IX An Up-to-Date High School
The modern high school is housed in a building which contains, in addition to the regular class rooms, gymnasiums, a swimming tank, physics, and chemical laboratories; cooking, sewing, and millinery rooms; wood-working, forge, and machine shops; drawing rooms; a music room; a room devoted to arts and crafts; and an assembly room. This arrangement of rooms presupposes Mr. Gilbert’s plan of making the high school, like the community, an aggregation of every sort of people, doing every sort of work.
Physical training in the high school has not yet come into its own, though it is on the road to recognition. All of the newer high schools have gymnasiums, but the children do not use them for more than thirty, forty, or fifty minutes a week. Sometimes the work is optional. The West Technical of Cleveland, with its outdoor basket ball court, its athletic grounds and grandstand, in addition to the indoor gymnasium, offers a good example of effective preparation for physical training. William D. Lewis of the William Penn High School sends all students who have physical defects to the gymnasium three, four, or even five times a week, until the defects are corrected. These exceptions merely serve to emphasize the fact that we have not yet learned that high school children have bodies which are as much in need of development and training as the minds which the bodies support.
Several real attempts are being made to teach high school boys and girls to care for their bodies, as they would for any other precious thing. Hygiene is taught, positively,—the old time “don’ts” being replaced by a series of “do’s.” In many schools, careful efforts are being made to give a sound sex education. The program at William Penn, in addition to the earlier work in biology and in personal and community hygiene, includes a senior course, extending through the year, in Domestic Sanitation and Eugenics. The course, given by the women in charge of Physical Training, deals frankly with the domestic and personal problems which the girls must face. The time is ripe for other schools to fall in line behind these much-needed pioneers.
The course of study in the modern high school is a broad one. Latin may always be taken, and sometimes there is Greek. French, German and Spanish, Mathematics, History, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, and Civics are almost universally offered on the cultural side of the curriculum. In addition, girls may take dress designing, sewing, millinery and home economics; boys may take wood-working, forge work, machine-tool work, electricity, printing, and house designing; and both boys and girls have an opportunity to elect art, arts and crafts work and music.
In some schools the combination of subjects group themselves into definite courses, as in the Newton High School, which offers,—
The Classical Course.
The Scientific Course.
The General Course.
The Technical Course.
The Technology-College Course.
The Extra Technical Course.
The Fine Arts Course.
The Business Course.
Other schools, like the Indianapolis Manual Training School, permit the pupil, with the advice of the principal, to make his own combination of subjects. Whether prepared by the school or by the pupil, however, the courses lead to college, to normal schools, to advanced technical schools, or to some definite vocation. On one subject, progressive high schools are in absolute agreement,—the course of study must furnish both culture and technical training in a form which meets the needs of high school children.
X From School to Shop and Back Again
The tendency toward vocational training finds its extreme expression in the so-called Industrial Co-operative Course in which boys and girls spend part of their time in school and part in the factory. Note this legal document. “The party of the second part agrees to place, as far as possible, the facilities of his establishment at the disposal of the School Committee for general educational purposes along industrial lines.” In these words, the individual manufacturers of Providence, Rhode Island, who are co-operating with the school board for the establishment of the industrial co-operative course in the Technical High School, place their mills and factories at the disposal of the school authorities. The plan instituted at the suggestion of the manufacturers themselves has won the approval of all parties during the two years of its operation.