The Free High School.
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��two tolerably safe incentives. If these qualities impelled them to seek more knowledge, there was the academic education which was not parcelled out to them like food to captive fowl. It was a coveted prize which they must work to obtain. Only the brightest children gained it, and they were early made to feel the value of time and learning a)id money.
The academies have become a dream of the past. Scattered all through the New England towns you will find old brick buildings, now either dis- used or diverted from their original purpose, which, a generation ago, were nurseries of literary culture. They were centres of local pride. To be an academy town then was a greater dis- tinction than now to be the capital of the state. Scarcely a man or a woman of distinction at the present day who does not owe the better part of his or her education to the academy where they spent the happiest days of their youth. Only the pen of an Ik Marvel, a Dr. Holland, or a Mrs. Stowe, can give a faithful picture of these institutions. They were always tuition schools. The fee was low, for the conditions of life were simple, but the education was held valuable enough to be worth a price.
The academies have dwindled away like the mountain streams when the forests are cut down. A few have survived, and have been specialized into expensive college preparatory schools. Boys alone are the students, and they, instead of being received as formerly into private families of the village and surrounded by the human- izing influences of a home, are now congregated together into dormitories. Educational institutions, instead of
��being diffused, are centralized. The district schools have in some instances diminished to a single pupil.
What causes have brought about these changes? The most im|)ortant are the tendency of the population toward the cities, and the preference for machinery over individual labor. These have killed the academy, and produced the free graded school sys- tem of which the high school is the bright and shining head.
Of all things in the world, it would seem that education, the drawing out of the faculties, is the last that ought to be performed in a wholesale man- ner. That method works well enough for inanimate objects. We read of great factories into which raw logs and iron are ])ut atone end and drawn out at the other as completed freight cars. We hear with wonder and amazement, if it were possible for the American mind of the present decade to be surprised at anything, that a whole train of such cars can be made in one day. The tremendous public- school system seizes our children at the age of five or six years, except where the blessed Kindergarten pro- tects them, puts them into its presses, instructs them almost entirely from text-books, and, at eighteen years or thereabouts, turns them out from its final mill, graduated — yes, but how prepared for the life that awaits them .? They are not provided for like the freight cars ; there is no regular, un- varying track laid out for them. In their course through the schools they are not treated so well as the freight cars, for no regard is paid to their different capacities, and they are all stuffed with the same things.
There are certain inspectors whose
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