Читать книгу Introduction to the scientific study of education - Charles Hubbard Judd - Страница 25

Origin of the High School

Оглавление

Table of Contents

The foregoing statements extracted from the history of the elementary school may be supplemented by references to the history of the high school. The first schools of secondary grade in this country were patterned after the classical secondary schools of England. The Boston Latin School and the Hopkins Grammar School of New Haven are examples of early foundations of the kind in question. These schools were vestibules to the colleges, and the boys who attended them—for they were schools for boys—were looking forward to one of the learned professions, usually, in the early days, to the clergy.

The Latin school charged tuition, as do all the European secondary schools to-day. It was an exclusive school. It was not a part of the popular movement toward general education. In an important sense it was a vocational school and illustrates the general fact of history that higher schools always had a vocational motive back of their organization, whereas the people’s schools of elementary grade were at first always missionary enterprises intended to spread religious training rather than vocational training.

Parallel with the Latin school and growing out of an entirely different motive was another institution which was very much more genuinely American in its character. This was the academy. The academy was often a boarding school to which boys and girls alike went for an extension of their education. Later the village in which the academy was situated took it over or made arrangements to pay for all the pupils, and it became a free academy.

There were some other experiments in the extension of school opportunities. In New England, the oldest and economically most forward section of the country, a ninth grade was added to the elementary school. There are to-day in Maine, and to some extent in other New England states, elementary schools with a nine-year course. But the ninth grade never succeeded. It was cramped by the German definition of the elementary school as a vernacular and rudimentary school. To try to spend nine years rather than eight on the three R’s was not productive. The academy, on the other hand, knew no limits of this kind. It reveled in such subjects as French and music and literature and history.

At last the Latin school and the academy fused in the American high school, and the high school took its place at the end of the elementary-school course. The influence of the academy in determining this form of organization was very great, for the academy was from the first connected with the elementary school, while the Latin school was in its early days an institution quite separate from the common school both in its organization and purpose.

Introduction to the scientific study of education

Подняться наверх