judgment of that time, the high school was an institution of so great expense and so limited service that only the largest and wealthiest towns ought to be required to maintain it. When the Legislature in 1891 ordered that every town should be required to provide its properly qualified children with free high school tuition, this meant that, in the popular judgment of that time, high school education was of so great and general value that, notwithstanding its expense, no child ought to be denied free access to it. In short, our people are doing far more for education to-day than in 1824, and yet they are doing it more easily. The voice of the grumbler, I suppose, will never cease, but it is less often heard to-day than then. Here and there, indeed, we see a town that is pitifully burdened, paying double or quadruple the school tax of its wealthier neighbors and yet powerless to command the schooling it ought to have. Such unevenness, whether of burdens or of results, is regrettable; the State does something to reduce it and should do more. Still the inequalities are not what they once were under the vicious district school system. It may be safely said that, whatever defects of taxation need to be remedied, the people as a whole are not excessively taxed.

Not only are there ample reasons, in theory, why the public should value and support the high school, but there are ample evidences in fact that these reasons are mighty with the public. Consider for a moment the rise of the high school and its present remarkable hold on the loyalty of the people. Our educational history shows in the spirit of the people the golden era, the dark ages and the renaissance, the golden age in the beginning, the renaissance in our own time and the dark ages between. There was the action of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay in 1647, ordering that towns of 100 families should each maintain a grammar school, that is, a college fitting school. It was Latin grammar and Greek, not English, that it taught. English grammar, as we understand it, was hardly known. It is a significant fact that the golden age of English literature was a grammarless age; the art flourished, the science slept. In 1677, Plymouth Colony said that towns of 50 families may, and towns of 70 families must, keep a grammar school. The next important legislation was in 1789. People had been living through a hard century. It was becoming more and more trying for the towns to comply with the law. Many of them had ceased to do so. Accordingly the General Court relaxed the grammar school law of 1674. It ordered that thereafter towns not of 100 families but of 200 should main

tain a grammar school. Under the old law 230 towns were required to maintain such a school; under the new more than 100 towns were released from this requirement.

But the General Court of 1789 unwittingly gave another damaging blow to the grammar schools. It unfortunately established the school district system. Under this system the school district, not the town, became the educational unit. Not unfrequently a town was broken up into twenty or thirty such districts. As a result district spirit rose; town spirit, already feeble, fell to greater depths, and with this fall went a further decline in the grammar school, which was a town and not a district institution. In other words, the several districts absorbed the educational energy of the people, what there was of it, and the town, as a town, was left educationally dry and barren. In such a desert no grammar school could thrive. It was this decline in town spirit, this dying out of the grammar school, that led to the springing up of academies and private schools on every hand. Towns might grow cold about high grade schooling, but there were spirited families enough to insist, whatever the sacrifice, on such schooling for their children. The year 1824 saw low water mark in our educational history. There were 172 towns that should have been supporting grammar schools under the law of 1789. Very few of them, however, were doing so. Accordingly, the Legislature exempted all towns under 5,000 inhabitants from maintaining them. That is to say, it exempted 165 of those 172 towns, - all of them but 7. It was no longer only 100 families in the town, as in 1647, no longer 200 families, as in 1789, but practically 1,000 families, that created the obligation to maintain a grammar school. Thus the grammar school was nearly extinguished and its very name began to fade in oblivion. The altar fires of high ideals, however, were kept alive in the academies. It was the very success of these academies that, in a way, checked their growth and led, with some notable exceptions, to their reduced importance or their demise. It was largely because of them that the demand for free secondary instruction revived. It became a burning question everywhere, "Why should not the children of all the people enjoy advantages equal to those of the favored few?"

The reaction from the legislation of 1824 came quick and sharp. In 1826 the Legislature ordered that towns of 4,000 people should maintain a high school of the first grade; towns of 500 families, a high school of the second grade. Here was a partial return to the policy of the fathers, the beginning of educational repentance. The chief original difference between the two grades was that the first taught Latin and Greek while the second did not; the

first connected with the colleges in the traditional way, the second ignored the colleges and was ignored by them. And now for some years the policy of the State was singularly vacillating. There was a locking of horns between the progressive party and the conservative. The law of 1826 had been in force but a short time when the requirement of a second grade high school in the case of towns with 500 families was repealed; in 1836 it was restored; in 1840 it was practically repealed again; and in 1848 it was restored again, this time to stay until another advance became possible. So we see that it took just twenty-two years to clinch the legislation of 1826.

For many years after 1826 the high school outlook was far from encouraging. The law was explicit enough, but towns consulted their pleasure about obeying it. In 1838, for instance, out of 43 towns required to maintain high schools only 14 were doing so. But the upward movement, long delayed, began at last. The missionaries of the movement were Horace Mann and his fellowworkers. In 1852 there were 64 high schools; in 1866, 156; in 1876, 216; in 1886, 229; to-day there are 261.

In 1891 the State took a step which placed it, for the first time, in advance of the policy of the founders. It ordered that free high school tuition thereafter should be the legal right of every properly qualified child in the Commonwealth. Every town, without exception, must furnish it either in its own high school or in that of a neighbor. Other States have gone beyond Massachusetts in making the college or university a part of the public school system, but Massachusetts was the first State in the Union, if not the first in the world, to make it compulsory on all its towns to provide free high school instruction. Such compulsion bore with hardship, of course, on many small and feeble towns. Hence the policy in such cases of State reimbursement of high school tuition payments.

III. AN EFFICIENT SYSTEM OF SCHOOLS FOR AN AMERICAN

COMMONWEALTH

[From 2d An. Rept. Iowa State Bd. of Educ., 1911-1912, p. 57.]

Everywhere this question is being asked: "What is an efficient system of schools for an American commonwealth?" As has been well said, this is a problem of the entire country and necessarily it is one in relation to which all other questions of the Board must be viewed.

The purpose of this paper is to present certain recommendations in an effort to be helpful toward the solution of some of these problems. With this end in view, we desire to state, first, as we see them, a few of the fundamental and essential qualifications which stand out in a right system of schools.

1. The schools of Iowa, from the elementary grades to the University, should each be a part of a consistent system, coöperating in a general plan.

2. The elementary schools are to-day the universal agency of the state to give to every boy and girl the elements of a simple and thorough training. We must look to these schools to continue in this function and to pledge themselves to greater simplicity, sincerity and thoroughness.

3. As life in Iowa becomes more diverse, we must provide not only for the general elementary education of the great mass of youth, but we must provide also the means by which each individual may become an effective economic unit. In other words, the vocational school must become almost as universal as the elementary school.

4. The three institutions of higher learning in Iowa must train almost wholly for a limited group of professions, no matter what system of school exists. It is in the interests of society to get its professional men and women at this high line; and society, in our judgment, will continue to hold high the conditions for admission to the professions.

There are in Iowa 677,000 boys and girls of school age. Sixty thousand of these are in the high schools of the state. Less than 7,000 of these are in the three institutions of higher learning. How is Iowa to make each of the 677,000 an effective economic unit as well as an intelligent member of a self-governing democracy? Since the days of the Greek Republic the task has been tried and we believe that no intelligent man to-day is ready to dogmatize upon it. We must all do some straight thinking, and, working together, proceed slowly, grasping the problem as a whole.

Experience indicates that there must be in every strong community not only a high school for those looking toward professional life, but also a vocational school for those looking toward business and the trades. Both of these must articulate with the elementary schools. No rigid lines may to-day be drawn between the high school and the vocational school; and all of these schools, in the very nature of the case, must be local. Further, these schools must give the great mass of young citizens thinking ability, a right conception of civic duty, and a vocational start at an age not to exceed eighteen. It is clearly hopeless to look to the

higher institutions of learning as a training place for the great mass of men and women. The problem is overwhelming in its significance.

IV. ARE THE TWO FUNCTIONS AT PRESENT FULFILLED BY THE HIGH SCHOOL COMPATIBLE?

[From Fifth Annual Report of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1910, pp. 63–66.]

The American high school is seeking to fulfil two distinct functions: (1) the preparation of the great mass of students for citizenship in a democracy; (2) the preparation of a minority -perhaps 5 per cent for college. The evidence which has been referred to would go far to show that this last object is but poorly attained. The easiest way out of the difficulty would be to conclude that this outcome condemns the double effort. This has been repeatedly urged. The high school, it has been said, having essayed two tasks, falls between them: it may, by concentration on one group of studies, prepare a boy for a practical career; or it may, by concentration on a limited range of academic tasks, prepare a boy for college; but, it is urged, experience proves that it cannot do both, so long, of course, as the two do not more nearly coincide.

I wish, in contradistinction to this view, to express my firm conviction that both these objects can be compassed consistently by the same secondary school, and that, furthermore, the same methods which make for efficiency in the preparation of boys and girls for college will also make for efficiency in the training of boys and girls for their vocations. If, indeed, both high school and college are vitally related to social conditions and needs, it cannot be otherwise. Only if one of the two is an artificial structure, answering no deep or organic purpose, can the program which it sets up be out of relation with the activities pursued by the other. Assuredly this is not the case. Both high school and college subserve a single purpose: the preparation of the American boy for the opportunities and responsibilities of the type of civilization which as a nation we are endeavoring to establish. Not all can leave the school-house at the same moment in order to take their places outside its walls. But the conception is nevertheless continuous; and those who stay longer under academic influences are not for that reason being equipped to take part in a fundamentally different life. The points in which careers differ are less fundamental than those in which they agree, and just this fun