THE GULF BETWEEN

The bridging of the chasm between secondary school and college is a riddle that has perplexed the educational engineers of America. In conventions, in college conferences, in most of the magazines of the popular intellectualism, the question has been put again and again. The mass of data is huge and mounting, but the man who can make a great highway, smooth-paved and uninterrupted, of what is now two roads connected by a bridge of San Luis, Rey, has not yet appeared.

The chasm is not, as has often been asserted, a purely curricular one. There is a close similarity between the elementary courses taken by freshmen and the mechanically preparatory system of the secondary school. This similarity, as President Lowell has said, is forced upon the college by inadequate grooming. If French 2 must come to Sever it is because "senior French" was not far behind or, in another sense, because it was too far behind.

Not on this point alone does the college show what little confidence it has in the preparation of the student. After he has passed the College Entrance Board Examinations he is obliged to take the scholastic aptitude test, which determines, in effect, whether all this learning has taught him how to study. The very presence of this test as part of the machinery of college entrance proves that the secondary school and college are working at purposes that may not be definitely crossed, but are certainly divergent. College prepares man for life, but the secondary school does not prepare man for college. It prepares him to pass the examinations of the College Entrance Board.

The complaint of the public secondary school is that the college foists upon it an outrageous scheme of courses, and a system of cramming for "units", which must be hoarded away for two or three years, and will be rewarded on some happy July morning. Viewed as the most likely leaders of a generation hence the college man or woman is important; regarded as only an entity in the multitude of America, whose masses enjoy secondary education in greater proportion than in any other country on the globe, the college man shrinks to numerical insignificance. The college curriculum is an Aeneas riding on the shoulders of the high school curriculum, which must adapt itself to college entrance demands, and so loses power in serving the quantitatively greater need.

The solution that presents itself most promptly is the foundation of public secondary schools for the exclusive purpose of college entrance examination. In Germany the decision between high school or college preparation for life comes when the boy is ten years old; in England about a year later. Mental tests at ten years of age to determine eligibility for university education are believed in Germany to be equal in justice as in efficacy with eight years of trial by education.

Like a white light thrown upon the weaknesses of a democracy is the knowledge that in America a plan for early selectivity would be hooted down with yells varying from "unconstitutional" to "dirty race prejudice." Such accusations, would contain a mead of truth. Any man, it has been said, may in America have an education; not infrequently the statement's scope has been widened to include a university education. Ambitious America thirsts after learning; because that thirst went unrecognized until the teens had stolen upon the box is no reason, in the American tradition, for a refusal to appease it. The European plan of secondary education will need much grafting with American educational flora before it can be safely transplanted to a loam so rich.

The very nature of an educational convention, with its fleeting luncheons and dinners and myriad speeches on everything from the automobile library to the little red schoolhouse, is a denial of sober and detailed consideration of a problem. Likewise doubtful in value are conferences of college and secondary school executives, where partisan speechmaking soon resolves the parley into the polite immobility of a disarmament conference.

Most needed now is a straightforward expression by secondary school educators of their belief, accompanied by consequent recommendations. Such a pedagogic bull would be a sound basis for discussion. The widely varying nature of entrance requirements in different colleges make it impossible for them to take a fixed position at present. Such delineation of public secondary school attitude should be not merely definitive, but suggestive in form. Foremost within it should be a statement of what further advance in specific fields of study the secondary school would be prepared to exchange for a cut in the over-wide requirements of college entrance under the credit system. In such a document education in general, as well as college committees on admission, would possess a thumb-rule for measuring the chasm's span.