parison were extended to Paris, the result would be no less to the disadvantage of our largest cities. It is clear that these cities, in order to keep pace with the demands of the times, must provide a greater number and variety of public high schools.

While the high school, which has been so rapidly extended and so liberally supported by the voluntary taxation of the people, is the flower of the system, it is not without its faults and imperfections. Free secondary education having now become a fixed fact, attention in the future will naturally be given in larger proportion to the work of perfecting its organization and management, so as to adapt it more completely to the wants of all classes of citizens and render it an instrument of the greatest possible good, accompanied by the least possible evil. In my view, the evil connected with the high school which most loudly calls for a remedy is the harm which it is doing to the health of the girls who attend it. This evil is not of recent origin. It dates back to the time when girls were first admitted to high schools; it is not limited to any particular description of high schools; it is found in both small ones and large ones, in separate schools and mixed schools. Nor is it restricted to any one region or section of the country; wherever there is a high school there the evil is found and there the application of the remedy should begin. Of course, the harm inflicted has its degrees. There may be schools under very judicious management of parents, committees, superintendents, principals, and teachers, where the injury to the health of girls has been reduced to a minimum. I am not aware, however, that such a school has come under my observation. On the other hand, there is a large number of schools, among which are some of the most noted in the country, where the injury inflicted upon the health of the female pupils is a very serious evil. What I mean is precisely this, that the evil of which I am speaking is general in our high schools and that the reform in this respect should be general; not that the evil reaches every individual pupil, but that it affects injuriously some pupils, even in the best schools, and a large percentage of the pupils in that large class of schools where as yet hygiene is only a word and not a reality. In justice to the public high schools it should be said, however, that the evil is not confined to them. It is quite as serious, if not more so, in the whole body of thoroughly organized institutions for higher female education. The causes of this evil are manifold. The following are some of them: Injudicious application of the marking system; injudicious system of examinations; too many studies; too many home lessons; an injudicious method of teaching, which confounds thoroughness with exhaustiveness; too much pressure to secure punctuality and regularity of attendance; rolls of honor printed in annual reports; competition for honors and medals; too long abstinence from substantial food and nourishing drinks; bad air; cold draughts; too many flights of stairs. These manifold causes suggest the manifold

1 Here the Baltimore girls' high schools are the models, one flight only.

remedies. The remedies can be more easily and effectually applied in separate schools than in mixed. To remedy the evil in question effectually in mixed schools without too great laxity towards the boys is no easy task. Higher female education has come to remain. It is a new element in modern civilization. It is a great boon. It has been attended with a lamentable evil which has largely offset its blessings. Let the remedying of that evil be one of the chief tasks of all earnest promoters of higher female education.

Among the important imperfections of the high schools I reckon that of the programs. I arrive at this conclusion by a comparison of our high school programs with the highly perfected programs or courses of study (we use the words indifferently) of the French and German, including German-speaking Austria. The program does not make the school, but a good program is an important element of a good school. In general the classical course is too much lumbered up with extraneous matters not requisite for admission to college. This error causes a serious loss of time to the students by delaying their admission to college one or two years after they are old enough to enter upon the college course with advantage. A boy of fair abilities and proper age could fit for any college in Latin and Greek with proper instruction in two years without injury from overwork. Pedagogical authorities seem to be settling down upon the conclusion that in secondary education instruction in the classics should be mostly limited to construing and to translating with correctness and elegance. In the non-classical course there is an immense waste of time in attempting to teach the speaking and writing of the French and German languages, and yet the task is never accomplished to any purpose. Nor need it be for students in general. The necessity for speaking any foreign language is so exceptional that this acquirement should be reckoned as a specialty, to be learned, if at all, outside of institutions for general education. If, for instance, a young man is destined to a diplomatic career, he should be able to speak and write both French and German. But it would be a prodigious waste of time to pursue these studies in an ordinary school for secondary instruction. He should either go to the countries where these languages are spoken or to a school where they are the specialties. Every educated man, however, needs to know how to read with facility both the French and German languages. To à certain extent the preparatory course should afford this instruction, which should be continued in the college. In the non-classical course facility in reading an ordinary book in French or German should be a fundamental requisite. This could easily be done by pursuing a rational method and discarding all attempts to write or speak these languages, and especially all attempts to acquire what is called a Parisian or Hanoverian accent. In the first place these accents cannot be obtained in our schools and in the next place if they could be obtained they would be as utterly useless to ninety-nine and nine-tenths per cent. of our

pupils as the accent of the Choctaw language. An intelligible pronunciation, with due regard to the rules, is all that should be aimed at in such a course.

It is a noticeable fact that the number of girls in our high schools is in general quite in excess of the number of boys and that the number of girls who graduate is in still greater excess of the number of boys` who graduate. Boys are too anxious, perhaps, to take a short cut to active business life. The average boy who has been kept in the grammar school until fifteen years of age looks upon the four-year high school course, which would carry him up to nineteen years of age, as too long for his purpose, and he is right. The case is different with the girls. What is required by the interest of the boy not destined to college or apprenticeship to a handicraft, but to practical business, is a non-classical high school course of three years, to which he can be admitted at thirteen or fourteen years of age.

In States having State universities, high schools are coming to receive State aid and some degree of direction and supervision by State officials. This highly important movement in the interest of high school instruction has for its object, primarily, to encourage the establishment and maintenance of free preparatory schools and to bring them into direct organic relations with the university. Minnesota has a high school board composed of the governor, the State superintendent of public instruction, and the president of the State university, ex-officiis. The main functions of this board are to determine the qualifications of the teachers, course of study, and the standard of examination for gradua tion. Each school submitted to the direction of the board in these particulars receives a sum not exceeding $400 from the State treasury. By the report of the board (1883), it appears that the board had under its supervision forty-nine high schools, with an enrolment of 2,417 pupils. The board obtained reliable information of the condition and progress of these schools by inspections made by the secretary and examiner of the board and by several members of the faculty of the State university, as they had been appointed. These inspectors have made careful inquiry into the thoroughness of the instruction, the facilities afforded in buildings, apparatus, and libraries, and have submitted written reports of their visits for the information of the board. There seems to be little room for doubt that provision for State supervision of high schools is needed, not only in States having State universities, but in other States as well.

The following modes of determining the qualifications of candidates for admission to high schools are those mostly in vogue, namely: (1) By competitive examinations, the number to be admitted being previously fixed; (2) by a pass examination, the candidates reaching a certain predetermined percentage being admitted; (3) the graduating diploma of the grammar school is accepted as evidence of qualification; (4) recommendation by the principal of the grammar school, but the

candidates are all admitted on probation; (5) by quotas sent up by wards or districts- example, Philadelphia. Of these, number 3 appears to be the most logical and rational.

EVENING SCHOOLS.

The evening school is the natural and necessary complement of the day school and is designed exclusively for persons who have passed beyond the age to which education in the elementary school is usually limited, namely, the age of fourteen years, and more especially for adults of both sexes. The initiative in the establishment and maintenance of the evening schools has generally been due, both at home and abroad, to the efforts of organizations outside of the public authorities, either charitable, religious, or educational. These agencies have rendered great service to the cause of education in various countries by thus supplementing the provisions made at the public expense for the instruc tion of the people. But experience has proved that the interests of adult education are too vast and important to be left wholly to voluntary effort for their support and management. Hence evening schools have become in various countries a permanent part of the public school system. In England more than thirty years ago a vast system of adult evening schools was established for instruction in elementary art and Science as a means of promoting the very great industrial interests of that manufacturing country. In several of the continental countries the attendance of apprentices at supplementary schools, either on afternoons, evenings, or Sundays, is made compulsory.

The lowest and simplest function of the evening school is to afford to illiterate adults and youth who have passed beyond the elementary school age the means of acquiring the rudiments of knowledge, such as reading, writing, and the simple rules of arithmetic; but in our cities there is happily a rapidly increasing number of youth and adults engaged in industrial occupations during the day who desire to devote their evenings to the acquisition of knowledge, either industrial, as a means of promoting their success in their respective callings, or general, as a means of mental culture and intellectual development. Hence the demand for evening high schools, with both liberal and industrial courses of study, and evening drawing schools of different grades.

Evening schools for manual training and the teaching of the elements of the various trades might be useful in meeting the educational needs of still another class of pupils. In few, if any, of our cities do we find a completely developed and thoroughly satisfactory system of evening schools, although no little progress has been made in this direction during the last two decades. In many cities there are no evening schools of any description; in the class ranking next higher in the scale of progress some provision is made for evening schools by voluntary effort; in the next stage of development we find elementary public evening

schools more or less efficient; in a small class the evening high school is added; and finally the evening drawing school has begun to be adopted as an integral part of the public school system.

ELEMENTARY EVENING SCHOOLS.

The elementary evening school is necessary in proportion as the elementary day school has failed in the accomplishment of its legitimate object. Were all the pupils of proper age entered at the public elementary day school and continued through the course of its several grades, they would have no occasion afterwards to attend the evening school in order to learn to read, write, and cipher. The purely elementary evening school, therefore, is a makeshift to supply a temporary want which will cease to exist as soon as the public school system becomes what it should be. In the mean time it is an actual necessity as the means of preventing illiteracy, so far as possible, among the youth who failed to acquire the rudiments of education during the school age, and of reducing to some extent the illiteracy of adult immigrants. The necessity of this class of schools is thus stated by the standing committee (Mr. John Shedden, chairman) of the Philadelphia school board:

The night school has become an actual necessity. Although the legislature of the State has been alive to its duty to the children of the Commonwealth, by the enactment of laws forbidding the employment in factories, &c., of children of tender age, yet, by the cupidity of some parents, the ignorance of others, and in many cases from financial necessity, the law of the State is openly violated at the expense of these helpless children. The night school is their only hope. There are persons holding eminent positions, useful to the community, that owe their educational advantages entirely to our night schools.

While the elementary evening school has been doing much good where it has been introduced, its results have very generally been far less satisfactory than could be desired. Where statistics are reported, the difference between the total enrolment and the average number belonging is shown to be very great, indicating that the average period of attendance is remarkably short.

The school statistics of St. Louis' show that for many years nearly one-third of the pupils enrolled each year attend less than twenty evenings and over one-half attend less than thirty evenings during the entire term of sixty-four nights. Moreover, the attendance of the actual members is usually very low; in Boston, for example, according to the report for 1881, the attendance reached only 54 per cent.

It would be unreasonable to expect in this class of evening schools the same continuity and regularity of attendance common in day schools; but experience has demonstrated that not only the imperfect attendance but other deficiencies of these schools are susceptible of remedy. The chief cause of their inefficiency seems to have been due to the inferior qualifications of the teachers employed in them. In Report of Superintendent Edward H. Long, 1881.

10153-No. 1 -3

333