SECONDARY SCHOOL PROGRAMMES-FRENCH AND

AMERICAN.

BY GEORGE W. BEAMAN.

THE general subject of American secondary school programmes has been of late years a most prolific one. What with the relative or particular importance of the mother-tongue, classical studies, history, modern languages, and, more recently, manual training, the educational essayist has been rather embarrassed by the multitude of the topics presented him. As the result of much discussion, contention, and wordy warfare, we have, however, today, certain secondary school programmes, generally speaking quite similar in their character, marking in a more or less defined manner the routes along which our boys are traveling on their respective journeys to college, to scientific school, or to practical business life. While there is to be noted a decided advance and improvement in pedagogical methods in our secondary schools within the last few decades, it yet remains true that no intelligent reader of the programmes, as exhibited in the catalogues of our leading endowed fitting schools, and public grammar and high schools, can fail to be struck by a certain lack of co-ordination, system, and, in most instances, by an apparent want of a genuine appreciation of the real demands that the present age makes upon modern secondary schools. Once outside the old fixed limits of the classics, there is to be observed much disagreement among the schools themselves, both as to the proper subjects to be included in the programme and the relative time to be devoted to the studies that are placed in the school curriculum. When comparison of these programmes with those of other countries is made, we have at once afforded us a most striking exemplification of how far we still are in this country from any well-defined consensus as to what the modern secondary school programme really should be. In view of the revolutionary period through which the schools have been passing during the past thirty years, this is perhaps hardly to be wondered at. The broadening of the college requirements for entrance, largely brought about by the demands of a public sentiment, no longer fully satisfied with purely mediæval curricula, has in itself served to call for many modifications of the secondary schools' programme. With Harvard and Johns Hopkins opening their doors to students unequipped with the traditional Greek, there has of course arisen a demand for preparation in other prerequisites which have necessarily been substituted for Greek. In response to the general outcry for them, the courses in modern languages, in the mother-tongue, history, and

particularly in science studies, have had to be greatly extended or recast. The many admirable scientific schools and colleges throughout the country have made demands for special preparation that have had to be met. Furthermore, it has come to pass that the college prerequisites in the old classical studies even have been very considerably increased. Altogether it may be stated that the demands made upon the preparatory schools to-day are probably at least twenty-five or thirty per cent in excess of the demands of twenty-five or thirty years ago. Coincident with this multiplication and extension of preparatory studies, there has arisen in our country a sentiment which to no inconsiderable extent has reduced the hours devoted to study. A few decades since a boy fitting for college with its limited requirements in Latin, Greek, and mathematics, spent six hours per diem in school, and, as a matter of course, expected to give two, three, or possibly more hours to study at home. Now, he spends four or five hours in the school-room; and the sight of a text-book under his arm as he idly saunters homeward excites comment in the community as to the severe mental strain to which school-children are nowadays subjected by rigorous masters.

The result of all this is a state of affairs to which President Eliot, of Harvard University, has recently invoked the serious attention of the American public.* He states that the average age of admission to Harvard University has been gradually rising for many years, and has now reached the extravagant age of eighteen years and ten months. He also notes that in view of the increased time required for the completion of his professional education, after leaving college, it follows that a man, thoroughly preparing himself for life, finds himself unprepared for self-support much before he is twenty-seven years old. This result is by no means peculiar to Harvard or to Harvard graduates, but holds true as to all colleges in the United States. Its remedy, in the opinion of President Eliot, is in both shortening and enriching our secondary school courses of study. As illustrating what other countries have succeeded in doing in this direction, he cites the school courses of France. The hours of recitation of these courses, less elaborate and difficult than those of Germany, are, he claims, so far as hours of recitation are concerned, substantially the same as those of this country; yet, under them, the French boy is better prepared for matriculation at seventeen years of age than ours are at nineteen. He therefore calls for a serious examination of the programmes of l'enseignement secondaire classique of France in comparison with the programmes of American preparatory

* A paper read before the Department of Superintendence of the National Educational Association at Washington, February 16, 1888, published in the Atlantic Monthly, August, 1888. Remarks before the Commercial Club, Providence, R. I., March, 1889.

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schools, as likely to yield results which can not but be conducive to educational progress in this country.

As might be expected from the eminence of its author, the paper of President Eliot has excited much interest in regard to the French secondary school programmes. Much comment has resulted both as to the facts and the conclusions arrived at. The facts represented in the address as to the age of matriculates in American colleges are only too patent. The defects of the programmes of the preparatory schools of this country are unfortunately equally patent. The great need of some readjustment of existing methods of our fitting schools and schools of grammar and even primary grades, for the benefit of boys preparing for modern collegiate, scientific, and university training, is so imperative that no friend of educational advance in this country can fail to welcome this valuable contribution to the literature of the subject given by the President of Harvard University. But, notwithstanding his admirable paper, and the comment which has followed, so far as one can judge from the literature of the controversy, no one has apparently made haste to follow President Eliot's advice and make any serious comparative examination of the French and American school programmes. On the contrary, there are indications that, with true American inconsequence, many persons are already either clamoring for the adoption of the French curricula forthwith, as a panacea for all our secondary school deficiencies, or, with great lack of knowledge and accurate information, are condemning them outright as a foreign growth quite unsuited to American soil. This is to be regretted; for assuredly the comparative study of the programmes of the two countries would give American school boards and American parents much information that should be known and accurately known. This examination is additionally desirable from the fact that, in his felicitous presentation of some characteristics of the lycée curriculum, Dr. Eliot seems to have omitted to note some of the more important features of the programmes that give them their strength, and has quite failed to point out how it happens that the French boy is really enabled to pass his examinations for the baccalauréat és lettres at the early age of seventeen years. It may also be said that the examination is likewise desirable for the reason that President Eliot has inadvertently made some statements as to the French courses of study that the official programmes hardly seem to warrant.

In the present paper the attempt will be made to present, in a somewhat more precise manner than has been undertaken by President Eliot, certain details of the curricula of not only the classical lycées, but also of the secondary special schools of France. In connection with this, the attempt will also be made to

exhibit, with equal precision, some facts as to comparative courses in vogue in typical preparatory schools of the United States. Following the suggestion of Dr. Eliot, particular reference will be made to the Public Grammar and Public Latin School of the city of Boston. To obtain the requisite data the writer has first tabulated the hours of recitation per week entering into the enseignement secondaire classique and the enseignement secondaire spécial of France. These tables have then been brought into comparison with similar tables, prepared on precisely the same plan, of the courses of study in both the classical and scientific departments of certain typical fitting schools in the United States. The hours of recitation having been made the unit of the tabulation, the tables thus exhibit the total number of recitations in every subject taught, each year, and for the entire course of every school subjected to this examination. From the resultant figures the percentage of each study to the whole course has been also derived. The data as to the French courses were collated from the latest official programmes of the schools, as prescribed by the order of January 22, 1885, for the classical lycées,* and by the order of August 10, 1886, for the secondary special schools. The data as to American schools were derived from information supplied by the head masters of the schools in question. The result of this tabulation has been to exhibit in full relief the curricula of both countries, and to bring into graphic view some very striking points of difference in the courses of study as carried out in the French and American schools, as well as to expose many singular differences of practice obtaining in our own schools. The large space that these tables would occupy precludes their publication in connection with this paper, but the methods of compilation are here mentioned, in order that such statements as may be made by the writer as to the details of the courses of instruction in both countries may be depended on as being as absolutely correct as a careful and conscientious tabulation can make them.

The programmes thus compared, at once exhibit two most important facts to which President Eliot has made no reference whatsoever, viz.: that if a boy in France is prepared for matriculation at seventeen years of age, instead of nineteen, as with us, it is due (1) to the fact that, between the ages of eight and seventeen, the French boy devotes more time to study than the American boy; and (2) to the further fact that, with his increased. amount of reading, the French lad has had eliminated from his preparatory course the serious study of subjects considered by the

Plan d'Études des Lycées-Programmes de l'Enseignement classique. Paris: Maison Delalain Frères.

+ Plan d'Études et Programmes de l'Enseignement secondaire spécial dans les Lycées et Colléges prescrit par Arêté du 10 Aout, 1886. Paris: Maison Delalain Frères.

French school authorities non-essential to that particular course, but which with us are still firmly intrenched in every preparatory school programme; in brief, that the results obtained under the French programmes, in both the classical and scientific preparatory schools, are due to honest hard work, persistently continued for a term of years on a well-defined plan, which is characterized by a complete disjunction of the courses that lead to college, from those that are intended for youth for whose anticipated career in life a knowledge of the classical languages is not deemed essential.

A comparative examination of the programmes of the Boston Latin School with the French lycée course brings out this excess of hours in the French school very prominently. The French boy, in his ten years' sojourn in the lycée, spends 8,560 hours in the recitation-room, while in the corresponding course in Boston* the recitation hours are 7,790 only. With a ten-per-cent excess in recitation hours, and a corresponding increase of study, it is evident that the two courses can not be considered "as substantially of the same strength." However much we might "enrich " our curricula by imitating French methods, it seems quite clear that we certainly could not, by this process, hope to "shorten" them any.

Turning to the relative assignment of time to the subjects taught in common by the two schools, there is to be noted also one other point where the statistics and Dr. Eliot are at variance. One searches in vain for that "preponderance" of time given to the French language in the lycées as compared with the instruction in the English language in the Boston Latin School. In fact, the "preponderance" is, on the contrary, altogether on the side of the Boston schools, where over twenty-eight per cent of the whole course is devoted to the mother-tongue, to only 20'8 per cent in the lycées. This is an interesting fact, which will doubtless be surprising to most readers. It is a prevalent opinion in the United States that in our schools too little time is devoted to the study of our own language. And lest it may be urged that this "preponderance" is offset by the nine hours' course per week in philosophy, given in the last year, where, President Eliot states, "French resumes almost exclusive possession of the programme," it may be said that, according to the official programme, this claim can not be legitimately made. The course of philosophy in question em

* The programme of the Boston Latin School, embracing six years of study, and that of the French lycées ten years, there have been prefixed to the tables of the Latin School -for purposes of comparison-the recitation hours of four years of the grammar-school courses preliminary to it. All references to the Latin School courses in this paper will, therefore, be understood as embracing the result of tabulation of ten years' school worknot that of the six years' course of the Latin School proper.