High School.

Hon. F. A. Hill, secretary of the State Board of Education, spoke last evening in Sever 11. The subject of the lecture was "What is a High School?"

Mr. Hill began by tracing briefly the history of the public schools in the state. In 1647, he said, the colony of Massachusetts Bay decreed that towns of 100 families should maintain a grammar school. This early grammar school was not what we today would understand by a grammar school. It was a preparatory school for college, in which greater attention was given to the study of Latin and Greek grammar than that of English. The Plymouth Colony in the same year decreed that every town which contained fifty families must support a public school.

In 1789 the condition of the schools was bad, and, as it was found to be exceedingly difficult for a small town to maintain a school of its own, a new legislation substituted two hundred families for the former one hundred. At this time over 200 towns in the state were supporting grammar schools, but this new regulation reduced this number to less than 100. In this year district schools first put in an appearance, and helped to lessen still further the interest taken by the small towns. The district schools absorbed all the educational energy of the commonwealth. Academies supported chiefly by the state, and large private schools sprang up and flourished in the last part of the eighteenth century, and have continued with little change almost down to our own day. These schools drew their students from all parts of the state, and absorbed still more of the educational interest.

The year 1824 saw the lowest tide in the history of the public schools of the towns. Of the one hundred and seventy-two towns required by law to maintain schools, scarcely one hundred were complying with the law. In this year the legislature determined to exempt all towns of less than 5,000 inhabitants from the educational law, and this released 162 of the 172 towns from their obligation. The academies now became all important and the grammar school was all but extinguished.

In a few years a decided reaction set in. In 1826 a new law was passed that decreed that every town of more than 4,000 inhabitants should support a first grade high school, and that all towns of more than 400 householders should support a second grade high school, the difference between these schools being that in the schools of the first grade Latin and Greek were taught, while in those of the second grade they were not. The law of 1826 is practically the law today, although the state legislature has since been very vacillating.

Mr. Hill then dwelt for a time upon the more technical of the two high schools, and he ended by showing the apparent injustice of the system. For while the people of the large towns may obtain the best school education for their children, the parents in the smaller towns must be content with a secondary education. He stated that there were two feasible remedies for this objection: first, every parent or legal guardian should have a right to claim a first grade high school for their children; second, let there be but one statutory high school, with certain fixed standards, and let every town in the state be required to furnish the minimum elements of this high school.