THE HIGH SCHOOL AS THE PEOPLE'S COLLEGE

G. STANLEY HALL, PRESIDENT OF CLARK UNIVERSITY, WORCESTER, MASS.

Education may fit the youth to live in the past, the present, or the future; and systems may be distinguished according to the relative influence of each. In the Renaissance, which was the golden dawn of secondary education, the past ruled. The literature and life of ancient Greece and Rome were revived. Sturm's goal was so to train his pupils that if they were suddenly transported to Rome or Athens they would be at home in the language, history, and customs. The vernacular was formed on the model of the ponderous Ciceronian sentence which set all the fashions in style. Latin was the language of the school and the playground. The games and the whole atmosphere harked back to antiquity. There was no contemporary literature, history, science deemed worth while. The fashion and the earmark of culture was to write a style interlarded with classical quotations and allusions. Liberal education consisted in reviving the dead past, and the results were remarkable. boys became young Greeks and Romans.

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How have we fallen away! Years of the study of Latin and Greek do not accomplish what months did then. Methods and results alike are degenerate. The baby Latin and Greek taught in our high schools is but a sanctified relic, the ghost of a ghost; and we find today almost every degree of degeneration from the golden age of secondary classical training. This is confessed even by its representatives in the German Gymnasia, where the old ideal is still best maintained in the modern world. An informed writer says that this high-school fetich no more revives antique culture than the soil is fertilized by the smell of the dung-cart driven over it; says that he has been incapacitated for his duties in modern life by the seductions of this phantom, and that his grandfather, the president of the United States, was injured by it, altho, pathetic to relate, he always praised it. The German emperor, in his famous rescript, declared it a shame to the modern youth to excel in Latin composition, and declared that he would have no more Gymnasia or Professor Hintzpeters. Norway forbids and Sweden has almost banished it from the secondary schools. The well-known Frankfurt method substitutes three years of modern languages for this, and finds at the end of five years pupils have more than made up. Mr. Reddie at Abbotsholme, Lietz at Ilsenburg, Demolins at L'école de Roche, have set back fires that are spreading in their respective countries. Booker T. Washington says the two chief desires of the colored youth during all the reconstruction period were to hold office and to study Latin, and that his life-work for his race has been directed against these two evils.

I raise no question of the great value of these studies for those who

go deeply into them. I acknowledge an inestimable debt to antiquity. I believe in humanistic culture. But when I find that during the past ten years, in which our high-school population has more than doubled, Latin has increased from 34 per cent. in 1890 to about 50 per cent. in 1900, while the proportion of those who go to college has decreased from 14 to 11 per cent., I believe the educational waste and devastation, in view of the growing claims and growing neglect of modern subjects, are calamitous to the point of pathos.

Despite vigorous denials, I am convinced that the general complaint of imperfect command of the mother-tongue by high-school youth is largely due to translation English, and I cite the report of the Harvard entrance committee which challenges comparison for slovenness and mutilation of good English style; and yet it is just at this stage, before the power to read without translating is acquired, that a recent writer says the chief benefit for the vernacular is acquired. Most high-school Latinists do not go on to college. Beginnings that leave abandoned

tracks in the brain because there is no relation to after-life are evil. Moreover, it is a purely formal discipline with almost no content as now taught. Its practical relations to life, arts, literature, which are so magnified, are of the slightest. Thirty-four per cent. of those who drop out of the high school do so from loss of interest and enchantment, and this is true mainly with the classics.

What keeps these studies alive? First, their traditional respectability. The high school was the Latin school, and children and parents feel they have launched on a higher stage in development when they are known to be students of Latin and perhaps algebra; especially is this true of Catholics. Moreover, Latin is often required in the first high-school year, still more often strongly advised. Again, it is probably the easiest and cheapest of all subjects to teach. I would undertake to hire a hundred female Latin teachers at shorter notice and for less cost than in any other topic. Again, college requirements and possibilities are an enormous bribe, and our secondary education is losing its independence by the excessive interference and dominance from above; and, finally, one can teach Latin and break in the youthful mind with more authority and ease than in any other topic. The voice of its defects is either hoarse or thin and piping with age. They are the rear guard in the retreat of what was once a great army; but the grasp of this dead hand from the tombs of culture must be relaxed.

How different when we turn from the too exclusive dominance of the past, which has its stronghold in that most conservative of all institutions, perhaps the church not excepted, to the training that fits for modern life in the present! Happily there is always a rapidly growing tendency in every modern race and nation to make its schools in its own image, and to measure their efficiency by how well they fit for the

domestic, social, political, industrial present. It is the burden of the German Kaiser's complaint that the schools do not give him good soldiers, well-trained civil servants, competent administrators, intelligent patriots. The ministry, and still more the law, show progressive inadequacy to the demands laid upon them. Mr. Kidd would test schools by the maximal social efficiency. Our own Dr. Harris measures them by the thoroness with which they prepare for the life of state, church, school, and home. We often imagine the enormous stimulus which would follow if educational requirements were as thoroly enforced here for our 120,000 office-holders as they are in Germany, where, to fill the lowest office, one must have attained a certain state schooling, and each higher stage up thru secondary and university grades opens the possibility of higher and higher government appointments. Business and trades also have their requirements.

To interpret "fitting for life" to mean fitting for the best service in existing institutions of the present, altho immeasurably better than fitting for the past, brings, along with all its inspiration, a growing danger of narrowness. It is a Roman postulate dear to organizers and to those who love to impart prepared knowledge, which the mature intellect selects as most useful. It tends to utilitarianism and is illiberal, whether one is fitting for a trade or for college. Standards are external, and the question is: Will it pay, whether in money or in passing examinations? Those who thus conceive education place the social organism first and subordinate the individual to his place in it. Citizenship bulks large compared with manhood and womanhood. Their philosophy of education, if they have one, is clear and convenient. Napoleon organized French education on this plan that it might give him good officials. Three-fourths of the students of the lycées look forward to snug little berths, and those who fail, after weary years of eating their hearts out, turn to independent careers from necessity, as a last resort. An office, with badge, uniform, and permanence, is the French parent's ideal. The hopelessness of reforms in secondary education here is due to the excessive surveillance of the school to the needs of the social and political community. The French boy's spur to graduate early is that he may get in the line of promotion in office, which is always by seniority. Families have to be small, because every addition diminishes each child's share of the parents' property, and no girl and few boys can marry without a dowry. The French schoolboy thus foresees everything in his career at the start, save only the date of his death, unless he fails of appointment. and remains a candidate for starvation. In China the evils of this system are more fully developed. Demolins well says: "That system of education which attempts to adapt the young to existing institutions is bad and. must fail." It tends to make young graduates tuft-hunters and placeseekers, hoping to secure by influence soft berths, instead of launching

forth and carving out a career for themselves. They are always fitting for something, accumulating learning for the highest market, and the aroma of the trade school penetrates academic halls and causes premature, undue specialization.

But there is a third muse, the inspirations of which are now more and more felt, which teaches that the school should be the bud and nursery of the world that is to be; that it should not be made in the image of the present, but should fit man for the next stage of development in the race and nation. In the present age of rapid transition and expansion of our race, the future and the ideal must be more dominant than ever before, or we are dwarfed as a nation. This is a good age to be young in. It is the psychologic moment for new pedagogic aims, topics, and methods, when the pulses of the old are quickened as with a new adolescence. Our children must not be trained merely to defend the old fortresses of civilization, but to carry on offensive and defensive warfare in fields as yet unexplored. We must not only augment present, but projected, efficiency. Altho the method of fitting for the future is to overflow the needs of the present, just as outgrowing our old soul is the best way to molt a new one in an age of moving equilibrium, we must remember that very much that we praise is deciduous; that the present is not a finality; is a germ and not a blossom, and still less a fruit; and that, unless we are to be jingoes and chauvinists, after knowing the spirit of the age, we must quite as often oppose as serve it. Youth is prophecy, for which its ideals are proverbially the best material. The battles of nations are sometimes won decades before on the school playgrounds. "As Oxford feels and thinks," runs the old slogan, "England thirty years later will act, for it is here that her history is preformed." Otherwise we turn out graduates like the man born just too late, who spent his after-life trying to make up for the last quarter of an hour. Thus we teachers must always, and especially today, be dual personalities on the one hand, held to our primary organism, and careful that no good in the past be lost; but, on the other, smitten with a divine discontent with the present and its works and ways, trying to make our own lives more honest and exemplary, and more hopeful and worth living, because we give life to others, and worshiping the god of the present but as an ex- or emeritus deity when the god of the future shows his face.

What will the high school, as the people's college, be and do? I answer if you will pardon summary phrases for the sake of brevity:

First, it will teach English with the chief stress, not upon language or form, but upon content, literature, history, and science. It will not exclude the Bible-man's chief text-book in psychology, human nature, selfknowledge, self-reverence, and self-control; its prophecies as the best school of the future; its appeal to faith as the substance of things hoped for; its poetry of nature, of morals, æsthetics, and of the true piety of

the heart as that out of which are the issues of life; as that which follows the order of the soul's unfoldment thru boyhood, adolescence, maturity, and old age, for which one American university already gives credits on admission.

Second, the people's college will teach oratory. I have found fourteen widely used books on rhetoric which dilate on punctuation, paragraphing, the subtleties of style and good use, proofreading, correct and incorrect use of idioms, theories of poetic structure, narration, description, and, above all, composition, which A. S. Hill's Rhetoric says is the "main business of the teacher of English." "Rhetoric is proper words in proper places, and the teacher must be all the time on the watch for errors," altho not one student in ten thousand has anything to say; and rhetoric, it is said, does "not teach or imply thinking clearly." Now, the very word "rhetoric" means oratory. To Aristotle it meant giving truth the superiority which belongs to it by its nature. It means the art of influencing conduct with the truth sent home by the living man. Rome knew no other education, and only in her decadence did rhetoric of our type arise, with its trifling, artificial, sophistical way. Some of this the English of the people's college should restore.

Third, the drama at its best is an incomparable school of life. The characters stand out clear and distinct; both they and the action are far easier to comprehend than in life, where all is more complex. Dramatic reading suits youth, and very much can be done in a single high-school year, even without a school theater, if we would only abandon our senseless worship of notes. I visited a high-school class which had spent three weeks on Othello, not one of whom yet knew how the story ended. The good drama is moral, because it rewards the good and punishes the villains. The lid of conventionality is taken off human nature, which is seen in its pure types, and a wholesome carthasis against evil is applied. There is always conflict, collision, and passion, which suits youth and makes the theater often truer than history, teaching the power that makes for righteousness. The decay of the modern theater from its happy ideal is hardest on youth.

Another content study in English work should be the great mediæval epics. Quintilian said that such "contribute more to the unfoldment of students than all the treatises that all the rhetoricians ever wrote." Highschool boys have passed the age of chief interest in Homer content, but it is the age of King Arthur, the Sangreal, Parsifal, Sir Galahad, Siegfried, and Lohengrin. This is the quarry where Chaucer, Shakespeare, Scott, Tennyson, Wagner, Ibsen, and scores of artists have found their inspiration. The theme of it all is chivalry and honor- the noblest thing in feudalism. It means reverence for womanhood, pity, valor, loyalty, courtesy, munificence, justice, obedience, and heroism. Here grew

the ideals of the gentleman, who was tender, generous, and helpful as well