High School, Grand Rapids, Michigan, which houses twelve hundred students.

"We have obliterated the sharp line of distinction between the grades,"

declared Mr. Gilbert. "The school, which is a new one, has a very complete equipment--physical, chemical, and biological laboratories, two cooking rooms, dressmaking and millinery rooms, an art department, a woodworking shop, a forge room and a machine shop; the print shop, though not yet installed, is to be put in this year. By bringing children of all grades to the school, we place at the disposal of grade pupils apparatus ordinarily reserved for high school pupils only. At the same time, our equipment is in constant use and the cost of establis.h.i.+ng a separate industrial department or school for the grades is eliminated.

"These are merely the surface advantages, however. The real gain to the students is in other and most significant directions. First, the abolis.h.i.+ng of rigid grading allows each child to follow his own bent. At the beginning of the adolescent period, when the old interests begin to lag, some new ideas must be furnished if the child is to be kept in school. We provide that new stimulus by beginning departmental work with the seventh year (at twelve or thirteen). Then, if the child shows any particular preference for any line of work, he may pursue it. From the seventh grade up, promotion is by subjects entirely, and not by grades. If a student elects art, she may follow up her art work for the next six years; similarly, a boy may follow shop-work, or a girl domestic science or millinery. In order to fit the school more quickly to the pupils' need, we make a division at the beginning of the eighth grade of those pupils desiring to take academic work and those desiring to take industrial work in the high school. The latter group does extra sewing or shop-work twice each week.

"Again, we take all over-age and over-size pupils from the schools in this section of the city, and by placing them in ungraded cla.s.ses, permit them to take the work which they can do. Here is a boy who cannot master grammar. That is no reason why he should not design jewelry, so we give him fourth year language, and take him into the tenth year cla.s.s in jewelry design. Yes, and he makes good, doing excellent craft work and gradually pulling up in his language. By this means we make our twelve grade school fit the needs of any and every pupil who may come to it.

"We have a natural educational progress for twelve years," concluded Mr.

Gilbert. "There is no break anywhere. Instead of making it hard to step from grade eight to grade nine, we interrelate them so intimately that the student scarcely feels the change from one to the other. The result?

Last June there were 152 pupils in our eighth grade. Of that number 118, or more than three-quarters of them reported in the ninth grade this fall. We have cancelled the invitation to quit school at the end of the eighth grade and our children stay with us."

VI The Abolition of "Ma.s.s Play"

Thus the dark narrow pa.s.sage-way from the elementary to the higher schools is being widened, lighted, paved and sign-posted. In some school systems it has disappeared altogether, leaving the promotion from the eighth year to the first year high school as easy as the step from the seventh to the eighth grade. After the children have reached the high school, however, the task is only begun. First they must be individualized, second socialized, and third taught.

"The trouble with the girls," complained Wm. McAndrew, in discussing his four thousand Was.h.i.+ngton Irvingites, "is that they have always been taught ma.s.s play. Take singing, for instance. A cla.s.s started off will sing beautifully all together, but get one girl on her feet and she is afraid to utter a note. The grade instruction has taught them group acting and group thinking. I step into a cla.s.s of Freshmen with a 'Good morning, girls'.

"'Good morning,' they chorus.

"'Are you glad to see me, girls?'

"'Yes sir,' again in chorus.

"'Do you wished I was hanged?'

"'Yes sir,' generally,--

"'Oh, no sir,' cries one girl who has begun to cerebrate. The idea catches all over the cla.s.s, and again the chorus comes,--