EDUCATION BEGINS AT SCHOOL

Herald of a new awakening, President Conant has demanded a revaluation and reform of secondary school education. The evils of high school and preparatory school training are so entrenched and pernicious that it is incredible that no one has been forward enough to do something about them. Seeing the heart of the problem, John Jay Chapman wrote in 1924: "College loyalty is the only religion the schoolboy knows. . . . And this religious idea is kept alive in him by the vision of the ultimate college examinations--the Clashing Rocks through which he must pass to save his soul alive. . . . Thus an enormous moral pressure is put on him to make him do an intelligent thing--and this on an urchin who has never been taught to use his mind." He and others shuddered at the mania for size which had seized the wealthier schools, the turning of headmasters into highly efficient administrative officers, the loss of close contact between student and teacher. And these evils have persisted and swelled, so that President Conant's report and the committee to study secondary teaching methods appear opportunely.

Yet these battle cries are not loud enough. A vital starting point for attack upon secondary schools are the college board exams. Every evil of the lower learning leads up to, and away from, these. The college boards condition the kind and amount of content taught in the schools, and thus mold the type of boy which the colleges for the most part receive. And the result is that the schools teach little useful for the college course, and only what the board exams will test. It is a bizarre fact that because of the board exams much of what could at least be surveyed in school--some government, economics, psychology--is omitted, and such subjects as Latin and trigonometry over-emphasized.

The general effect of the college boards is double. On the one hand, it forces the student to view his pre-college training as a series of hurdles to be leapt before he falls into the green pastures of a university. But lo and behold! once alighted he will discover that University Hall urges the mature student, through the general exam and tutorial systems, to see college as another series of jumps, climaxing in one big water hazard at the end. This conception of hurdles, series, and incessant academic strife seems at bottom false, an example of the commercialization of learning, and contrary to the most rational tents of teaching. The student becomes a mere animal running a steeplechase, with the dean's office as jockey; the ideal of individual instruction is submerged beneath a mass of competitive symbols and scholastic rigmarole. On the other hand, the effect is to turn the headmaster into an executive charged with the training of his students to pass college boards, not to enter college with a foundation of wide, well-integrated knowledge. Grooved by his responsibility to the boys' parents, he is apt to operate his school like a clothing store, fitting out each student with the requisite apparel and giving him only the choice between a hat and earmuffs.

President Conant's committee, the School of Education, and the Dean's Office can do much to resurrect the secondary schools. Already the English college board has been slapped by the stiffening of requirements for English A. They might encourage the merging of the Educational Records Bureau, whose examining methods are notably progressive, with the conservative, horribly inadequate College Entrance Examination Board. When conferring with, headmasters about candidates for admission they might him as to the academic inadequacies of today's Freshmen--their inability to study, their lack of even a superficial acquaintance with the world's thoughts and deeds. In brief, Harvard can urge the schools to modernize their teaching of both method and content, also to give depth and integration to their training, so that the existing gap between schools and colleges may be transformed into one continuous educational growth.