Second Lecture on Education.

Professor Hanus gave the second of the series of Lectures on Education last night on "The Academy and the Public High School." He said in part:

The secondary schools originated as college preparatory schools. The college preparatory schools served, from the beginning, the educational needs of only a limited portion of the community, since their aims and scope of work were technical, designed to provide the necessary pre-collegiate training of clergymen. This technical character of the schools, in spite of the fact that the narrow curriculum comprised the elements of liberal culture as then understood, could not alone permanently hold the support of the community.

From this cause together with the rise of the academies and the establishment of the district system, the town grammar schools declined, except in a few of the large towns of the Common-wealth.

It was through private initiative and generosity that the academies arose to take up the work which the grammar schools had failed to perform. The academies demonstrated, at the same time, the possibility of a secondary education adapted to the special needs and briefer educational careers of non-collegiate pupils of both sexes. Thus the enthusiastic support of our public high schools as we know them today was ultimately brought about during the years from 1826 to the present time. Although this country, through the state of Massachusetts, was very early committed to the maintenance of secondary schools supported partly or wholly by taxes, it took nearly two hundred years before the new conception of the scope and meaning of public secondary education had been evolved. This new conception was a share in the elements of liberal culture and in useful knowledge and appropriate mental training for the duties and refined pleasures of life through an enlarged and more flexible programme of studies. This was administered so as to be adapted to the briefer educational career of the youth who had to get what liberal culture he could without the help of the college, as well as to the longer educational career of the more fortunate youth who could go to college.

The last two hundred years have accordingly given an enlarged significance to the secondary education. During those years the public secondary school has grown into the stature of an independent educational institution with a function of its own, and at the same time it has never ceased to be closely connected with the college. That is, the distinction between the two historical functions of secondary education, preparation for the college and preparation for life, once very marked, is disappearing. Whether it will wholly disappear within a generation or two can only be conjectured.