and supplement each other instead of duplicating and controverting each other."

Cooley's Plan. Mr. Edwin G. Cooley, ex-superintendent of schools of Chicago, has devised a system of vocational training which he is endeavoring to have adopted in Illinois. The plan is similar to Wisconsin's and is undoubtedly modeled in certain respects after the German system of continuation schools. It is urged that the existing system of public schools cannot adequately provide vocational training and a separate system of continuation or vocational schools is recommended. The vocational schools are not to be controlled by the ordinary boards of education but by local boards of vocational training. A special tax for the purpose of maintaining vocational schools is advocated. "Separate schools are necessary whose equipment, corps of teachers, and boards of administration must be in the closest possible relation to the occupations. In such schools the applications of general education to vocational work can be made only by men who know the vocations." The vocational schools are not intended to be substitutes for the present forms of schools but merely to supplement their work. Mr. Cooley calls attention to the necessity for training for social service and citizenship as well as for a vocation. But, it may be asked, is it not to be expected that special vocational schools controlled by separate boards and taught by special teachers will undervalue all kinds of training except the purely vocational? Is there not great danger that such an isolated system directed by specialist teachers will lead to narrow specialization in purely vocational matters?

Friends of the Wisconsin system and of Cooley's plan insist, however, that sooner or later the separate system

of administration will prevail. "In Europe the schoolmen fought this system bitterly for years, but after they had demonstrated their utter inability to keep the aims of specialized vocational training from the aims of general academic training the systems were gradually but surely divorced and industrial education was put under the control of separate boards." Germany's experience is, however, not necessarily conclusive for democratic America. It might not be amiss to suggest a possible compromise. The continuation schools might be left under the control of the public school authorities, but special advisory boards, consisting of employers and employees, might be appointed. Any movement tending to break the public school system into specially controlled units should be very carefully scrutinized by the schoolmen and the wage earners of the nation.

PART II

THE MORE INTIMATE SPECIALIZED RELATIONSHIPS OF HIGH SCHOOL WORK

CHAPTER VIII

SOCIALIZED HIGH SCHOOL CURRICULUMS AND COURSES OF STUDY

COLIN A. SCOTT, PH.D.

HEAD OF DEPARTMENT OF PSYCHOLOGY, BOSTON NORMAL SCHOOL

Historical Beginnings.-There is perhaps nothing that characterizes the high school of the present day more than the way in which it is responding to wide-spread social influences of various kinds. In this respect it. shows its vitality and proclaims the fact that although descended from the Renaissance and therefore old enough in tradition to run the danger of becoming stiff, it still retains the original spirit of reconstruction which characterized its inception at that time. Then the new studies were the classics and all that went with them a new appreciation for the beauty and joy of life, for the felicities of language and for the free democratic life of Greece and Rome. These were life values that in the fifteenth century could not be approached directly. They were offensive to the piety of the middle age and even to its art and government. For although there was

beautiful art in the middle age it had become narrow because confined too closely to religious needs. There was also government approaching in some favored spots to the democratic, but freedom was, on the whole, an exception. And there was no native literature whatever. The mind of the time took the best and most practical way of approaching these ideas. It unconsciously turned to the days when they flourished and to the monuments they had left behind. It absorbed the spirit of these times not in order to venerate it at a distance, but in order to put that spirit into the life of every day.

We have been at work at this ever since, but as time has gone on the logical march of events has brought us to a place where the classics can no longer play the rôle for which they were instituted. We have a literature, we have the solid beginnings of a free government, we have a new art, new sciences, and new industries. We no longer need the indirect approach. We are in a position to attack life directly.

Social Pressure on the High School.-Social pressure makes this felt in the high school. The young people that fill our classrooms are bent upon living. It is here and now for them. Their parents behind them and the community as a whole are equally convinced. What can the high school do to prepare for a life or to give an opportunity itself for living that shall raise the standard of life and improve the means for gratifying it on the part of those who attend? This is the question at the bottom of the social pressure on the high school of to-day.

At the present stage "courses of study" are the objective points. It is assumed that "courses of study" form the essential features of a high school and that to

change these would be to change all. It is, I think, also generally assumed that a course of study is something made by a teacher or by one set over him and that it represents a certain amount of knowledge regarded as valuable for some reason by the teacher or superintendent. It is not expected, in most of the high schools, to be regarded as valuable by the pupils before they begin. It is sometimes not regarded as valuable after they get through. It is not meant by this that such a course of study need be "hard and fast." It may be changed from year to year. It may be changed in some details within. the year itself. Such changes, I think, represent what is called "elasticity." The essential feature is that the elastic part as well as the rest of the course is made by the teacher or his superior in office.

This idea of the course of study is certainly a timehonored one. It was in existence in the teaching institutions of the middle ages. The universities of that time, which usually had a contingent of boys as young as ten, regarded truth as something authoritatively handed down. The root and kernel of their effort was to prepare the pupil for the next world or to prepare him to prepare others for that period of his life. The Renaissance teachers also dealt through the classics with another life and another world, although this time in the past and upon the earth.

Superior Authority and the Course of Study. Such courses of study must necessarily be made and engineered by the force of superior authority. The pupil must be instructed rather than educated. There is not enough. in his current daily life, in the most of cases at least, to form proliferating areas, capable of growing by their own initiative. In the case of the theologically dominated