THE GAP BETWEEN COMMON SCHOOLS AND COLLEGES.*

BY PRESIDENT CHARLES W. ELIOT, OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY.

IN July last, Professor Canfield, of the University of Kansas, read before the National Council of Education a wellconsidered report on secondary education in the United States. This valuable paper gives a clear picture of the undeveloped condition of secondary education throughout the country, and demonstrates that just there lies the weakest part of our educational system. No State in the American Union possesses anything which can be properly called a system of secondary education. The elementary, or common school system, both in city and country, is tolerably organized in many States; but between the elementary schools and the colleges is a wide gap very imperfectly bridged by a few public high schools, endowed academies, college preparatory departments, and private schools, which conform to no common standards and are under no unifying control. The masses of the rural population,- that is to say, three-quarters of the American people are unprovided with secondary schools. The town and city high schools are, on the one hand, independent of each other and of any superior educational authority; and, on the other, are entirely in the power of local committees or boards which can but rarely look beyond the immediate interests of the particular region which supports each school. Many States have adopted permissive legislation with regard to the maintenance of high schools; but for the most part this legislation has produced no fruits. Only one State in the Union Massachusetts · has mandatory legislation on this subject; but in that State a large proportion of the 230 so-called high schools are not. secondary schools in any proper sense. Because of the lack

The substance of this paper was read in New York on the 20th of February, 1890, before the Superintendents' Department of the National Education Association.

of secondary schools competent to prepare their pupils for college, five-sixths of the colleges and universities in the United States maintain preparatory departments against their will, and in disregard of the interests of the higher instruction.

One would infer from Professor Canfield's report that with regard to secondary education, the condition of things in Massachusetts a little State in which sixty per cent. of the population may fairly be called urban-is better than anywhere else in the United States. Perhaps it is; but how wide the gap is between the common schools in Massachusetts and her colleges may be inferred from a few facts about the supply of students to Harvard College. Only nine Massachusetts high schools (out of 230) send pupils to Harvard College every year. In 1889, out of 352 persons who were admitted to Harvard College as candidates for the degree of bachelor of arts, ninety-seven (or twenty-seven and one-half per cent.) were prepared at free public schools; but these schools numbered only thirty, and all New England furnished but twenty-three of them. The plain fact is in Massachusetts that not one-tenth of the schools called high habitually maintain a course of study which enables the pupil to prepare himself for admission to Harvard College, or to any other college in the State which enforces its requirements for admission as stated in its catalogue.

If this is the condition of things in what may be called an urban State, what must it be in a rural one? Imagine a patriot compelled to choose between two alternatives,-one, that the less intelligent half of his countrymen should be completely illiterate, the other, that half of the children capable of receiving the highest instruction should be cut off from that instruction. Which would he choose? He would find the decision a difficult one; for either alternative would inflict an incalculable loss upon his country. Yet in the present condition of secondary education, one-half of the most capable children in the United States, at a moderate estimate, have no open road to colleges and universities.

To discover and to apply the remedies for the present defective, disjointed, and heterogeneous condition of secondary education is the problem now most worthy of the attention of American educationists; but while seeking remedies they must use palliatives. Recognizing the plain fact of to-daythat secondary schools are insufficient in number and defec

tive in quality. -what can colleges do, under these adverse circumstances, to make themselves as useful as possible to the population, while awaiting a better organization of secondary education? Is it not their plain duty to maintain two schedules of requirements, one for the degree of Bachelor of Arts, the other for the degree of Bachelor of Science or Philosophy, the latter demanding much less preparatory study than the former? American colleges have been severely criticised for receiving students whose preparation was confessedly inferior to that required of candidates for the degree of Bachelor of Arts; but even the oldest and strongest of them have done this, and they have done it from a genuine desire to be serviceable to as large a proportion as possible of American youth. One lower grade of admission examinations, leading to a distinct degree, is an expedient concession to the feeble condition of secondary education throughout the country. That grade of secondary schools which cannot prepare pupils for the bachelor of arts course, but can prepare them for the bachelor of science course, is thus brought into serviceable connection with the colleges.

The same may be said of the slight and elementary examinations on which many universities admit to their professional schools. It is much to be regretted that, concerning the great majority of lawyers and physicians, the community has no security that they are men of any general cultivation or liberal training; but the fault or defect is at the secondary school stage. The universities palliate the acknowledged evil by admitting to a professional training which is in itself a strenuous education, men whose defective earlier education can never except in rarest instances be made good.

Another expedient measure for keeping colleges in touch with that large proportion of the American population which has no access to systematic secondary instruction is the admission to college, without any comprehensive examination, of persons who prove themselves able to pursue special subjects which are taught in college but not elsewhere, and who without expectation of any degree are willing to submit to all college tests of their industry and capacity. This measure was adopted at Harvard College so long ago as 1826, and was in force till 1848, when it was temporarily abandoned, to be taken up again in 1873. It is an arrangement