VI. REORGANIZATION OF ELEMENTARY EDUCATION

[From Report of the Committee of the National Education Association on Economy of Time in Education. Bulletin No. 38, 1913, United States Bureau of Education, pp. 23-25.]

(b) ELEMENTARY EDUCATION SHOULD END WITH THE TWELFTH YEAR

When we pass to a consideration of that social class which stands at the opposite extreme of those who go to college, we find many grounds that suggest the wisdom of completing the elementary school at the close of six years of instruction.

In the first place, such expert testimony as we have indicates the presence of considerable waste of time and energy in the elementary school. There is a very widespread belief among school men that the fundamental facts, habits, attitudes, and ideals demanded by the general needs of our civilization can be fixed in the nervous system of the child in six school years, particularly if the less useful parts of the course of study are eliminated and more efficient methods are introduced.

In the second place, the compulsory-education law under our present organization gives society control of the child only long enough to guarantee the ablest child eight years of general training. It cannot guarantee him the additional years of vocational education required to make him an efficient, self-supporting, and self-reliant citizen. To shorten the elementary school to six years without impairing its efficiency is to guarantee every child who does not go to the high school some vocational education. The need to guarantee some vocational education to the retarded pupils is so important that many careful students of social conditions are ready to say that the compulsory school age must be extended to 16 years, so as to carry the least able elementary school children, who now get no further than the fourth, fifth, or sixth school year, through one, two, or three years of vocational education.

In the third place, the six-year articulation is regarded not only as a better ending point for the general elementary studies, but as a better beginning point for the secondary studies. There are certain inner physiological changes that usher in adolescence that now occur at about the time when the average child makes the transition from elementary to secondary school. The strain of outer and inner conditions are more or less coincident. Therefore,

the resulting school mortality is likely to be larger than it ought to be; or school life is continued at a larger physical and nervous cost than ought to be the case. It would be a distinct gain for a child to get fairly well started and adjusted to his new school life, vocational or secondary, before the full weight of physiological and nervous changes are thrust upon him. The two adjustments can be better cared for in series than together.

Again, it is the opinion of schoolmasters in general that, for those who have the peculiar mentality to go on to the ordinary academic high school, it is decidedly more profitable to begin the foreign languages at 12 than at 14 years of age. The same advantage may be had in other subjects where a large acquisition of facts is necessary to successful work.

In the case of those children who are more given to action than to abstraction, it is equally profitable to begin to center their intellectual work about an active vocation early. To begin vocational education, with its practical life-career appeal, at 12 rather than at 14 is to save many children from truancy and disinterest. It will extend their school life so that they will not be too early driven into unprofitable and futureless employment. They will still take up much general training parallel with and motivated by their broad study of vocational work.

Here again the practicality of a reorganized elementary school period finds adequate sanction in experience. We have only to turn to the concrete efforts in this direction that have already been made by American schoolmen. Such experiments as have been tried in American school systems under practical operating conditions, prove with certainty that the elementary school may be reduced to seven years; and that there is an almost equally strong probability that an elementary school of six years would be fully as efficient. Where the seven-year school has been tried, the school officials very generally anticipate a six-year plan. The organization of junior high schools out of the two upper grammar-grades and the first-year high-school class is a distinctly successful move in the same direction. Here the high school begins to reach down into the grammar school. The establishment of separate departmental schools in the elementary system, consisting of the two upper elementary years and given over to manual activities, is the vocational movement beginning to claim its own from the elementary school system. All sorts of successful experimentation tending to restrict the general elementary curriculum to six years give at least tentative, fragmentary approval to the practicality of the plan suggested.

CHAPTER XIII

SECONDARY EDUCATION

The Focus of Educational Control. The most salient feature of American social-educational development of the two decades connecting the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is to be found in the public secondary school. From causes that lie deep in the nature of our political and economic institutions the high school, besides being widely established, is undergoing a most rapid evolution. This evolution is producing differentiated types of schools, the survival of which will determine some of the dominant characteristics of the educational system. The arguments and data relating to secondary education brought together in this chapter contain some evidence of the problems that must yet be met before the public high school is oriented in the educational organization.

I. THE STATUS OF THE PUBLIC HIGH SCHOOL IN THE

AMERICAN SCHOOL SYSTEM

Coming at this stage in the development of American public secondary education, the following case is worthy of consideration. It presents further evidence of the fact that it was the design of the founders of our American states to include a complete system of education within the opportunity of all. The case itself presents no really new feature, but is included here because it reaffirms in unmistakable terms a fundamental doctrine of the American school system. [Board of Education of the City of Lawrence v. Dick et al. Supreme Court of Kansas. December 1. 1904. 78 Pacific, 812.]

The case arose from action by Harry Dick and others against the Board of Education of the City of Lawrence, to test the constitu

tionality of that part of section 1, chapter 224, page 326, of the Laws of 1899 (section 6305, General Statutes, 1901), authorizing cities of the second class to maintain high schools in whole or in part by collecting a tuition fee from each pupil.

The judgment for the plaintiffs rendered in the district court of Douglass County was affirmed. The decision of Justice Green is thought to deserve careful reading by all those interested in the development and the protection of the American free public school system, including all grades of instruction from the lowest to the highest.

The plaintiffs, for themselves and 400 others similarly situated, brought this action to restrain the board of education of the city of Lawrence, a city of the second class, from enforcing one of its resolutions previously adopted, authorizing the superintendent of its city schools to expel from the high school all resident pupils who refused to pay a tuition fee of $2.50 per term. The petition alleges that the plaintiffs are residents and taxpayers of the city of Lawrence, and the parents of the children between the ages of 6 and 20 years; that the board of education had previously passed a resolution to the effect that all pupils attending such school should be required to pay a tuition fee of $2.50 per term, and had authorized the superintendent of schools of the city to expel from such school all children then attending who refused to pay such tuition fee on or before a certain day therein named. Upon the application of the plaintiffs a temporary restraining order prohibiting said board from enforcing the conditions of the resolution was allowed, and finally made permanent. It was held generally that the board of education had no power to impose a tuition fee upon the resident pupils as a condition precedent to attending such school. The question involved is, has the Legislature of the state of Kansas power to authorize the board of education of cities of the second class to impose a tuition fee upon resident pupils attending the high school? If this question is answered in the affirmative, it must be held that the board acted with authority. The Legislature attempts to confer such authority upon the board of education of the cities of the second class within the state by the enactment of section 6305, Gen. St., 1901. This section reads:

The board of education shall have power to elect their own officers, except the treasurer; to make their own rules and regulations, subject to the provisions of this article; to organize and maintain a system of graded schools; to establish a high school whenever in their opinion the educational interests of the city demand; and to exercise the sole control over the schools and school property of the city; and maintain such high school, in whole or

Z

in part, by demanding, collecting, and receiving a tuition fee for and from each and every scholar or pupil attending such high school." Plaintiffs contend that the common schools of Kansas are free schools, and that this section, in so far as it attempts to confer power upon the board of education of cities of the second class to impose a tuition fee upon pupils attending such schools, contravenes section 2, art. 6, of the Constitution of Kansas, and is void. The constitutional provision invoked reads: "The Legislature shall encourage the promotion of intellectual, moral, scientific, and agricultural improvement by establishing a uniform system of common schools, and schools of a higher grade, embracing normal, preparatory, collegiate, and university departments."

The one great hope of the republic lies in the intelligence and morality of the individual citizen. To encourage, promote, and inculcate intelligence and morality large bodies of land were reserved by the government from the public domain to many of the states upon their admission into the Union, to be used for a permanent school fund. Section 34 of our organic act provides that when the lands in the said territory shall be surveyed under the direction of the government of the United States, preparatory to bringing the same into market, sections numbered sixteen and thirty-six in each township in said territory shall be, and the same are hereby, reserved for the purpose of being applied to schools in said territory and in the states and territories hereafter to be erected out of the same."

Recognizing the great need of popular education, the framers of our Constitution, in addition to the provisions hereinbefore quoted making it compulsory upon the Legislature to establish a uniform system of common schools, inserted section 3, art. 6, which reads: "The proceeds of all lands that have been or may be granted by the United States, for the support of schools, and the five hundred thousand acres of land granted to the new states, under an act of Congress distributing the proceeds of public lands among the several States of the Union, approved September 4, A.D. 1841, and all estates of persons dying without heir or will, and such per cent as may be granted by Congress, on the sale of lands in this state, shall be the common property of the state shall be a perpetual school fund, which shall not be diminished, but the interest of which, together with all the rents of the lands, and such other means as the Legislature may provide, by tax or otherwise, shall be inviolably appropriate to the support of the common schools." Ample provisions are found elsewhere for the annual distribution of this fund to the several county treasurers of the state, to be used in the support of the common schools. In addition to the fund