With regard to courses for girls, it is interesting to inquire how far classes in an elective system are chosen by boys and how far by girls. Why are conditions as they are?
The foregoing questions are asked on the assumption that the contrasts presented in the chapter are of value only when they make students keenly aware of the facts in their own environment. The facts of history are valuable chiefly because of the light they throw on the present.
Brown, E. E. Making of our Middle Schools. Longmans, Green, & Co. This is the only history of American secondary schools.
Bunker, F. F. “Reorganization of the Public School System,” in Bulletin No. 8, United States Bureau of Education, 1916. This shows how our present school system was organized.
Farrington, F. E. French Secondary Schools. Longmans, Green, & Co.
Farrington, F. E. The Public Primary School System of France. Teachers College.
Judd, C. H. “The Training of Teachers in England, Scotland, and Germany,” in Bulletin No. 35, United States Bureau of Education, 1914.
Monroe, W. S. “Development of Arithmetic as a School Subject,” in Bulletin No. 10, United States Bureau of Education, 1917. This bulletin tells of the origin of the present methods of teaching arithmetic.
Parker, S. C. The History of Modern Elementary Education. Ginn and Company. This is a very good summary of the facts regarding the development of American schools.
[CHAPTER III]
EDUCATION AS A PUBLIC NECESSITY
The Primitive Attitude One of Neglect
One does not have to go far from the door of any educational institution to find people who look on reading and writing—to say nothing of higher forms of education—as luxuries rather than necessities. There is the parent who is willing to take his child out of school for the sake of the wage which the child can earn. There is the negligent parent, often himself illiterate, who is utterly unconcerned about the education of his sons and daughters. Another kind of example appears in the boy or girl who goes out into the trades after a limited schooling and fails to keep up the type of intellectual activity which was cultivated in the school. Many a child who has been taught through years of instruction how to read makes very little use of his training in mature life.
An appeal to the history of civilization reveals the fact that there was a time when the opinion prevailed that education was unnecessary for the common man. The earliest schools were for the aristocracy and for the professional classes. Schools for all the people are of comparatively recent date.
Compulsory Education
In striking contrast with this attitude of neglect and indifference is the fact that to-day there are laws in all the civilized countries of the world compelling children of every social grade to attend school. Society as a whole does not share the slight esteem of reading exhibited by the man who takes his child out of school. Indeed, society has gone so far as to set aside that man’s judgment and to assume control of the child to the extent of insisting that the rudiments of an education shall be made universal.