The High School Boy and His Problems/The Course
When your grandfather went to high school, if fortunately he had the chance to do so, the course of study open to him was a pretty rigid one, very much indeed like an intellectual table d'hôte at which he had little opportunity to pick and choose, but must take what was set before him and ask no questions. There was a generous helping of mathematics with Latin and probably, Greek, to form the heavy part of the intellectual meal. Physics and chemistry often made up a part of the requirement, with history and English to serve as dessert to lighten the repast. There were few if any electives then, and little questioning on the part of the students as to whether or not what they were taking was likely to "do them any good" or was particularly to their individual tastes; they took their studies as they ate the simple nourishing food that was set before them at home by grandmother, in the belief that their elders knew best what was good for them.
Now everything is different. The program of study in the well-equipped modern high school carries an intellectual bill of fare as varied and as bizarre as that represented by the à la carte dining service of a first-class hotel. The boy entering high school today has so varied a program set before him, has so many things from which to choose, that it is little wonder if he is not sometimes confused and at loss to know just what to choose. Unrestricted election is not possible in any high school, so far as I know, but the restrictions are so limited that the actual results amount almost to that. High school boys have so great a variety put before them that they often become over fastidious and finical in their tastes and so hard to please that they refuse to show interest in, or to cultivate an appetite for, anything. A dozen different subjects of which his grandfather would scarcely have known the names, from agronomy to pharmacy, are now found in many a high school boy's program.
Even if the boy is sensible enough to recognize the difficulty and the danger he is in, he will not always find it easy to get intelligent advice. There is a wide difference of opinion these days as to just what is best for a boy to study. There are those who think he ought to choose only what interests him, only what may be put to immediate and practical use. There is no greater educational fallacy than this insistence that we should always make a student's work interesting, and that if he can see no practical end in what he is studying, there is no logical reason why he should go on with it. He should study, the argument is, only such subjects as he finds he has special fitness and liking for. The lines of least resistance are the lines for him to follow. "Make it easy or cut it out."
A young fellow will not always get a great deal of help by going to his father or his mother. They may not have had a high school experience themselves, and even if they have had, things are done very differently now from what they were twenty-five years ago, and educational affairs are managed in quite another way than when your father was young. Anyway fathers are often thought old-fashioned and tremendously behind the times by their young sons, and it is not always easy for boys to take the father's advice even if the fathers are willing to give it. Fathers, too, fall into the same educational jargon that they hear about them without always thinking seriously on the problems of education as they are presented to young boys.
Teachers, it is true, ought to be able to give dependable advice, because it is their business to know something definite about educational matters, but too many teachers are specialists, or think they are, and are too much impressed with the importance of the subject which they themselves teach to be able to give unprejudiced advice. It is a rare teacher who when asked will advise a boy against taking a subject which he himself teaches. As a result, in most cases, the boy is left to make his own decision and within the limits of his possible elections, to rely upon his own judgment as to what he shall study.
In making this choice he is pretty likely to be influenced by popular opinion, by what some of the other fellows are taking, and by his own personal tastes and tendencies. Few people would work if circumstances did not require it, and fewer still would voluntarily choose to do disagreeable or unpleasant things, and a young boy least of all is likely to do so. Very naturally, then, if allowed to determine his own program, he picks out what he likes best, not stopping to inquire whether or not what gives him the most pleasure is likely to do him the most good. "Why did you drop chemistry?" I asked a neighbor boy in high school not long ago.
"I didn't care for it," was his reply, "and I don't see any reason in studying anything I don't care for, do you?"
I really did, and I tried to tell him that every one has all through life, every day usually, to do many things that are not pleasing, and that the sooner one begins, the easier the task becomes.
He shies, often at what he considers difficult. If he reasons badly, he avoids, as far as possible, mathematics and chemistry and physics. If he has a poor verbal memory he passes up Latin and modern languages arguing when questioned on the subject, that he can get just as much good out of something else that he finds more to his liking. If he finds spelling difficult or the composition of themes puzzling he dodges such work as well as he can and explains his course of action by saying that he "never could spell or write a good theme, anyway." He fails in doing so to recognize the fact that one of the main purposes of education is to help him to do more easily these and other things which he may find hard to do. A normal mind can be made to work successfully along almost any line, if the boy to whom it belongs will apply himself persistently to the difficult subject. There is nothing so sure in any sort of endeavor to bring defeat as the admission at the outset that defeat is very probable, and there is no intellectual joy so sweet as the successful accomplishment of a task that was thought difficult or impossible. The boy who says he is going to fail seldom does anything else.
Just the other day a boy was telling me, with the greatest exultation showing in his face, of his experience with what the teacher had called "the hardest problem in the book." The boy did not find mathematics easy, often he was satisfied with working the simpler problems at the beginning of the assignment trusting to luck that he would not be called upon to explain any of the "stickers" when it came to the recitation. This time, however, his ambition was stirred, his "spunk was up," he said, and he determined he would work that problem if it took all night. Well, it did take mighty nearly all night, but he stuck to it, and got it right, and the joy of mental conquest was a satisfaction and an inspiration to him for the rest of his high school course. So is it to every boy who struggles. The benefits of such accomplishments, too, will not end with a boy's graduation from high school. Forty years afterwards he will still be able to feel the self-reliance which he gained through his boyish conquest of difficulty; forty years afterwards he will be stronger to meet unexpected trials by having overcome this mental hardship.
"What are you going to take next half year?" I asked Donald at mid-year.
"I don't know," he replied. "Do you know any snap course?"
The snap, whatever it is, will get a boy nowhere excepting to give him credits, and what one ought to want out of four years of high school is training that will make one happier and more able to think and that will fit one better to do the hard but necessary things of life.
Next to the interesting and the easy, the practical is what now appeals to the majority of boys. There is no sort of bunkum in educational matters that appeals now so strongly to the public as that which is presented with the label "practical" on it. It is like the old "made in Germany" which used so to appeal to us when we found it on an article in which we were interested, and it is about as cheap and worthless in its significance. Our high school courses are crammed full of subjects which are supposed to be eminently practical and which will assist those who have taken them almost immediately to make money or to get a job or to do something. Typewriting, stenography, cooking, dressmaking, millinery, plumbing, typesetting, manual training, pharmacy, business English and business arithmetic, whatever these last two subjects may be, may all be found in one or another of our high school curricula, and they appeal very strongly, some of them, to boys, because they suggest an immediate use and application of knowledge.
I am not now meaning to imply that many of them are not of use; in fact very likely each is of some benefit and may be put to immediate use more readily, apparently at least, than a good many other subjects which are in the high school course. They are more easily learned, however; they require less brain power, and they are more quickly forgotten than are those subjects that require concentration of mind and logical reasoning.
"Of what possible use could Latin be to me?" George protested the other day when his father was advising him to include it in his high school course. "I'm not going to teach, I'm not going to be a lawyer, and nobody talks Latin these days."
There is a curious, though possibly an explainable, point of view with many young people now-a-days that only the teacher or the lawyer could ever find any use for so dead a language as Latin—the teacher because everybody expects him to have had the subject, and the lawyer because many legal terms are still expressed in Latin, and the lawyer is supposed to know how to translate them. I suppose the real facts are that neither of these men needs Latin in his business more than any other intelligent or educated person does.
I am no special advocate of foreign languages, and especially of dead languages, and have no special fluency either in reading or speaking any one. I have had some training in three languages besides my native tongue, but if I am in any degree able to estimate the relative benefits to me of the various subjects which I pursued preparatory to entering college I have no hesitancy in saying that my study of Latin meant more to me than anything else I did and means more to me today. History bored me, so I worked very little at it; mathematics required little study on my part, so though I received high grades in it I really derived little discipline from it, science I liked, but it did not require any strenuous effort to get by the examinations. Latin was to me the most difficult of all. I toiled at it; I dug out laboriously each word and phrase and sentence; I committed my declensions and my paradigms with painful slowness, but I held myself to the task, and I accomplished it with rather more than average success.
I can read today, after thirty years, with some fluency every Latin text I ever studied. I got more idea of concentration and accuracy and coördination out of the subject than from anything else. It was the one thing that gave me mental discipline; it was the thing that required of me most serious study. Perhaps it might not accomplish the same result for others; perhaps for you that result would be brought about through some other means; but for me, it was the Latin that did it, so when I hear a boy say, "What possible good could Latin do me?" I tell him my story, and I try to show him that it will do for him what it did for me if he will go at it with a determination to do it well.
I once heard a practical man, one of the leading engineers of the country in fact, and a man trained at a well-known technical school in New England, make the statement that if he were given the privilege of going to school or college again he would never elect anything that was considered practical. What he really meant, he explained, was that as he saw education it is not for immediate and practical use so much as for training and discipline of the mind, for the development of ideals, for the setting of standards. High school is not so much to give a boy specific information as it is so to prepare him to get that information for himself if he ever needs it, and needing it that he may have a brain sufhiciently well trained intelligently to use the information when he gets it.
Of course it would be quite unwise and even untrue to assert that the practical things one finds in a high school course do not in a measure conduce to discipline and training of the mind. Many of them are both practical and disciplinary, but as a rule the so-called practical subjects that are more and more creeping into the high school course and that make the strongest appeal to the boy and quite as often to his parents, have little disciplinary value, have less cultural value, and are seldom used practically after the boy leaves high school. The boy who is fed-up on these subjects often has a hard time when he is called upon to work out problems which require logical and consistent thinking.
Sometimes, too, a boy is tempted to "specialize" in electing his course in high school. He makes up his mind to prepare for a definite line of work, and he begins early to load up his course with all that is offered in a single department of work. This is usually an unwise thing to do. It gives a one-sided training, it develops a rather badly balanced mind. The boy who runs to languages, or to commercial subjects, or to drawing and manual training because he likes these subjects, or because he thinks they will better prepare him for a specific sort of work, even though he is allowed to graduate from high school on such a specialized program, has missed the vital purpose of a high school course. After he has been taught to think, after he has laid a broad foundation, a boy can specialize to much better advantage in anything he likes.
So far I have seemed to be satisfied with condemning certain practices followed in choosing a course in high school, without giving much suggestion as to what is best to do. It is a foolish man, however, who spends his energies entirely in condemning and tearing down and who does not suggest something definite and constructive.
There is a certain necessary preparation which every boy should get in high school if he intends to go to college or if he is looking forward to a specific sort of work. The college entrance requirements are now about as flexible as they are likely to be made for a while, and they are about as liberal as any high school course ought to be, and yet, if one is to enter college, there are a few things which are essential in all cases, and in technical colleges there are additional requirements. For instance one can not enter any course in engineering without having a fairly thorough foundation in mathematics and physics. At least a year and a half of algebra are required with a year of plane geometry and a half year of solid geometry. Some institutions require in addition advanced algebra and trigonometry. Every high school principal is acquainted with this fact and ought to make it evident to his students, though he does not always do so. If the boy has the foresight to inquire he will undoubtedly get the information he desires, but every year I find fellows who wish to enter a course in college for which they do not have the requirements, and these requirements, had they known them, they might very easily have met.
The man who expects later in college to go on with English or chemistry or foreign language should at least find out the minimum requirements in these subjects, for entrance to college, and should meet them, so that he may not later be handicapped on account of not having done the thing which he could easily have accomplished.
There are a great many people who maintain that there is a vast difference between preparing for college and preparing for life. These people hold that because one does not expect to enter college after he is through with high school, he is therefore excusable if he omits from his course such subjects as do not appeal to him either as interesting or as practical. There is in their arguments the inference that college entrance requirements are unreasonable or freakish, or that they do not furnish a young fellow with the training that will be of any material value, or at least of the greatest value to him, should he not go to college. I believe that quite the contrary is true, and that the course prescribed for entrance to college is on the whole as good a course as a boy can select no matter what he intends doing. Such a course will teach him logical thinking, and the ability to think is quite as necessary out of college as in it; whatever one undertakes and carries through that causes him to think is of the greatest advantage to him in any later enterprise. Since no boy is likely while he is in high school absolutely to know that he will or will not go to college, the safest plan would seem to be so to choose his course in high school that he may meet the college entrance requirements should he ever want to do so.
Every boy should undertake something in high school that he finds hard to do, something that will make him bring his books home at night and do a little studying after school hours. There is always a question about the training the boy is getting who never has to do any studying at home, who never finds anything that causes him to dig, who does not know what it means to work his brain at times as hard as it is capable of working. If you will ask any man, young or old, out of what experience, mental or physical, he has received the most valuable training he will almost invariably answer that it was from the experience which forced him to work the hardest. It is through vigorous and regular exercise that any muscle or any faculty is developed.
I knew "Mike" Mason before he entered high school; and "Mike" developed later into the best two-miler the Western Conference has ever had. He had no special talents athletically at the outset, unless one should admit that persistence and willingness to work hard and to sacrifice whenever it is necessary are special talents. Mike wanted to be a good runner, and he was willing to pay the price. He trained regularly all through his high school course; he worked hard when other boys, some of them as good prospects as he, perhaps, had long ago given up the contest and had gone over to join the rooters on the bleachers; he worked hard when hard work was far from pleasant; he gave up everything that seemed to interfere with his prospects, but when he was ready for college he was beginning to be counted as one of the coming athletes of the state, and before he graduated he was known as the best runner of the middle west. And it was largely through hard work, through doing his best, through his willingness constantly to tackle something hard that Mike trained his muscles and developed his mind, and outstripped his competitors in the race.
Mr. Frank A. Vanderlip, of New York, in a recent address to young people said, "If you are starting out to make a success in life, don't choose the job that offers you the easiest time or the most money. Choose rather the one that requires the hardest work and furnishes the greatest opportunity for your development." Now a boy trains his mind as he learns a profession or trains his muscles, by putting it to the test and seeing what it can regularly do when it is pushed. It is for this reason that I should advise a boy, no matter what his regular curriculum in the high school may be, always to select some course that will give his mind a good work out.
I heard an architect say once that to be worth much in his profession an architect had to be able to do his work rapidly and to do it well. There are a great many people, he alleged, who can turn out a lot of work in a short time, but it proves inaccurate or worthless; there are a great many others whose work is beautifully and carefully done, but it takes them all summer to get anything accomplished. Neither sort of person will get far in his profession. Out of his high school course every boy should learn concentration—that is the ability to center the mind on a definite piece of work and to bring it to completion within a definite and reasonable time. Some boys learn this trick more easily than others, but it is quite possible for every boy so to acquire control of his mind that it will accomplish what he wants it to do within the time at his disposal. Possibly the best way to bring this about is through setting for himself mental "stunts" and trying to see in how short a time these may be satisfactorily accomplished, just as when we were boys we used to set for ourselves physical tasks.
"If you will get the potatoes hoed by three o'clock," mother used to say to us boys, "you can go fishing for the rest of the afternoon."
How quickly conversation and youthful horseplay stopped; the weeds fell before our devastating hoes like the Huns before the marines. We plied our task with a vigor and a persistency that brought it to a glorious finish with time to spare before three o'clock.
It is so that a boy ought to learn to drive his mind, yet few young fellows come to college or go out from high school into life with much idea of mental concentration or much training in it. Their minds have a tendency to jump from one thing to another with the skill of an acrobat. They find it difficult to concentrate their attention on a single subject for fifteen minutes, and, both in high school and college, they are handicapped by this lack of mental control.
The best student I have ever known was so not so much from superior quality or alertness of mind as from his unusual ability to concentrate and hold his attention on what he was doing. He could get more done in an hour than most fellows could accomplish in two. When he settled to his books nothing moved him or diverted his attention. He would sit for an hour never stirring a muscle excepting as he had to turn the pages of the book he was reading. When he was at work he neither spoke to his companions nor seemed to take any account of what they are doing or saying. This is a quality of mind which every boy would do well to cultivate, and it is a quality which can be developed through effort and practice.
A boy should get a certain breadth of view from his high school course. It should take him to other countries than his own and to other worlds. It should interest him in the great people and the great movements of thought of the world, and should stimulate in him a desire to read and to know more and to see more of what the world contains. It should be for him the beginning and not the end of an interest in history and science, and literature; in inventions and discoveries, and manufactures. If it is to do this, the boy must have shown interest in more than one subject in the high school; he must have done more than merely pass in the various subjects which he has elected; he must be taken out of his own narrow environment, his interest and his breadth of view must be broadened, and he must see life as a different and a better thing than it was before he took up a high school course.
A boy should get from his high school course better taste, better manners, more interest in poetry and music and art and whatever is idealistic and beautiful. He should be less selfish than when he began his course of study, more interested in other people, more ambitious.
Besides choosing subjects that will require hard work, that will develop concentration, broaden his view and develop his taste and his ideals, every boy should regularly have something in his course of study that he likes. Doing what one likes may not always be so profitable but it is more interesting than doing the difficult. Life, and especially high school life, should not be all drudgery or it will fail of its main purpose Every day's work—should be looked forward to with interest and pleasure, and this can be only when the program of studies is in some part at least pleasing to the boy. We have all eaten the carrots or the common bread and butter we had no taste for in order that we might the sooner get at the dessert which we so much more enjoyed, and we shall often find the same condition existing in the boy's attitude toward his high school course. He will stand a certain amount of unpleasant work provided there is mixed up with it something he enjoys.
The question of carrying an over-schedule often comes up. Some boys say that they always do their best work when they are carrying the heaviest intellectual load. This means that only when they are under pressure, when they are being urged on by surrounding conditions do they develop concentration and conservation of their time. It is undoubtedly true that for some temperaments this sort of goading is most conducive to good work. The less some boys have to do, the less they will do, and vice versa. Simons was one of that sort. When he carried a light schedule he loafed and cut class and fooled away his time generally. It was only when his teacher told him that he had no shadow of a chance to pass that he got down to business. When he was metaphorically pushed against the wall with some one at his throat, he roused himself and fought for his life, and he usually won the contest. He was like a man who really never makes an effort to swim until he thinks himself drowning.
Under ordinary circumstances a normal schedule is best. There is little to be gained from finishing high school ahead of one's class. It is pretty hard if not practically impossible to develop in a boy of sixteen the judgment and the power of thinking that we expect him to have at eighteen. The time element counts more than we are often willing to admit, and the high school course finished in three years is quite often worth no more than seventy-five per cent of the same course pursued normally and completed in four years. If a boy has been unlucky, if he is behind his class, then it is sometimes an advantage for him to speed up by carrying more than the normal amount. In most cases, however, it is a mistake for him to do so. A normal schedule gives a boy time to think, time to read, time to do his work well. It is always better to do a moderate amount of work with credit than to skim indifferently through twice as much. The boy who just gets by misses the most of the good that he might get out of his course.
The high school course for a very large number of boys is the end of their formal educational training; they go no further excepting as they acquire training from the practical experiences of business or industrial life. A boy should carry away from high school then, something more than a diploma inscribed with a list of the subjects he has pursued. He should have grounded himself in the elements of a number of subjects, he should have learned at least the beginnings of logical thinking and be ready to solve whatever problem is put to him, he should have some knowledge of literature, he should know how to write a correct sentence, and he should not count either reading or writing a task but rather a pleasure. His high school course should have prepared him for entrance to college, or, if that privilege is denied him, it should have given him a helpful and satisfactory training for entering upon the practical duties of life.