ginia and Texas; there were in the previous year 5877 male students in the academic departments of the southern state universities, and 1658 more in endowed institutions of similar grade;[1] a population of over 23,000[2] bordering on high school graduation and widely distributed over the entire area. Our question is thus already answered. The best material for the making of a few hundred southern doctors annually does not have to be torn from the plough.
But these figures convey by no means the whole truth. The south is in the midst of a genuine educational renaissance. Within the last few years every southern state under the leadership of the state university, the state department of education, and certain endowed institutions like Vanderbilt University, has set enthusiastically to work to develop its common and secondary school systems after the admirable model furnished by the robust communities of the middle west. The professors of secondary education in the state universities are the evangelists of this auspicious movement. Young, intelligent, well trained, these sturdy leaders ceaselessly traverse the length and breadth of their respective states, stimulating, suggesting, guiding, organizing. It is an inspiring spectacle. Three years ago the high school had no legal standing in Virginia; to-day the state is dotted with two-year, three-year, and four-year high schools, created by local taxation, with a considerable subvention from the state treasury. There are already 2511 boys in fairly well equipped four-year high schools, and as many more in private institutions of equal value; and the two-year and three-year schools are growing rapidly into fuller high school stature. It needs no argument to prove that Virginia can at once procure its doctors from among the bona-fide graduates of such high schools and better. What is true of Virginia is true of every other southern state. In Alabama, for example, three years ago there was scarcely a public high school in the state; to-day there are 61 public four-year high schools,[3] 11 private four-year high schools, and 15 town and city three-year high schools. Of the 345 teachers employed in these schools, 184 are college graduates and 55 more have had at least two years of college work. Of course the situation is uneven; it lacks homogeneity. Standards are more or less confused; distinctions are not everywhere clear. The schools have frequently shot up like ungainly boys, who first get their height and fill up afterwards; their four years are not yet the four years of Boston or Indianapolis. But this is a phenomenon of hopeful omen; it provides the framework for a vigorous and imminent maturity. The universities and the professional schools have in this emergency a clear duty: to call things by their right names, to abandon the apologetic attitude, to cease from compromises which tempt the student from the high school and then set up the successful temptation as a sufficient excuse for their
- ↑ Compiled from the Report of the United States Commissioner of Education, 1908.
- ↑ Not including four-year high schools of Mississippi, Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Kentucky, which would considerably increase these figures. They are omitted because equally reliable data are not at hand.
- ↑ Under legislative enactment approved August 7, 1907, the state contributes $2000 a year to aid any county that establishes its own high school.
