PASSING FROM PREPARATORY SCHOOL TO COLLEGE

Between the college and the preparatory school, modern educational methods have driven a wedge that has disrupted the continuity of the normal intellectual development of the student. The varying specific needs of individual secondary schools and colleges have necessitated the establishment of standardized means of judging entrants. Unfortunately this blanket characterization is neither sufficiently elastic or authentic to be considered a reliable criterion. The result of this practice has been that the preparatory school has degenerated into a few years of intense cramming for College Entrance Board Examinations while the college is left to all in the deficiencies that have resulted from inadequacies in preparation.

There are at least three major factors which tend to emphasize the distance between school and college. The first of these is the sacrifice of sound education to cramming for entrance examinations. The college must have some way of judging its candidates, and this way has resolved itself into the College Entrance Board Examinations. The secondary school must either follow the dictates of preparation set by these tests or else fail to fulfill its raison d' etre of getting men into college. All of this means that more emphasis must be put on getting men into college regardless of keeping them there. The remarks of Dean Hanford elsewhere in today's CRIMSON indicate that it is not the results of the College Boards but the record in the Scholastic Aptitude Tests and the school record that give the best indication of the student's abilities. The obvious inference is that cramming for entrance results in nothing more than catapulting the man into college without any consideration for his equilibrium after he has arrived.

Dean Hanford further points out that examinations are necessary in spite of the admitted faults of the system. It is true that there must be some standard criterion, but it does not follow that it must be so arranged as to abnegate the background for the mere consideration of preliminary requirements. If these examinations are to mean anything, they must require a thorough foundation; and a passing mark must be an indication not of a strenuous, last minute effort, but an expression of a well-grounded, fundamental education.

The second factor is the inadequacy of school preparation in essentially elementary subjects. Languages, to take the outstanding example, are, above all branches of learning, peculiarly adaptable to secondary school teaching methods. If a student is ever to learn a foreign tongue, he most certainly should do so when he is under the individual supervision and painstaking care of a secondary school teacher. Languages in colleges are only well taught in the most advanced stages for the obvious reason that there is neither the time nor the money to provide adequate instruction in this field. A clear example of the futility of the present system can be seen in such courses as French 2 and German A.

Nor is it desirable that elementary subjects should be taught in colleges by preparatory school methods. The advance from secondary school to college should be marked by a differentiation in teaching methods. First year students should be prepared to supplement the background rather than mark time in distinctly unpleasant and demoralizing courses such as the present elementary language courses that colleges offer. The preparatory school is designed to provide the fundamentals of education while the college should be free to build its thought-stimulating instruction upon this foundation.

The third major factor has to do with the college. The tendency has been to submit the Freshman class to the futile efforts of the poorest instructors in the college faculty. An effort is being made to relieve this situation and the proposal is to improve the quality of the instruction and at the same time draw the Freshman advisers from those teachers with whom the students have immediate contact. Such a change would be highly advisable in view of the present system by which a student coming from a good preparatory school is submitted to men of distinctly inferior ability to those who taught him before coming to college. The usual conception of a college education as an intellectual stimulus is completely shattered by this drab practice. It is probably true that the man just out of secondary school is not sufficiently mature to cope with instruction as it is presented to the upper classes; but it is true that upon entering college he must be made to realize the change in educational atmosphere that college presents.

This problem finally resolves itself into the fact that there is not sufficient material cooperation between the college and the preparatory school. There are several organizations such as the Milton Secondary Education Board that are seeking for a solution of this problem, but they are hampered on all sides by the fact that they represent only one of the three elements affecting the situation. To reach any definite and beneficial solution they must join hands with the colleges and the Board of Entrance Examiners. Until all three act at once and in accord, it is hopeless to expect any improvement, for the interrelation that exists among three forces makes it impossible for one to move without the other. It is not within the ability of the CRIMSON to discuss the relative merits of various plans for the solution of this problem, but it can point out that the present state of affairs needs immediate attention. Relief can only come from those sources that are responsible for the present state of affairs. It remains for them to face the problem squarely.

The actors in the scrubwomen drama whose parts range all the way from the "heavy" in quest of the "good" to the song and dance performers, of whom there are only too few, are becoming more and more involved in the plot. Can the co-authors straighten out the parts and the cues? The audience is getting ped and in case the wrong man gets shot, is there a doctor in the house.