exploitation of this waiting work has begun. The people, the patrons, the taxpayers, the citizens have caught the spirit of looking for results. The administrators of high schools, superintendents, principals, supervisors, and teachers are doing genuine curriculum thinking. These curriculum variations, adapted to student groups classified with reference to social and individual needs, are as naturally put in operation to-day as they were ignored twenty-five years ago. We accept the fact that the high school is a socializing institution. High school supervision, likewise, is being recognized as a problem itself which cannot be dismissed nor solved merely by the importation into the high school of principles discovered to apply elsewhere. With this is coming among high school teachers the professional spirit and consciousness which have been until recently so conspicuous by their absence. Standards are being recognized for high school teaching, and certification laws in most States look definitely toward a long-desired minimum standard for admittance into the high school teaching profession. Parallel with these encouraging tendencies has come the institutional recognition of the field of secondary education by colleges and universities. Secondary education has itself become a department of study in these higher curriculums with an actual model high school as its laboratory. It constitutes a field for research where one may hope soon to be able to call in the services of experts and to have available results of scientific investigations.

Surveys of State conditions for high school teaching show concrete problems in bewildering numbers and varieties, both administrative and pedagogical. The sign of progress is just this fact-that we can survey,

name, and work definitely toward the ultimate solution of these problems. Every State is in some serious way devising a method and embedding it in statute for providing free high school education for all its boys and girls. State recognition of its own obligation in the matter of high school education is of profound significance. Equally so is the modern relation of colleges and universities to high schools. Entrance requirements are gradually coming to have a different educational meaning. Instead of externally imposed informational tests of arbitrarily chosen subject-matter, they now are looked upon as co-operative devices which may safely insure a reasonable standard of proficiency on the part of the graduating high school student, regardless of the subject-matter which was used to bring about this proficiency. College inspection of high schools has accordingly changed its character where it existed before and become a co-operative administrative and supervisory work of making one educational institution more successfully articulate with another. Where entrance examinations are still in operation they have changed their character correspondingly.

Era for the Differentiation of Types of High Schools. -With this impetus to become self-orienting, the American high schools have forsaken the earlier ideal of uniformity and conformity to a standard type academically conceived for them by outsiders. Hundreds of high schools now have their own individuality, as, for different reasons, Grand Rapids, Louisville, or Richmond, Ind., to say nothing of the industrial and agricultural and commercial variations of the type. An almost analogous issue to that of separate kinds of high schools is that of the differentiation and multiplication of cur

riculums within the single high school itself. With these artistic, domestic, and otherwise vocational colorings for our different curriculums, or high school plants, as the case may be, have come inevitably the related human obligations. We are face to face with these personal problems of vocational guidance and the somewhat less frequently formulated but probably more fundamental one of avocational guidance. Related in turn to these problems, which must find expression finally through some systematic and approved method of high school administration, comes the question of how, in defined procedure, one is to set about moral instruction and training which will enable high school students to possess and obey a twentieth-century moral conscience.

In short, the question of secondary education is uniquely one of how most adequately to formulate a working conception of the high school organization, how to extend its reach to all our adolescents, and how to refine our procedure in accordance with such ultimate purposes. The prime issue is shifting from the literal but important secondary question of extension over four years or five or six years, including upper grades, or six, including first two years of college; and shifting from the impersonal and more or less superficial problem of how to direct the academic procedure of imparting some choice bits of information from stores precious by virtue of mellowness of age to that of training the students' powers as social usage and our common life demand. High school education, however it may differ from other grades of education, is not, in our civilization, primarily a luxury, academic or otherwise. It is in the broad social sense a necessity. Fortunately, it at

length burdens the community conscience and has become the measure of our educational democracy.

Plan of the Book.-The authors of the following pages, working under the inspiriting conviction that our American high school is thus surely and rapidly becoming conscious of its mission, have set forth, in as clear and simple fashion as possible, instances and theories of high school activities in this widening field of social usefulness and influence. This volume represents an attempt to make it easier to think naturally of the high school as the Temple of our Democracy, with its halls an art museum (Chapter XXVIII); its debating teams and supporting audiences real though miniature forums (Chapter XIX); its playgrounds and athletic fields ethical as well as hygienic laboratories (Chapters XVII and XXVII); its classrooms meetings where co-operative investigations, live discussions, and the application of knowledge to living are carried on as a matter of course (Chapters VIII, IX, X, and XI); and its student organizations the wholesome expression of the best organized student sentiment (Chapters XVI, XVII, and XVIII). That this is not a dream the reader has but to study, with his normal imagination alert, the suggestions and doctrines which are contained in the following chapters.

"High School Education," the forerunner of the present volume, limited its field to the special pedagogies of all the subjects generally offered in the modern high school programme of studies. Only those administrative and supervisory problems involved in such distinctly pedagogical questions received separate chapter

treatment.

1 By Charles Hughes Johnston and others. Scribners, 1912.

There is an even more urgent need for a co-operative attempt by specialists to interpret the modern American high school in its broad social setting.

This seemed to require specific treatments differentiated somewhat as the titles of the thirty chapters of this book indicate. The first few chapters, Part I, develop broadly the institutional relationships of the high school, and the next division of chapters, Part II, is concerned with certain more "particularized" relationships. The succeeding third set of chapters, Part III, treats of certain definite internal expressions of the social nature and socializing function of the high school. The concluding chapters, Part IV, somewhat heterogeneous, unavoidably, deal with those clear problems of the high school which, although genuine enough and well recognized by practical schoolmen, nevertheless present difficulties in the matter of logical chapter sequence.

This first chapter, Introduction, and the second chapter, Part I, establish the new setting for the modern high school and suggest promising fields for scientific exploration and systematic experimentation. Chapter III goes into the whole interesting field of different State movements looking toward providing without exception, by ingenious systems of taxation, high school opportunity under favorable and even encouraging conditions for all, and Chapter IV treats of the "scientific management" of high schools as "big business" enterprises. Chapters V, VI, and VII specify existing and desirable modes of articulation of our idealized high school with other fundamental agencies of civilization. Part II contains more specialized treatments of the plans for more delicate relationships which the high school must foster and develop. Chapters VIII, IX,