ANSWERING AN OLD QUESTION

The periodic attack upon the methods of high school and college training has been made, this time by Henry W. Holmes in the Atlantic Monthly for October. His article, called. "Chaos or Cosmos in American Education", praises Harvard's method of study--the concentration and distribution scheme that bewails with vehemence the absence of this same system in the junior high and preparatory schools.

Mr. Holmes would have the student incessantly pursue a definite field of concentration from the time he enters a junior high school until the day of his graduation. Some might be able to boast of a little precocity, but rare indeed is the lad who can, or who would be willing to, divine his concentrated study, his profession, or even his prospective college, on the morning that he enters a junior high school. And still more ephemeral is the high school teacher profound enough to advise the child what life-course he should follow.

In seeking an undistorted continuation of study from junior high school through college, the proposal advocates the discarding of several preparatory courses. A narrower, more limited field of study in the training school is Mr. Holmes's judgement. This is certainly the reverse of a liberal education. In fact it is no direct release from the musty problem of unity between preparatory school and college. Mr. Holmes destroys his own plan when he expresses the college's lack of confidence in elementary training by requiring the freshman to study English composition, a course which has been demanded of him from the day he learned to read. It is ridiculous to expect the high school to reach such a polity that it could train a high school student in the work of a college upperclassman.

Only in the closing paragraphs does the article seem reasonable. It justly attributes the unparalleled success of the German preparatory schools to the masterly training of their instructors. That is the place for American educational reform as long as it must be discussed. Why doesn't Mr. Holmes bemoan the existing practice of allowing ordinary normal school graduates to guide the child in the early formative years of his life? Why does it cry that the problem lies in the students' race for graduation units, when that is an extremely minor issue? Why should a child, who would rather be playing ball than attending class, be faced with the serious problem of selecting his vocation or field of concentration? The proposition is sufficiently gross in his riper years. It would be well for the reformers to save the time of creating new answers to an old question by repeating this time-worn solution--raise the standards of the teachers in order to elevate the pupils.