Live Students and Dead Education: Why the High School Must Be Revived

THE ATLANTIC

BY OSCAR HANDLIN

MORE money will help. But it will not itself solve the problem. American schools, particularly the high schools, are entering a prolonged crisis, obscured by the debate over the ways and means of financing them. However the funds will be raised, we shall have to reconsider the function of secondary education if we wish to spare our children the chaos that now threatens them in the most vulnerable years of their lives.

The evidence is clear. The number of high school students is larger than ever before, and it will continue to increase for years to come. In this group are boys and girls of types that did not formerly ascend to this level of instruction; it will be dangerous to neglect their needs and interests. Above all, the high schools operate in a new social context, of which they must take account. These developments pose a challenge so serious that we can disregard it only at our peril.

The federal census conveniently tabulates the population by age groups and projects its size into the future. The number of Americans aged fifteen to nineteen grew from slightly more than eleven million in 1955 to well over twelve million in 1958. At that point we began to feel the effects of the post-war baby boom. The size of the group grew more rapidly. In 1965 it will amount to more than seventeen million; in 1970, to well over nineteen million. There is no guesswork to these estimates; these children are already born and on their way toward adolescence. They will enormously expand the pool from which the high school population of the future will be drawn.

An ever-larger percentage of the eligible age group will demand and receive a secondary education. Almost twice as large a proportion of entering students will receive high school diplomas in 1961 as were able to do so twenty years ago. More than 90 per cent of the boys and girls over five and under eighteen are now enrolled in some school; before long almost all of them will be. The high school population has already soared under these pressures. From six and a half million in 1950, it has risen to over ten million in 1961.

One can anticipate an even larger increase in the decade ahead, for the high birth rate and the rising level of expectations throughout American society show no signs of subsiding. In addition, the dominant economic trends of our period literally drive young people into the schools.

There is nothing else for them to do. The range of unskilled jobs open to youths of under eighteen years of age is steadily shrinking. The decline of the family farm and mechanization and automation of industry continually reduce the number of places for which they can qualify. The talk of a thirty-hour week to spread employment reflects the desire to limit the size of the labor force, a situation not likely to make attractive openings for the very young. The number of white-collar jobs has grown, but these jobs generally require a high school diploma. As the long process of formal education becomes the universal norm, the thing to do, those who lack education suffer increasingly and are compelled to adhere to the general pattern. All the ways up now lead through the high school, and only the misfits or the children of the very poor and underprivileged are pushed into the narrowing range of employments from which there is no exit. It is not in the least likely that these trends will be reversed in the future.

Copyright © 1961, by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston 16, Mass. All rights reserved.

The high school cannot meet the challenge of the oncoming tide of new students simply by increasing its existing facilities. The high school was an institution developed for a rather select student body, and this much larger aggregate will not fit into its established forms.

THE TOTAL STUDENT BODY

Our students vary greatly in intelligence; as many are below as are above average. The problems of the high school change radically as it begins to serve a clientele unselected as to ability.

The situation of the talented boys and girls is clear-cut. The old curriculum was made for them; the road ahead to college and the professional schools is open; and a good deal of attention is already being devoted to them. They will have to learn to avoid being dragged down by the average of the mass about them. But success in doing so is one of the tests of their ability.

The high school has had less experience in dealing with those who, lacking competence or motivation, are euphemistically called the “academically untalented.” The traditional course of study is above their grasp, and the careers open to them are by no means clear. Yet the untalented will comprise a rising percentage of the total student body. They cannot be thrown into a labor market which has no room for them, but the imperatives of a democratic society demand that they have their chance. Formerly, it was possible to shunt them off into various vocational educational programs. Rarely did these programs reflect a positive comprehension of the students they served; all too often they aimed simply to get the less able out of the way of the more able. Characteristically, they absorbed the underprivileged, who lacked the opportunity to develop their ability. It was no coincidence, for instance, that Georgia in 1958 had three times as many students enrolled in such programs as did Massachusetts.

In any case, the old forms of vocational education will be even less useful in the future than in the past; the very same economic changes that drive more students into the schools also undervalue the handicraft skills that can be taught there. These vocational programs are therefore growing at a far lower rate than are other sectors of secondary education.

A large part of the high school population consequently finds itself enmeshed in an institution that has little relevance to present or future needs. These boys and girls have drifted on into the ninth grade because it follows after the eighth. They are told to study subjects they cannot grasp and to acquire skills they may never use. Only athletics, marching bands, and their own social life rescue them from total boredom.

And they are adolescents! Growing into maturity, they feel the need to test their powers and assert their individuality. Lacking recognized means for doing so, confined to a round of purposeless tasks, some become utterly apathetic. Others divert their vitality into the rebellion of juvenile delinquency.

The secondary school must adjust to meet the needs of all these young people. In the 1960s, either it will prepare or it will fail to prepare them for citizenship and for careers.

THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY PATTERN

There is no simple formula for reshaping the structure of an institution that prepares some of its students for college and others for trades, and that is also intended to equip all of them with the ability to vole, to drive cars, to make friends, and to take a useful part in life. The high school must now become something more than the bridge between the elementary school and the college, a function which hitherto shaped its development.

The American high school took its present form in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Until then, there had been no organization whatever to secondary education in the United States. Side by side there existed public and private academies and a multitude of high, trade, and finishing schools of various sorts, each with its individually fashioned curriculum. Most of the students terminated their education at this level, for it was not yet necessary to go further to enter upon an apprenticeship in business or the professions. Only a small minority went on to college.

There was no consistent pattern to the preparation of that minority. Requirements for college admission differed, and rarely did colleges insist upon the completion of a secondary school course. Students entered when they could prove that they were ready, by passing an entrance examination to the satisfaction of the faculty of the college to which they applied. And those examinations varied in scope as well as in difficulty.

The multiplication in the number of both colleges and secondary schools after 1870 created confusion and generated controversy between the two groups of educators. The schools demanded that the colleges guarantee admission to their graduates. The colleges insisted that the schools devote themselves primarily to instruction prerequisite to their own offerings. Yet the ability of the schools to do so was complicated by the fact that the colleges were changing under the impetus of the new scientific scholarship.

The virtual anarchy of the 1880s induced the National Educational Association to appoint a distinguished committee of ten to look into the secondary school curriculum, under the chairmanship of President Charles W. Eliot of Harvard. The committee drew together the best minds in American education, and its report, published in 1893, presented an incisive and penetrating analysis of secondary education in the United States. Although not all the changes it recommended were adopted, it did set a formalized pattern that very quickly dominated instruction at this level and helped to establish the basic features of the high school as we know it. This was to be an intermediate school with a term four years in duration between elementary and collegiate instruction. It was to be secular and primarily public in its control. Most important of all, the committee recommended that the curriculum be standardized in terms of units of instruction, so that the students could be uniformly evaluated for the purposes of college admission.

The members of the committee had approached their task in no parochial spirit. They were acutely aware that not every high school student would cross the bridge into college and that the schools had to meet the needs of the whole society and not simply those of a selected portion of it. Yet, precisely in that respect, public education had failed.

The function of the high school was to transmit to the student the guides that would help him pass safely by the distractions of popular fads in tastes and ideas. The college preparatory subjects presented to him a body of knowledge, organized in subject units, that every educated man had to know. Familiarity with that body of knowledge was expected to impart to each youth a set of standards that he could thereafter accept as good and right. The educated man would know what he ought to enjoy in literature, art, and music; what was proper in economics and politics; and what was just and decent in personal relationships. He could measure every problem by the criteria of the defined culture acquired in the high school, not as well as if he had gone on to college, but in the same way.

Although that culture was detached and apart from life, it nevertheless prepared the student for most contingencies. Through science he acquired practice in classification and induction; with the logic absorbed from mathematics he was endowed with the methods of right reasoning. History and the classics taught him how to draw analogies from experience; and from literature and art he acquired taste and discrimination. Thus armed, he was ready to sally forth from the bastion of the school to do battle with life.

The concealed premise of this assumption was that knowledge of any subject was to be acquired not for its intrinsic value but as a means toward some more general purpose. The farmer or the businessman who wondered why his taxes should go to support instruction in Latin or geometry or history was told that these courses were to be studied not merely because they were worth knowing for their own sakes but because of the mental discipline involved in learning them.

CONFUSION IN THE CURRICULUM

The disastrous consequences of this point of view emerged in the next quarter century. As the high school absorbed an increasing part of the population, the pressure for accommodating new interests mounted, and the conception of indirect training proved infinitely extensible. Since no subject was worthy of attention in itself, but primarily as a means of mental training, the way was open for the intrusion of many new subjects. If music was to be studied because it gave our heterogeneous population “the feeling for order and symmetry,” and literature because it “will keep us pure and keep us strong,” then why not basketball, which developed a sense of discipline and a respect for law?

The teachers in the entrenched academic course continued to argue the peculiar merits of their own subjects. But they could not demonstrate, to the satisfaction of parents and school boards, that Greek and Latin were indeed more valuable instruments of mental discipline than French or home economics.

The confusion in the curriculum grew worse after World War I, when new psychological investigations shook the confidence of educators in the theory of the transfer of learning. Now it appeared that the training acquired in one subject did not carry over automatically to another. The power of reasoning acquired in physics did not add to a man’s ability to make judgments in politics; the sense of harmony gained in music did not contribute to neighborliness. The result was the dissipation of any effort to select some subjects as more worthy of inclusion in the high school curriculum than others. The core of academic courses retained their prestige because they led to college; any worthy boy or girl would take them. The other students were left to judge unaided what would be most immediately useful to them. But so long as culture was compartmentalized in blocks of subject matter, there could be no effort to put it within the reach of students not destined for college.

The idea of education as adjustment to life, which emerged from the work of John Dewey and his followers, useful as that was, did not fill the void. Indeed, one of the weaknesses of the Dewey approach, in breaking down established disciplines, was to strengthen the impression that all things were equally worthy of being taught.

The high school therefore lacked the ability to adjust to new pressures, other than through adding new courses. On the one hand, the community demanded that it assume more functions; on the other, the contracting labor market thrust larger numbers of the untalented into the high school. As long as the only standard of judgment was that of immediate utility, the case for drivers’ education or etiquette was as plausible as that for history or geometry. To add a new subject, it was only necessary to appease the guardians of the old ones by leaving their cultural domain untouched.

Any effort at reconstruction must recognize the crucial situation of the high school in the enlarging American social structure. It cannot be simply, or even primarily, the first stage in preparation for a career, as the Continental European secondary school is. In our society, careers are not chosen at the age of eleven; few boys and girls know what they will do even at graduation. Indeed, a majority of our college students have not yet made up their minds at the end of their freshman year. And experience indicates that the gains of our type of procedure, time-consuming though it be, far outweigh the losses.

The high school must remain an undifferentiated institution through which the whole population will pass. It must focus its attention not on the preparation of one segment or another of its student body, but on the development in all of it of the core of habits, ideas, and assumptions that will make them, to the best of their abilities, creative citizens. In doing so, it will also, but incidentally, provide them with a basis for selecting their future vocations, as they learn to know the world about them and as they come to lest their own abilities and aptitudes.

To understand what such an institution can best teach, it is necessary to expose two pervasive errors in recent American thought about education.

Every dabbler in curriculums begins with the assumption that what is taught is learned. To require a course is to spread the knowledge of its contents; therefore, it remains only to be decided what should be required. Nothing could be further from the truth. Few subjects are as much taught as American history; in most states it is doled out repetitively in the fifth and eighth grades of elementary school and again in the last year of high school. Yet a national survey by the New York Times some years ago showed the abysmal ignorance that was the product of all this teaching. In fact, every college course of which I know begins from the beginning and takes for granted no previous knowledge of the subject. More than two decades of experience with the best-trained students in the country have convinced me that it would make no difference whatever if they had never studied American history before they came to college.

The rate at which knowledge fades after the final quiz in mathematics or languages is fully as rapid. It matters little how many students take three years of French; what matters is how few will ever thereafter look into a French book. What is taught simply cannot be equated with what is learned and retained.

Nor is it true that what is not taught will not be learned. I pass by the men like Benjamin Franklin, who learned six languages, something about prose style, and a good deal of science without being taught; they were, perhaps, exceptions. I come rather to the lad who cannot remember the date of the Spanish-American War or the meaning of “sixteen to one,” but who can name the pitchers in each game of the World Series of 1948 and can reel off batting averages by the yard. These had significance to him, while dates and monetary ratios did not. When we wish to do so, we learn without teachers, and, sometimes, despite them.

To recognize that not everything that ought to be learned can or should be taught by the school is to set the problem of its curriculum within manageable terms. Any renewed effort, after the fashion of the Committee of Ten, to define a body of knowledge that every educated man ought to have is futile and needless. By what criteria can we tell the boys and girls who enter high school next year to take French and Latin rather than German and Russian, Medieval rather than Oriental history, physics rather than chemistry? The world of information that reaches from antiquity to the present is so complex that such simple evaluations are impossible. The high school cannot endow its students with everything they ought to know. It can only equip them to get what they need as they come to recognize the need for it.

THE TWO FUNDAMENTALS

Given its place in American society and the character of its students, the high school must focus on two tasks: It ought to impart to its students the ability to communicate and to be communicated with; and it ought to introduce them to the quantitative techniques on which modern science and technology rest. If it succeeds in these tasks, it will give its graduates the equipment for future learning.

Reading, writing, and arithmetic have, of course, long been elements of the traditional curriculum. Unfortunately, their function has been so frequently misunderstood by teachers as to make instruction in them almost totally ineffective. When the class creeps through Ivanhoe at the rate of eight pages a day, it is not learning to read; when it parses sentences or memorizes the rules for the use of indefinite pronouns, it is not learning to write; and when it acquires facility in problemsolving, it is not learning the nature of mathematics.

The prevailing pattern of instruction has emphasized drill in rules and diligence in the performance of ritual exercises at the expense of understanding the content. The teachers have been dominated by the assumption that the student, good, bad, or indifferent, must first learn to make bricks before he can be allowed to see the outlines of the building. Alas, the meaningless monotony of brickmaking destroys in all but a few any desire to see the building.

The incorrigible optimist within me nevertheless insists that the high school can perform these tasks. The processes of comprehension, expression, and measurement can be made real and meaningful — even pleasurable — to adolescents at every level of ability. Nor would it take a major revolution to do so, only a decisive clarification of purpose.

Certainly the high school has available the means of enabling its pupils to acquire through reading some familiarity with the important conceptions of our culture, and through practice in writing and speaking the ability to express themselves clearly.

The classics occupy a central place in such training. These are the great works of human intelligence which, whether produced in Palestine, Greece, Rome, Italy, England, or the United States, have demonstrated the capacity for being understood over long periods of time and in a variety of places. Acquaintanceship with them introduces the student to the significant common ideas of our civilization. But before they can be used, the classics must be rescued from the classicists.

I know not how many Gauls Caesar slaughtered. But I know that he has killed the interest of three generations of Americans in the classics. More than sixty years ago, the consultants to the Committee of Ten demonstrated that the Gallic Wars belonged in the library, not in the classroom. “The book is altogether too difficult for beginners; it is too exclusively military in contents to be generally interesting; its vocabulary is too largely restricted, from the nature of the subject, to marches, sieges, and battles to afford the best introduction to subsequent reading; and, finally, it touches human life at too few points to be morally helpful and significant.” Yet, of the glory that was Greece and Rome, this is what the high school student first encounters. And for many it is all.

The stubborn attachment of the classicists to Caesar is due to more than inertia, profound though that may be. It springs also from an underlying insistence that the ultimate purpose of their teaching is to produce scholarly masters of an elegant Latin style. For the same reason, Beowulf has been set as an impenetrable barrier in the way to a love of English literature by those who believe that nothing can be accomplished in this sphere without beginning with the Anglo-Saxon.

If, however, the function of the classics be recognized as that of offering the American adolescent a glimpse of the seminal ideas of our culture, quite different texts can be held forth to him. Any boy or girl can read some Aristophanes or Thucydides or Livy or Chaucer or Dickens with interest. Inclusive lists are of no importance, for these books should be the beginning, rather than the sum, of their reading. And that reading should be in the available good English translations. No translation is, of course, the equivalent of the original. But the question is not whether The Clouds should be read in Greek or in English; the question is whether it should be read in English or not at all. And there is more likelihood that a few students will be drawn to study the language through knowing its literature than that any will be drawn to the literature through drill in the language.

THE COMMON ATTRIBUTES

Reading is one prerequisite of learning to write; the other is actual practice in writing, and this the high school offers hardly at all. Year after year, the colleges face a dismal encounter with freshmen who may have composed a few three-hundred word papers, or, more likely, have in all their studies written nothing whatever. No amount of exercise in word definition or grammar can take the place of the regular and frequent experience of setting words meaningfully on paper.

Finally, the disappearance of what a century ago was known as rhetoric has had deplorable effects in the broken sentences and indirect, ambiguous phraseology characteristic of American speech. Training in the tricks of elocution and debate is no substitute for practice, as a normal part of the teaching of the language, in the habits of clear and forceful oral expression.

The content of instruction in reading, writing, and speaking can readily be adjusted to the varying levels of student ability. The untalented will command a smaller vocabulary; they will absorb a narrower range of meanings from stories; they will apprehend myths and metaphors more readily than abstract symbols or logical connections. But whatever they learn will be of immense use in establishing a means of communication with the rest of the society in which they live.

I write with less confidence and less knowledge of what is wrong with the teaching of mathematics. But that something is wrong seems certain. The last sixty years have witnessed revolutionary changes in fundamental conceptions, yet the standard sequence of algebra, plane geometry, intermediate algebra, trigonometry, advanced algebra, and solid geometry, until just a few years ago, remained anchored in a pre-Newtonian universe. Most young people who are excellent at problemsolving and make perfect scores on the mathematical achievement test do not begin to understand what modern mathematics is about until they are well into their college careers. What have the vast majority who never go beyond plane geometry got?

The high school teaching of mathematics seems to reflect the same concentration upon rules and exercises that blights the study of language. It needs an analogous shift in emphasis that will introduce all students, at different levels of competence, to the concepts of quantity and space they will encounter throughout their lives. That task ought not to be left to popularizations, which in their wide sales show the genuine public interest in the subject.

If the high school can supply a solid groundwork of training in the use of language and of mathematics, the rest of its curriculum need not be so rigidly specified. Let it recognize the variety of students who meet within its halls. Let it offer what courses in languages, art, music, history, science, bookkeeping, machine-shop practice, personal behavior, and athletics its size, budget, and location dictate. Let the students move where interest and ability draw them. Above all, let it occupy the boys and girls in activities relevant to their present needs and to a future in which leisure may be as prominent a part of life as work.

There need be no fear either that talents will be wasted or that students will lack exposure to important aspects of our culture. The lad who is unwillingly forced into a course in American history or physics will not learn anything of value, and his presence will impede the learning of those who are interested. Let him have instead his course in French or family relations. If he has really learned to read, he will someday see the relevance of American history to his own life and find available the means of knowing what he should about it. And if he has a solid foundation in mathematics and shows a desire to study physics in college, he will not be at a great disadvantage in doing so.

Nor will society suffer, in consequence, a shrinkage in the supply of historians or physicists. Our colleges manage to produce geologists and astronomers and philosophers without advance preparation at the secondary level. They can do the same in every sphere of scholarship.

As for the untalented, they will pass these four critical years sharing the social and communal experiences of their fellows. They will not be excluded from the realm of culture by their failure to go on to college, but will catch glimpses of it commensurate with their ability. Just as the peasant and Saint Thomas apprehended the awe of the cathedral, although in different ways, or as Emerson and the farmer spoke of progress, so our own culture can be grasped at different levels. And the high school is its critical teaching mechanism.

We may thus hope to imbue these young people with a sense of community that will make their future work worth while. We cannot restore the small-town carpenter or tinkerer of the past, who took pride in his handiwork. But we can endow the mechanics and factory hands of the future with enough awareness of the world in which they live to give them a sense of the value of their labor and of its relation to others. And that same awareness outside the job will help them lead useful lives as parents and citizens.

The illusion of the Committee of Ten that culture can be defined in frozen units of essential subject matter which will train the mind of every student has too long deceived us. A large percentage of our boys and girls will resist the efforts of the school to stuff such culture into them. It does not matter. They will make good citizens, businessmen, and parents despite the lack of Latin or of history, if they can grow through the difficult years of adolescence, learning by experience to relate themselves to the world about them.

What is important is that the high school do well what it can do. It serves a democratic society at a point in the lives of its young people when their future is still vague and undefined. It can do no more, but it must do no less, than to endow them, to the limits of their abilities, with the common attributes of our culture.