Bulletin of the Department ak — 
condary-School Principals — 


of the 
NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION 


SoNTEME 
jallenge of a New School; J. F. WELLEMEYER........ : | 
Trends in Secondary-School English: H. A. ANDERSON............. 8 A 


f mural Basketball Program for. Boye in the Small High 
Behoot: HAL HALL. 

















atonal Pring nr Fara 
& Public Is a Sympathetic Public: J. E. GRINNELL 
unio ia Principals’ Associations as Discussion ok: sae | 











awe Pcirning Provete::. 

Foward Improving Language Instruction. 
Gucation and International Relations 
he Future of Education in America and for Ameriedi...:-.62 ot 

b Application of Peychological Methods to Safety Bdweation..& fh 

















DEPARTMENT OF 
SECONDARY-SCHOOL PRINCIPAL. 
of the 
NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION 


OFFICERS 
1937-1938 


President: McCrex.an G. Jones 
Principal of Union High School, Huntington Beach, California 


First Vice President: ‘Pau. E. Exicxer 
Principal of Newton High School, Newtonville, Massachusetts 


Second Vice President: H. V. Kepner 
Principal of West Side High School, Denver, Colorado 


Executive Secretary: H. V. Cuurcu 
5835 Kimbark Avenue, Chicago 


EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE 


‘ K. J. CrarK 
Principal Murphy High School, Mobile, Alabama 


Vircn, M. Harpin Ms 
Principal of Pipkin and of Reed Junior High School, Springfield, Missouri — > 


Wu.tarp N. Van Srycx 
Principal of High School, Topeka, Kansas 


Joun E. Wetiwoop 
Principal Central High School, Flint, Michigan 


NATIONAL COUNCIL OF THE NATIONAL HONOR SOCIETY 


M. R. McDanten, President 
Principal of Oak Park and River Forest Township High School, 
Oak Park, Illinois 


CuHartes Forrest ALLEN 
Supervisor of Secondary Education, Little Rock, Arkansas 
L. W. Brooxs 
Principal of pia High School East, Wichita, Kansas 
Aut, E. Exicker 
Principal of Newton High School, Newtonville, Massachusetts 
H. V. Kepner 
Principal of West Side High School, Denver, Colorado 
A. E. MacQuarrie 
Principal of Washburn High School, Minneapolis, Minnesota 
H. J. Parker 
Principal of High School, Corvallis, Oregon 
Louts E. Se tye 
Principal of Fullerton Union High School and Junior College, 
Fullerton, ifornia 
W. L. SPENCER 
State Director of Secondary Education, Montgomery, Alabama 


H. V. Cuurcu, Secretary 
5835 Kimbark Avenue, Chicago 











Bulletin 


of the 


DEPARTMENT OF SECONDARY-SCHOOL 
PRINCIPALS 


National Education Association 


THE CONTENTS OF THIS BULLETIN ARE LISTED IN EDUCATION INDEX 





VOLUME 21 NOVEMBER, 1937 NUMBER 69 





THE CHALLENGE OF A NEW SCHOOL 


J. F. WELLEMEYER 
Principal, Wyandotte High School 
Kansas City, Kansas 


The Wyandotte High School of Kansas City, Kansas, has 
been in existence for over fifty years. During these years, this 
high school has run the whole gamut of secondary-school de- 
velopment in the most important period of American educa- 


tional history. Beginning as the first free secondary school of 
the community with an enrollment of thirty pupils in 1886, its 
roll to-day carries about three thousand. Its first graduating 
class was in 1887 and consisted of 11 girls; the 1936 graduat- 
ing class totaled 597 pupils. The first curriculum with five 
fixed courses, English, Latin, scientific, normal, and commer- 
cial, had little in common with the rather elaborate yet flexible 
program that developed in later years. Fifty years ago all 
learning was from a small number of textbooks. There were no 
laboratories, shops, library, or extra-curriculum program. 


Withal-this particular high school seems to have partici- 
- pated in many significant progressive movements which ap- 
» peared in American secondary education during this time; 
| handicapped always by enrollment increases too rapid to be 
| absorbed conveniently. Practices have been accepted and re- 
jected but the spirit of experimentation has always been pres- 
' ent. The institution has never been without the services of a 
- rather outstanding faculty and has never been indifferent to 
» the significance of better study techniques or the importance 

_ of providing better facilities. Like hundreds of other Ameri- 

can high schools it was always handicapped by over-enroll- 
rents, traditions, old equipment adapted to new ideas, and a 





2 DEPARTMENT OF SECONDARY-SCHOOL PRINCIPALS [November, 


naturally conservative community. Progress in later years 
was slow because the best energies of the school heads were 
exhausted in routine adjustments to make the physical plant 
adequate to mere housing needs. Destruction of the building 
in 1934 by fire was a boon, although it increased temporarily 
the list of handicaps. 


In one week following the fire our adjustment to tempo- 
rary quarters was made and the pupils returned to school. In 
about two months a complete financial program was worked 
out by the board of education and the resulting bond issue was 
approved by an overwhelming vote of the people. The selec- 
tion of an architect was not easy because our administrators 
were determined to engage as architects only men who had suc- 
cessfully planned the construction of school buildings and 
were sympathetic with actual school situations. The archi- 
tect secured and engaged, however, we were hardly prepared 
when he rather blunty enquired what sort of building we ex- 
pected him to plan. In effect his question could be phrased 
about as follows: “Gentlemen, what kind of institution is the 
new Wyandotte High School to be?” 


I think you will agree with me that such a question would 
present a challenge to any school man. Ordinarily we, move 
along, making conservative advances here and there, content 
to make appreciable progress and codperating with various 
community influences and tendencies. In the face of such an 
emergency, however, how would you answer the challenge? It 
is the purpose of this article to set forth briefly our thinking 
and planning in view of the problem presented to us in the 
challenge of a new school. 


Two things, only, were determined. A number of years 
before a beautiful twenty-eight acre site had been purchased 
by the board, and appropriately dedicated as a new high-school 
site, if and when we might be ready to build. Thus a question 
which divides many other communities, was pretty definitely 
accepted by ours. A second and most important item was that 
of total cost which was announced almost arbitrarily by our 
board at $2,000,000. The actual cost, including site and equip- 
ment, was $2,500,000; $557,000.00 was supplied by a Federal 
grant. 


Other aspects of the problem to be studied and determined 
before our architects were to be satisfied may be grouped un- 
der four heads: physical, equipment, functional, and curricu- 








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1937] THE CHALLENGE OF A NEW SCHOOL 3 


lum. Within the limits of this study, we shall discuss briefly 
selected items under each heading. 

In considering the physical aspect of the whole situation 
quite naturally the most important question would be the size 
and pupil capacity of the building and various departments. 

The number of rooms required in each department as well 
as total pupil capacity were determined by enrollment statis- 
tics extending over a period of ten years preceding. The build- 
ing was designed to accommodate a working enrollment of 
8,000 pupils, with 2,750 expected the first year. In science we 
provided eleven laboratories. Ten of these are assigned with 
eight in use full time. Forty-three academic classrooms are 
ample for some years to come. Shops were provided for wood- 
working, general metal, printing, electricity, auto mechanics, 
and mechanical drawing. Regularly scheduled to be used six 
periods daily, all shops are filled except two periods in metal 
shop and three in one of the two mechanical drawing rooms. 


The space for home-living courses provided two cooking 
laboratories and two sewing rooms. Two additional rooms 
were assigned this department for general classroom purposes. 
Vocal and instrumental music must be so placed that they do 
not disturb other departments. This was accomplished by lo- 
cating them on a top floor near the gymnasium wing. With 
art and mechanical drawing a northeast light was provided 
and the speech and dramatic quarters were located near the 
two auditoriums. Journalism is placed with the English de- 
partment, but it is provided with a city telephone and has easy 
access to the print shop. 

The library caused us some concern. Usually one plans 
a library to seat one-tenth of the enrollment. However, be- 
cause of the three fine study halls not far removed and a con- 
ference room available, we compromised with a seating ca- 
pacity of one hundred ninety in the main library. Parenthet- 
ically, one sees so many school library rooms ruined by an at- 
tempt to use some multiple of the standard classroom. These 
are invariably too narrow and present an overcrowded ap- 
pearance. The library should always be centrally located and 
Specially designed; not provided as an afterthought. 

The size of the auditorium was a problem. In a large 
high school it is practically impossible to accommodate the en- 
tire student body at one time without making the room too 
large for fine programs and dramatic performances. Our au- 
ditorium seats eighteen hundred; the acoustics are so perfect 























4 DEPARTMENT OF SECONDARY-SCHOOL PRINCIPALS [November, 


that no amplification of sound is ever necessary and the ap- 
pointments are very artistic and beautiful. We reluctantly, 
but of necessity, gave up the idea of assembling the entire 
school. The auditorium is in a separate wing and has an out- 
side entrance with facilities for cutting off the remainder of 
the building. A beautiful recital hall seating two hundred fifty 
persons and with a fully equipped stage accommodates smaller 
meetings. 

For physical education we have provided separate gym- 
nasiums for girls and for boys with their respective dressing 
and shower rooms, a swimming pool, a corrective room, and a 
health unit. Here again seating capacity for spectators reared 
its ugly head. Right or wrong, we plan to seat two thousand, 
with some extension possible, if it becomes imperative. The 
boys’ gymnasium, where public spectators are to be admitted, 
also occupies a separate wing with separate street entrance. 

The cafeteria occupies central location on the ground floor. 
There are two large dining rooms with a capacity of five hun- 
dred each, a separate entrance from outside and complete iso- 
lation from the school both as to location and sound. Our 
three study halls seat one hundred fifty each and are in direct 
corridor line opposite the library. The administrative offices 
are in the center of the building, with all offices grouped to- 
gether. Our plan also included the complete landscaping of 
the twenty-eight-acre tract. All playground, recreation, and 
parking facilities are under unit control. 

Very closely associated with the general physical aspect 
was that of equipment for the new building. In planning 
equipment certain matters of general policy are often involved. 
We believed that best results could be obtained by promoting 
classroom, unity and independence in the installation of equip- 
ment. For this reason the laboratory storerooms were large, 
fully provided for with shelving, drawers, etc., and invariably 
opened from within the classroom. The departmental teach- 
ers were asked to submit drawings of the classroom equip- 
ment set-up, including storerooms, shelving, ciosets as well as 
furniture. Standard furniture is to be found only in the aca- 
demic classrooms, and even here certain items like wall maps _ 
and charts are absolutely determined by the subject to be 
taught. 

Teachers’ desks are uniform throughout the building. 
After long consideration we decided against loose chairs and 
in favor of a pedestal desk fastened to the floor in practically 

















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all academic rooms. This naturally called for maple flooring 
in these rooms. In the physics and chemistry room one finds 
an interesting example of an attempt to promote class unity. 
In each case the room is long with laboratory tables and store- 
room at one end and class recitation equipment and teacher’s 
demonstration table at the other. All other laboratories have 
one-way tables and thus supply the dual purpose very well. In 
all special rooms where chairs are used these are uniform and 
are finished in walnut color which is uniform for all furniture 
of every kind. This holds true for the cafeteria, auditorium, 
and offices. The library has the tables and chairs specified by 
the American Library Association. It would be utterly im- 
possible to describe completely the furniture and equipment. 
Nothing but new equipment was permitted to pass our receiv- 
ing room even though some teachers wished to bring in favored 
items. Under our plan it seldom happens that responsibility 
for any item of equipment is shared by two or more teachers. 
Thus the individual teacher is held strictly accountable. 


A far more important challenge comes to us when we at- 
tempted to face the functional aspect. During the building of 
our school some tried to describe the new equipment by calling 
it a functional building. The meaning back of this statement 
seemed to emphasize the use of pupils to be accommodated. Are 
we prepared in the new building to offer an appropriate educa- 
tion to the great masses now seeking admission? College pre- 
paration is to-day only a single item. Many other needs must 
be recognized, large group teaching techniques developed and 
curriculum offerings differentiated to meet the situation so 
suddenly thrust upon us. And the equipment must reflect our 
desire to do this. - A decision was necessary as to the length 
and character of the school day. Our city is tired of the ab- 
breviated school day. During the past three years that such a 
plan has been in operation other great social changes have 
taken place. Pupils of high-school age can’t secure employ- 
ment to-day as they could even ten years ago. This condition 
will be more or less permanent, since it is right in line with 
the whole social security program. Our parents applaud when 
we begin school at 8:15 A. M. and continue until 3:00 P. M., 
but how are we attempting to justify the added time given us? 
In answer, we are requiring of each pupil at least one hour of 
study under supervision. For this reason we have built in the 
three fine study halls and the well equipped commodious li- 
brary. For this reason, as well, we have decided not to merely 


THE CHALLENGE OF A NEw SCHOOL 5 






















































6 DEPARTMENT OF SECONDARY-SCHOOL PRINCIPALS [November, 


offer a hurried snack for lunch at noon, but have equipped our 
dining halls with heavy tables and solid comfortable chairs. 
Each pupil is allowed thirty minutes for lunch, is asked to take 
a nice tray, and select a good though very reasonable meal and 
take his time to eat it. Those who bring their lunches from 
home must eat in the dining room with the others, but none 
may leave until the lunch period is over. No one leaves the 
building at noon unless on a special permit card, and these 
are issued only for an especially good reason. Thus the cafe- 
teria functions very definitely in the educational program. 

We also recognize as one duty the making of provision for 
improving the morals and unity of our student body. Assem- 
blies, school publications, athletic events, music, dramatics, 
speech, intra-mural activities; all these and others must be es- 
pecially provided for. We go further and recognize a definite 
obligation toward providing comfort and convenience. A pri- 
vate locker for each child; corridors, floored with noiseless 
linoleum block and ceiled with acoustic plaster; convenient, 
sanitary, and well-lighted toilet rooms; gymnasiums, auditor- 
iums, and swimming pool open to the sunlight; a graduate 
nurse on the job always; these are a few of the comforts pro- 
vided. Facilities for added social activity are found in the many 
meeting places for clubs, opportunities for holding banquets 
and parties under school sponsorship. Since guidance is a big 
word in our whole program, we provide a counseling room and 
teachers equipped for this task. 

Our final challenge, however, was found in the insistent 
and imperative call for a complete revision of the curriculum. 
With that we are still earnestly engaged. Last November, 
almost exactly a year ago, our intensive study started. Our 
best progress seems to come from departmental conferences 
and we hold many. Committed for years to the plan of classi- 
fication of pupils on the basis of ability, we recognize distinct 
limitations here. In addition, we must consider interests, de- 
sires and goals (vocational or other), characteristics, special 
abilities, and skills other than intellectual. We recognize a 
very distinct relation between our curriculum and the demands 
of democracy. 

Our school is large. It offers an unusual opportunity for 
differentiation. We no longer call chemistry merely chemistry, 
but group the pupils in three divisions A, B, and C. The same 
holds true for physics, history, and other courses. We call in 
an occasional curriculum expert, but always recognize that 



















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1987] THE CHALLENGE OF A NEw SCHOOL 





the obligation is ours. On the basis of our study we published 
our findings in a booklet addressed to parents and students. In 
this little book we announced five guiding principles as fol- 


lows: 

1. We believe in an appropriate and reasonable high- 
school education for all and urge upon parents and pu- 
pils alike the strict necessity of high-school graduation 
as a minimum. 

2. We believe in a differentiated curriculum designed to 
meet the actual needs of every class of students in our 
community. 

83. Vocational training in its fundamental aspects must 
continue to be a strong element in the new curriculum. 

4. We believe that a high-school education should func- 
tion in the daily lives of the boys and girls both within 
and without the school. 

5. We are confident that certain organized bodies of 
knowledge commonly known as subject matter should 
be regarded as the natural heritage of modern boys 
and girls, and that there is definite value in the acqui- 
sition of such knowledge. In such courses we shall 
ever endeavor to insist, upon accurate acquisition and 
a high degree of mastery. 


You will not all agree with me in the guiding principles 
set forth here. Many of us are not in complete accord with 


certain issues and functions of secondary education as dis- 
cussed in this BULLETIN during the past two years. What 


we have ineluded here, in answer to the challenge of the new — 


school, we have included for cause. What we have omitted 
was done with definite reason. All must function in an educa- 
tional program to accomplish definite educational objectives. 


































DEPARTMENT OF SECONDARY-SCHOOL PRINCIPALS [November, 


RECENT TRENDS IN SECONDARY-SCHOOL 
ENGLISH 


HAROLD A. ANDERSON 
Chairman, Department of English 
The University High School, University of Chicago 


The rapid democratization of the American high school 
in recent years and the findings of educational research have 
caused significant changes in the English curriculum. 

English as a high-school subject is difficult to define. 
Usually it includes all phases of instruction in the four funda- 
mental language arts: speaking, writing, reading, and listen- 
ing. Our discussion may be simplified somewhat by grouping 
these branches into the two traditional divisions, composition 
and literature. We shall deal first with composition, both oral 


and written. 

In the main, language ability is acquired spontaneously in 
the process of group living. But without conscious training it 
seldom reaches a level of effectiveness which is adequate for 
the activities of intelligent citizenship. For this reason the 
school undertakes, as one aspect of its program of preparation 
for effective citizenship, the improvement of the language in- 
strument beyond the level which is demanded by most social 
groups. 

Since language is an aspect of most experiences, training 
in its use becomes the problem of the whole school rather than 
of a single department or group of teachers. All teachers must 
be concerned with instruction in composition whenever lan- 
guage is a part of the learning or wherever experiences are 
verbalized. Whenever the need for language instruction goes 
beyond what can be accomplished by incidental instruction, 
the obligation to provide systematic and organized training 
rests with the teachers of English. In coéperation with other 
teachers they anticipate the language needs of their pupils, 
correct deficiencies observed and reported, and through group 
instruction and individual guidance provide for continuous 
growth in the power to use language effectively. The special 
responsibility of teachers of English is to provide instruction 
in the technical aspects of expression and to supervise, both 
directly and indirectly, the pupil’s language activities in all 
situations. Recognition of the principle that English is essen- 


tially not a separate subject but a responsibility of the whole 


Bt 





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RECENT TRENDS IN SECONDARY-SCHOOL ENGLISH 9 






1987) 








school is perhaps the most significant trend in secondary-school 
English. . 

In as much as language has no content of its own, the 
school provides for training in composition in connection with 
the numerous opportunities for purposeful expression which 
normal group life supplies. In his school and out-of-school 

ool . life, the pupil engages in formal group discussion and informal 
ave conversation, presides over meetings, gives talks, writes let- 
ters, prepares outlines and organizations, and writes papers of 
various kinds. The function of the English curriculum is to 
train pupils to perform these activities well. The older courses 
of study in composition, organized as they were around narra- 
tion, description, exposition, and argumentation, have given 
way to a curriculum organized around functional centers of 
expression, such as the following: 

1. Ability to engage in informal conversation and group 

discussion. 
. Ability to prepare and deliver effectively talks suita- 
ble to various occasions. | 
Ability to listen profitably to formal presentation of 
materials. 
Ability to conduct and report an interview. | 
Ability to follow parliamentary procedures in direct- 
ing and participating in debate. 
Ability to write papers of critical comment. 
Ability to write letters of various kinds suitable in con- 
tent and appropriate in form. 
Ability to select materials according to a plan and to 
st develop coherent discourse of considerable length { 
1- adapted to various purposes. 
The second major trend, then, is a shift from the college-pre- 
paratory type of English with its emphasis upon the literary 
or stylistic or artistic aspects of writing to the utilitarian use | 
of language in everyday writing and speaking. _ 
A third major trend, closely related to the first two, if not 
a corrollary of them, is the integration of instruction in com- 
position with content subjects, particularly the social studies. 
Language is the fundamental tool of thinking and of communi- 
cating and acquiring thought. Since language and thought 
are inseparably related, it follows that effective training in ex- 
pression is best associated with subjects rich in content and in 
which language processes play a prominent and vital part. 
Such correlation recognizes the essentials in developing nat- 
ural, free, and effective expression: awakening in the pupil the 
































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10 DEPARTMENT OF SECONDARY-SCHOOL PRINCIPALS [November, 


realization that he has something to say and impressing upon 
him the fact that others are genuinely interested in what he 
has to say. In other words, a teacher may stimulate pupils to 
expressional activity by bringing them into contact with what 
concerns them and moves them and by providing them with a 
true audience situation. In harmony with the general trend 
in education to integrate all learning, the modern English cur- 
riculum associates instruction in composition with the content 
subjects. 

In the field of literature, several important curriculum 
changes are taking place. Formerly, the curriculum was con- 
fined very largely to the study of a number of prescribed 
classics limited to English and American. Frequently six to 
ten weeks were spent in studying a single masterpiece. To 
this intensive reading and careful dissection of a few chosen 
classics was added the history of literature. Emphasis was 
placed not so much upon the content values of books as upon 
their literary merits and the biographies of their authors. 

No longer is reading strictly confined to a few classics 
required of every pupil regardless of his interests and apti- 
tudes. To-day, pupils read widely with considerable latitude 
in their choice of reading. It is not unusual in some schools 
for pupils to read twenty-five or even fifty books in a year. 
The courses in literature are organized with full cognizance 
of the special interests and aptitudes of pupils. This shift 
from intensive, analytical reading of a few prescribed classics, 
to extensive reading with emphasis upon content values is the 
most significant trend in the teaching of literature. 

Closely related to the major trend already described is 
the tendency to broaden the scope of the courses in literature. 
Acceptable reading lists now include the whole range of read- 
ing suitable to the age and maturity of the pupil. The lists 
contain a much larger proportion of books of travel, biogra- 
phy, adventure, and general non-fiction. Many schools recog- 
nize, too, that literature of the modern world properly includes 
not only that which is of enduring worth, but also that which 
is, or may be, of temporary importance only. The latter is 
most accessible in the numerous periodicals of to-day. Con- 
sequently, an introduction to the better adult magazines is 
frequently included in the regular courses of study. 

Emphasis upon extensive reading and upon the content 
values of books naturally results in a closer association of lit- 


erature with other subjects. One illustration will suffice to FY 








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1987] RECENT TRENDS IN SECONDARY-SCHOOL ENGLISH 11 


make clear how literature and history may be correlated. 
While the pupil is studying the Westward Movement as a unit 


' jn American history, his work in literature is organized around 


a unit entitled Pioneer Life. Much American literature re- 
creates the romance of the covered wagon, the buffalo hunt, 
the pony express, and the discovery of gold. It portrays en- 
counters with the Indians and the stern realities of the life of 
the early pioneer. The pupil’s study of history is thus en- 
riched and vitalized through reading appropriate portions of 
his heritage of American literature, and his appreciation of 
literature is enhanced by the direction and purpose given to 
his reading. It is not difficult to see that correlation has sev- 
eral features of excellence. The plan provides a vital substi- 
tute for the analytical method of dealing with literature piece- 
meal by stressing instead the reading of books as wholes. It 
furnishes, too, a functional approach by grouping the litera- 
ture of various types according to theme or content values. 
This approach appears to be a more effective means of creat- 
ing and stimulating in young people a genuine appreciation of 
their literary heritage. 

The general tendency to broaden the scope of courses in 
literature is revealed in another trend particularly noticeable 
in the last three or four years, namely, offerings in world lit- 
erature. There has been for several years a tendency to in- 
clude in all courses literature from countries other than Eng- 
land and America, especially in courses organized by types or 
themes. Very recently, schools have begun to offer separate 
courses in world literature. In response to the demand, there 
have appeared recently several excellent high-school textbooks 
or anthologies of world literature. One of these includes mod- 
ern literature in translation from the French, Spanish, Portu- 
guese, Italian, German, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, and Rus- 
sian and a rich collection of the classical literature of the 
Greeks and Romans and in the Oriental field from the Egyp- 
tian, Babylonian-Assyrian, Hebrew, Persian, Arabic, Indian, 
Chinese, and Japanese. Thus there is a wide difference be- 
tween the course of study in the high school to-day and the 
circumscribed curriculum of a decade or more ago limited as 
it usually was to a few readings from the works of English 
and American writers. 

Thus. far we have considered trends in composition and 
literature. The modern English curriculum includes areas 
which were not found in the course of study a few years ago. 





12 DEPARTMENT OF SECONDARY-SCHOOL PRINCIPALS [November, 


Among these newer areas the photoplay and the radio are the 


mast significant. Whatever our attitude may be toward the 


motion picture as a medium of education and entertainment, 
the fact remains that millions of boys and girls of high-school 
age are spending a considerable amount of time at the movies. 
And as adults to-morrow they will continue to attend the mo- 
tion picture theater. The school must accept responsibility for 
training young people to become intelligent and discriminating 
consumers of motion pictures just as it has assumed similar 
responsibilities in the fields of literature, music, and art. 

Two phases of the problem confront the school. The first 
is the task of teaching motion-picture appreciation. Boys and 
girls need assistance in setting up standards by which to evalu- 
ate the pictures they see. Improvement in the quality of the 
motion picture will result from training millions of young 
people in the schools to be critical in their selection of motion 
pictures and in their reactions to them. Notable progress in 
this direction has been made in the last five years under the 
able direction of such men, among others, as Edgar Dale, Wal- 
ter Barnes, William Lewin, and Max J. Herzberg. Mr. Dale’s 
textbook for high-school pupils entitled How to Appreciate 
Motion Pictures is not only a pioneer work but a brilliant pro- 
duction. The Photoplay as Literary Art, by Walter Barnes, 
should be read by every teacher of English. The rapidly in- 
creasing attention which English departments throughout the 
country are giving to instruction in motion-picture apprecia- 
tion indicates that the photoplay is finding a place in the Eng- 
lish curriculum as one of. the literary arts. So far we have 
been dealing with the photoplay as commercial entertainment. 
Many schools now employ motion pictures in the classroom for 
educational purposes. The use of the sound film in English 
classrooms will mark a significant trend in the next decade. 

The radio is the second area of instruction which has re- 
ceived increasing attention in the last two or three years. 
Here, also, two phases of the problem may be differentiated. 
In the first place, there is need for instruction in how to select 
radio programs intelligently and how to listen to them most 
effectively. That boys and girls spend an enormous amount 
of time at the dial of the radio is known to us all. A study 
made recently in one city revealed that pupils of high-school 
age spent an average of more than two hours a day listening 
to radio broadcasts. In 1935 it was estimated that there were 


in the United States more than twenty-one million radio 








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RECENT TRENDS IN SECONDARY-SCHOOL ENGLISH 18 





1987) 





homes. The modern school recognizes its obligation to train 
boys and girls in the wise use of this new medium of expres- 
sion. In the second place, many schools are employing the 
radio in classroom instruction. Considerable progress in this 
direction has been made in.the last year. Like the photoplay, 
the radio has a contribution to make to the teaching of Eng- 
lish. Its timeliness, its authenticity, its enrichment of emo- 
tional life, and its artistry of expression make the radio a 
unique instrument of communication. 

Our examination of the English curriculum reveals the 
six major trends: (1) composition is no longer looked upon as 
a separate subject with its own content but rather a discipline 
or tool training in which is a school-wide responsibility (2) 
there has been a shift from the former emphasis upon the lit- 
erary and artistic aspects of writing to the utilitarian use of 
language in the normal expressional situations of everyday life; 
(8) instruction in composition and literature is now closely 
integrated with the content subjects; (4) extensive reading 
from the whole range of good books with emphasis upon con- 
tent values is rapidly replacing the intensive and analytical 
study of a few prescribed classics; (5) the scope of acceptable 
reading in literature courses has been greatly broadened and 
extended; and (6) new areas have been added to the field of 
English instruction, notably the photoplay and the radio. 


SEND NEWS NOTES TO BULLETIN 


The Bulletin is interested in receiving from the offices of 
principals and others connected with secondary schools ac- 
counts of outstanding activities and accomplishments in the 
field. News items about significant developments in second- 
ary schools such as curriculum revisions and reorganizations, 
group studies, experiments, new courses, unique activities, 
problems and methods of solution, are appropriate for this 
section. Many individual schools are making important con- 
tributions to the field of secondary education. If your school 
is one of these, you can secure the educational recognition 
which it deserves for such work by sending an account of the 
contributions of importance to W. C. Reavis, 5835 Kimbark 
Avenue, Chicago. 








AN INTRAMURAL BASKETBALL PROGRAM 
*FOR BOYS IN THE SMALL HIGH SCHOOL’ 


HAL HALL 
Athletic Director, 
University High School 
Southern Illinois State Normal University 
Carbondale, Illinois 


School men have long recognized the more direct values 
that come from an interscholastic athletic program. It has 
been evident that a sanely administered program will result 
in (1) desirable physical development as a result of acquiring 
the necessary game skills, and (2) that the participant will 
absorb a number of associated learnings, closely connected 
with the activity, which enables the player to improve his 
game. Correct habits of sleep, rest, relaxation, and hygiene 
are examples of such associated learnings. A third set of 
learnings perhaps of greater importance than the first two, are 
the concomitant learnings. These refer to the desirable atti- 
tudes and ideals that may develop—concepts of sportsmanship, 
codperation with team mates, good fellowship, and wholesome 
attitudes toward play. 

A fourth group of values that are coming to be recog- 
nized more and more are those that result from student parti- 
cipation in the control and management of the athletic pro- 
gram. These afford excellent training in leadership, in excer- 
cising initiative, and in practice in democratic living. If it is 
agreed that these important results accrue to those who take 
part in interscholastic sports, how many times might these 
values be multiplied if sports were actually democratized 
through an intramural program. 

The purpose of this article is to describe a plan whereby 
the largest possible number of students may be benefitted 
through democratic participation in and control of the games. 

As in all extra-curriculum activities, the selection of a 
faculty sponsor is a vital consideration. If at all possible, the 
faculty sponsor should not be the coach, as his main interest 
is very naturally the interscholastic teams and he may look 
upon the intramural program as a feeder for his teams. If the 
school employs a director of physical education, this teacher 


1This plan may be very easily adapted to an intramural basketball 
program for the girls. 


DEPARTMENT OF SECONDARY-SCHOOL PRINCIPALS [November, 





















LD —_— — 


nae; 












15 





AN INTRAMURAL BASKETBALL PROGRAM FOR Boys 





1937] 





should have general supervision and should appoint the spon- 
sor. e 
Since one of the main objectives of the program is to give 
those who take part practice in living in a democratic situa- 
tion, it is clear then that it is desirable to have as large a 
group as possible take part in the games and in their manage- 
ment. This can best be effected through an intramural club or 
sportsman’s club to which all players and officials belong. This 


































§ club should elect officers and appoint committees to attend to 
S all necessary details. Committees should be appointed to look 
it after publicity, awards, equipment, and sportsmanship. From 
g this group should come the manager of intramural basketball, 
ll his assistant, and the student officials. 
d One of the very important tasks of the intramural club is 
is the training of the officials and the imbuing of the players 
e with the proper attitude toward them. Basketball is one game in 
if which the rules are familiar to many and poor officiating may 
@ rob the whole program of its effectiveness. The students who 
i- volunteer or who are selected by the club for this task should 
), be given rule books. They should be required to know the rules 
e thoroughly and to read Chapter I of Forrest Allen’s My Bas- 
ketball Bible and Stanley S. Feezle’s “Basketball Officiating” 
‘ in the Athletic Journal, January, 1929. 


i- The players should be requested to read Chapter VI of 
Allen’s book and Hammett and Lundgren’s book on How to 
Become an Athlete. These references discuss ethics for the 
player and the necessary training rules. The sportsmanship 
committee should be called upon to prepare several programs 
for the club on the subject of sportsmanship from the stand- 
point of player and spectator." 

Very little equipment is needed—basketballs may be. bor- 
rowed from the athletic department—but it is recommended 
that the timer’s and scorer’s implements be purchased es- 
pecially for the intramural department. A very durable and 
reliable stop watch can be bought for $2.50 from companies 
which deal in athletic goods. 

It is better practice for the boys to furnish their own 
playing outfits as constant swapping of equipment may lead 
to the spread of skin diseases. (A satisfactory gym outfit can 
be purchased for less than $1.) One scheme is to have the dif- 


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1R. E. Lindwall, Intramural Activities (1933), the appendix of this 
book contains some valuable information concerning ways to develop 
sportsmanship. 


— 

















16 DEPARTMENT OF SECONDARY-SCHOOL PrincIPALS [November, 


ferent teams to choose a color and then have the home eco- 
nomics department dye their playing shirts the prescribed hue. 

Eligibility rules should be conspicious by their absence as 
the purpose of the program is to benefit as many students as 
possible. This is also a fine opportunity to burn up some of the 
surplus energy of the school’s trouble makers. Those whose 
health will not permit and who are playing interscholastic ball 
should, however, be excluded. 

The division of the boys into teams will depend upon the 
number who turn out. If enough turn out to form two leagues 
with three or four teams to a league, then the boys may be 
separated into two groups by means of physical ability tests. 
One simple index number that can be used is computed by 
multiplying the boy’s age by four and to this figure add one- 
half his height in inches and one-half his weight in pounds. 
(For nine other physical ability tests see footnote.) 

If there are only enough players to form one league, the 
following plan works well. Enough captains should be elected 
by the group to choose the boys into teams with six to seven 
players on a side. The captains decide the order of selection 
by lot. Let us say, that there are five captains A, B, C, D, E, 
and they: have won the right to choose team mates in that 
order. The first round will go A, B, C, D, E, but the second 
round goes E, D, C, B, A. In the third round the captains 
pick team mates in this order: A, B, C, D, E. This continues 
until all the players are chosen. 

In a small school where all the boys know each other, this 
plan matches the teams very evenly. The writer has used this 
scheme for several years, and it always provides an exciting 
championship race full of upsets, one-point, and over-time 
games. 

When the captains have their team mates, the next step is 
the selection of team names. The name chosen by the boys 
must be one that will have no questionable connotations. If 
the boys are left to their own resources, they sometimes pick 
a name that the school might not like to see in print. Last 
year, the writer looked up the names of twenty-five Indian 
tribes and suggested that the boys select their names from the 
list. So enthusiastic were they that this year the list will be 
extended to include such categories as snakes, fish, wild ani- 
mals of various regions, mascots or nicknames adopted by 
leading colleges and universities. 


1R. E. Lindwall, Op. Cit., P. 31. 














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_ as the type that results from regularly watching many of the 





AN INTRAMURAL BASKETBALL PROGRAM FOR Boys 17 






1987] 


The schedule of play should be a round robin affair in 
which each team plays every other team one or more times. 
This prevents elimination of any team and keeps the whole 
group playing until the league play ends. 


The time of day the games are to be played is a most im-. 


portant consideration. Suggestions offered by various writers 
are: divide time with the varsity, have varsity practice after 
intramurals, Saturday games, have varsity turn out in the 
evening, use gymnasium in the fall and possibly in the spring 
after school, have games in the morning before school, use the 
physical education period several times a week, and have noon 
hour intramurals. 

If possible, the most desirable time to have the games will 
be within the regular school day. Before or after school or on 
Saturdays may %e times when the boys are expected to work 
at home. If the main consideration is, as it should be, the 
reaching of the largest number, then the noon hour would seem 
the logical time. 

The big objection to using the noon hour, of course, is that 
this period should be used for eating lunch and relaxation. 
Most youngsters gulp their lunch and dash out to play anyway; 
or if they go home for lunch, the procedure is many times the 
same. It would be harmful, however, for the boys to eat their 
lunch and play immediately afterwards, but this difficulty can 


be neatly side-stepped by allowing them a twenty-minute 


lunch period near the middle of the morning—10:00 or 10:30. 
This plan works out particularly well in rural communities 
where a large number of boys bring their lunch anyway. It 
might also work equally well in urban communities if the mem- 
bers of. the intramural club were sufficiently convinced of the 
desirability of playing at noon. By shifting the activity period 
to the fourth or fifth hour, several games-can be played in this 
extended noonday period. 

This plan prevents any conflict between the intramural 
program and the varsity. The boys are not deprived of play- 
ing because of having to work before and after school and the. 
scheme provides for wholesome activity during the noon hour. 

In some schools, all students are encouraged to come to 
the gymnasium after lunch to watch the games. This may de- 
velop a few cases of spectatoritis perhaps, but they will be of 
the more harmless varieties and are in no wise as harmful 















18 DEPARTMENT OF SECONDARY-SCHOOL PRINCIPALS [November, 


activities that occur down town during the noon hour. Be- 
sides, many who are watching the games to-day will be play- 
ing too in a day or so. In some school where the buildings are 
near the business district, this device has been used success- 
fully to divert the students’ interest from the less desirable 
pool room, jelly-temple environment. 


A NEW EMPHASIS IN SAFETY EDUCATION 


Greatly increased interest and activity in the field of 
safety education, particularly in instruction in safe automo- 
bile driving, have been noted recently throughout the country 
as the school is forced to assume much of the responsibility 
for reducing the tremendous annual toll of accidents on street 
and highway. 

Courses of study in safety, with special emphasis on care- 
ful conduct on street and highway, especially while driving, 
have been reported in six states: Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, 
New Hampshire, North Dakota, and Pennsylvania, while other 
states are planning such courses. During the past year in- 
struction in driving for teachers, who later would give this 
training in their colleges and high schools, was offered in 
twelve colleges and four Indian Service Schools. 

All are following a program developed by educators co- 
6perating with the American Automobile Association and are 
assisted by Professor Amos E. Neyhart, who is directing the 
Association’s driver-training activities. According to a re- 
cent survey by the A. A. A., 3,500 high schools now offer 
driver education, and about 500,000 students were reached dur- 


ing the last school year. 











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1987] THREE MAJOR FACTORS IN AMERICAN YOUTH PROBLEM 19 


THREE MAJOR FACTORS IN THE AMERICAN 
YOUTH PROBLEM 


HOMER P. RAINEY 


Director, The American Youth Commission 
Washington, D. C. 


To those who are studying the problems of secondary educa- 
tion it is clear that numerous changes in American life, some of 
which have been piling up over a long period of time and some of 
which are of more recent origin, are by their cumulative effort pro- 
ducing a crisis in secondary education. It was in recognition of 
this crisis that the American Council on Education more than two 
years ago created the American Youth Commission and instructed 
it to study all of the needs of American youth between the ages 
of twelve and twenty-five and to prepare a comprehensive program 
for their care and education. The Commission has spent two of 
the five years which were allotted to it in laying as comprehensive 
a factual foundation as possible for its thinking. As a part of its 
work it has completed the Inventory of Oncoming Youth in Penn- 
syluania, which had been begun earlier by the Department of | 
Public Instruction, in which comprehensive data were secured on 
approximately thirty thousand youths in the State of Pennsyl- 
vania over a period of eight years, from 1926 to 1934. In addition, 
it has interviewed directly approximately twenty-thousand other 
youth between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four in the State of 
Maryland, in Dallas, Texas, and in Muncie, Indiana. Futher- 
more, it has made an analysis of data from some two-hundred 
other surveys of youth that have been made in the last three or 
four years. 

This body of data has given us a broad view of the needs and 
problems of American adolescent youth. I have chosen three of 
these major issues and to present them to you with some of the 
implications which they raise. 

1. Undoubtedly one of the most fundamental issues in the 
the field of secondary education to-day has to do with the implica- 
tions growing out of our system of universal secondary education 
for all youth. There is no principle of American education that 
is more deeply imbedded in our educational philosophy than that 
of universal secondary education, and coupled with it the prin- 
ciple of equality of educational opportunities. We committed 
ourselves to these principles historically, but up until the present 
time they have never been put to a practical test for the simple 
reason that all of our youth of secondary-school age have never 
before sought to avail themselves of these opportunities. We are 





DEPARTMENT OF SECONDARY-SCHOOL PRINCIPALS [November, 


20 


rapidly approaching the time when practically all youth of sec- 
ondary-school age are going to be asking for secondary education 
at public expense. 

This simple fact, therefore, is producing one of the most 
fundamenatal issues that we have ever confronted in secondary 
education. The issue may be stated in this way: Are we going to 
face frankly the implications of our system of universal secondary 
education and prepare programs adapted to the needs, interests, and 
and capacities of all youth of secondary-school age? 

I shall short circuit a great deal of argument by asserting that 
society is faced with the obligation of providing a secondary educ- 
tion for practically all of its youth of secondary-school age whether 
it wills it or not. It is perfectly clear that the employment situa- 
tion in American life does not now demand, and will not in the 
immediate future demand, the services of youth under eighteen 
years of age, and that only a small percentage of youth under 
twenty-one years of age will really find worth-while opportunities 
in employment. Society is faced, therefore, with the very practi- 
cal problem of how to provide adequately for its youth under 
twenty-one years of age. Our schools must find a type of educa- 
tional program that is fitted to the needs of its youth. 

There is another aspect of our present situation that is highly 
significant. In the past we have thought of the common school 
as being confined to the elementary grades. We are rapidly ap- 
proaching the time when we must think of a common education 
for practically all youth under twenty or twenty-one years of age 
This is a wholly new concept of secondary education. The de- 
velopment of a program of education adequate to the implications 
of this concept is going to tax the finest educational statesmanship 
we possess. Certainly our present schools are not adapted to this 
situation. 

I cannot leave this subject without giving you some idea as 
to my concept of what the nature of this new program should be. 
A proper concept of secondary education for the future seems to 
be that of a common education for our common life. By the de- 
velopment of means of travel and communication all people have 
been drawn close together and means for the dissemination of 
knowledge and information are making it possible for all people to 
hear and to know the same things. Habits, customs, manners, 
and ways of thinking are fast becoming common to all groups and 
sections of our country. People in all classes in all sections of the 
country hear the same radio programs, read the same books from 
public libraries, see and ride in the same kind of automobiles, see 
the same moving pictures, play the same sports, and share hun- 
dreds of other things in common. They attend the same kind of 




















1987] THREE MAJOR FACTORS IN AMERICAN YOUTH PROBLEM 21 
schools, colleges, and universities; take similar courses; study the 
same textbooks; and collect the same kind of education measured 
in semester units. The common life comes whether or not we 
will it. The prime function, therefore, of universal secondary edu- 
cation is to provide a common.education for the common life of the 
whole population. 

The centrai problem of curriculum building for secondary 
education is to identify these common elements in the experiences 
of all, and to prepare materials and procedures which will insure 
that all youth have an opportunity to share in these experiences. 
These common elements of our common life, therefore, ought to 
become the core curricula for all youth in the secondary schools. 
The building of such curricula will require a thorough and funda- 
amental reorganization of the entire program of studies. These 
new materials should be developed and carefully graded for every 
level of secondary education from the first year of the junior high 
school through the junior college, and they should also be graded 
for different ability groups. 

2. A second major issue in modern secondary education relates 
to the kind of program of vocational education that is needed 
for modern conditions. There is no doubt but that this issue of 
vocational education is one of the most critical in American educa- 
tion at the present time. The President of the United States has 
recognized this issue in his unwillingness to make further federal 
appropriations for vocational education until a comprehensive 
study of the entire problem has been made. 

Our Commission has been giving a great deal of consideration 
to this problem of vocational education. The widespread appli- 
cation of technology to industry and agriculture has resulted 
everywhere in a more rapid increase in production than in employ- 
ment opportunities. This trend, which was distinguishable in 
the twenties in many of our basic industries, has become the char- 
acteristic phenomenon of the period of national recovery. Indeed, 
as the recent report of the National Resources Board discloses, 
the nation’s output increased forty-six per cent between 1929, 
with a simultaneous increase of but sixteen per cent in the nation’s 
labor force. On the other hand, while production in 1935 was 
fourteen per cent above 1920, the unit labor requirement was 
twenty-eight per cent lower. The volume of unemployment in 
1935 was accordingly nearly nine times that in 1920. Thus em- 
ployment as well as re-employment lags behind general recovery — 
and constitutes one of the most serious social and economic pro- 
blems. In fact, unless it is possible to increase our production of 
goods and services by twenty per cent, there is no prospect of 
returning to the employment levels of 1929. Futhermore, em- 





22 DEPARTMENT OF SECONDARY-SCHOOL PRINCIPALS [November, 


ployment opportunities in manufacturing and agriculture, two 
of our basic industries, are declining for the first decade in our 
national life. Nor is there any reason to expect that the service 
industries that expanded so rapidly in the twenties will not simi- 
larly reach a saturation point. 

In addition to this divergence between the increase of pro- 
ductivity and employment opportunities, there are taking place 
significant technological changes within industry itself which will 
further change the character of the work process. The scrapping 
of old equipment and the introduction of multiple units of auto- 
matic or semi-automatic machines has not only reduced the number 
of workers employed, but the amount of skill required for their 
operation has often been reduced. The repetitive nature of work 
has increased as has the labor turnover on particular operations. 
Futhermore, some recent studies of displaced workers discloses that 
the qualities which help men to rise to skilled jobs and high wages 
-while at work are of limited use in helping men to readjust satis- 
factorily when the job goes; and that the majority who did find 
jobs found them in industries or occupations other than those in 
which they were previously employed. Youth faces thus an 
occupational future in industry that is becoming more mechanized, 
less concerned with highly developed mechanical skills, less given 
to practical instruction outside the industrial plant, and more 
insecure for one with a single vocational skill. 

A system of vocational education which would be adequate in 
such a changing situation should provide for training of a short- 
term type far more diversified than ever before in respect to the 
fields in which the training is offered, participated in by both in- 
dustry and the school, and stressing opportunities for rapid and 
effective re-training. Such instruction of youth would become 
effective through the wide use of present promising beginnings of 
occupational and placement information that is provided through 
a well organized placement service. 

Futhermore, such a system of vocational education should 
recognize a three-fold responsibility upon school, community, and 
the employers. The schools should be required to provide educa- 
tional opportunities for all qualified youth on the secondary level, 
designed not primarily to impart particular techniques, but to de- 
velop such an adaptability that shifting from one job to another 
is made practicable and further designed with such resourceful- 
ness that youth in routine jobs will be able to find other life satis- 
factions in extra-occupational interests. 

What has been said above relative to vocational education 
raises the whole problem of the relationship between general and 
vocational education. Experience has shown that individual 











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1937] THREE MAJOR FACTORS IN AMERICAN YOUTH PROBLEM 23 
vocational diagnoses of youth are not practical nor very reliable 
until youth are well along into their adolescence, preferably four- 
teen to eighteen years of age. This means that differentiation 
of youth prior to the beginning of the senior high-school period is 
not advisable, and that prior to that time the program of educa- 
tion should be fairly general and uniform for all, and that emphasis. 
should be placed almost entirely upon a general or liberal educa- 
tion. There will be, of course, individual exceptions to these 
generalizations and the schools should be prepared to take these 
exceptions into account. 

The curriculum should not be thought of as designed to give 
specific training for vocations. Its primary purpose should be to 
give preparation for intelligent participation in the experiences of 
life which are shared in by all people--for general living in a modern 
community. If properly organized with suitable electives, it will. 
also supply a basis for the first level of specialization, which will 
be entered upon in the tenth or eleventh school year. 

What is here called the first level of specialization requires 
definition in order to distinguish it from the specialization pro- 
vided in technical and professional schools. The first level of 
specialization is one on which the pupil population will divide not 
merely as a result of the acceptance of the few elective opportuni- 
ties offered in connection with the core curriculum, but as a result 
of the deliberate selection of certain related groups of courses that 
involve more direct preparation for groups of pursuits. 

Modern conditions have brought into positions of importance 
parallel with those of the time-honored learned professions other 
callings, notable among which are engineering, business manage- 
ment, professional agriculture, and governmental service. Prep- 
arations for these callings is generally recognized as vocational in 
type. For the new professions courses of study are needed which 
are not included in the traditional pre-professional, classical curri- 
culum. With diminishing emphasis on the classical subjects and 
increasing demands for new courses, confusion has arisen with 
respect to the terms, liberal and vocational. The fact is that the 
only truly liberal education is that which furnishes the common 
background for cultured life and intelligent citizenship. 

In contrast with general, liberal education, vocational educa- 
tion aims at the cultivation of particular abilities. Even here, 
however, there are certain introductory forms of education which 
are comparatively broad in scope. When the vocational outlooks 
open to young people are analyzed, it becomes evident that groups 
of courses can be arranged, each group having certain common 
elements. For example, all the vocations which deal with machin- 
ery have a common background in physical science. All the voca- 








24 DEPARTMENT OF SECONDARY-SCHOOL PRINCIPALS [November, 


tions which are of the type commonly classified as commercial 
have a background in economics. The learned professions have a 
background in history and literature. 

The relation between the liberal and the vocational parts of 
the secondary-school curriculum has been a subject of violent con- 
troversy in recent years. The time has come when this contro- 
versy must end if young people are to have proper preparation 
for life. A plan of instruction must be adopted which will include 
for all pupils both vocational education and general, or liberal, 
education in the true sense of the word. The two kinds of educa- 
tion are not antithetical but supplementary. The really liberal 
curriculum is that which prepares for the common activities of all 
citizens. The vocational curriculum is that which trains pupils 
to follow the lines dictated by their individual differences. _What- 
ever the period of schooling, the school should at all times aim to 
cultivate two types of intellectual maturity, two types of inform- 
ation, and two types of interpretation of the facts known to 
modern science and letters--one vocational in its interests and appli- 
cations; one general, directly related to the common social life of 
humanity. At the beginning of secondary education, general educa- 
tion should be stressed. During the later years vocational education 
should come into prominence. 

8. The third great field of importance in secondary education 
to-day has to do with the responsibility of the schools for the em- 
ployment and vocational adjustment of youth. One of the cru- 
cial points in our youth problem which we have discovered is the 
steadily widening gap which exists between the completion of 
school on the one hand and the beginning of employment on the 
other for an increasing percentage of American youth. Society, 
therefore, is faced with the problem of finding some productive 
way to bridge this gap. The first problem that presents itself is 
that of who or what agency or agencies shall be responsible for 
helping youth make this transition. At the present time under 
our compulsory school laws, the schools are responsible for youth 
up to the end of the compulsory school period. When that stage 
is reached our youth are catapulted into society with no one re- 
sponsible for their adjustment. We have literally hundreds of 
social agencies working with and for youth, but the responsibility 
for this major problem is not centered in any agency or group. 

It is my belief that the schools are the only appropriate 
agency to assume the responsibility. However, it does not seem 
possible for practical reasons that the schools can assume the entire 
responsibility. It must be shared by other groups, such as em- 
ployers and govermental agencies, particularly the Employment 
Services. 








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1987] THREE MAJor FACTORS IN AMERICAN YOUTH PROBLEM 25 

Space will not permit more than a brief sketch of my concept 
of an adequate program to deal with this problem. The first 
essential step is the development of a cumulative youth census. 
Every state should have a continuous inventory of its oncoming 
youth. This inventory may well be a cumulative and extended 
school census and should include full educational and vocational 
data relative to all youth in the state under twenty-one years of 
age. A state cannot do basic and long-range planning to meet the 
needs of its youth unless it first has full information which only 
a cumulative census will provide. The underlying purpose of ° 
such an inventory should be to differentiate the background, ex- 
periences, capacities, interests, and present status of all youth un- 
der twenty-one so as to furnish basic material for the determin- 
ation of policies and plans that will make the optimum contri- 
bution to their educational and social needs on the one hand, and 
will best promote the welfare of society on the other. 

Such an inventory of youth ought to lay the factual founda- 
tion upon which a state should be able to approach the answer to 
such questions as the following: 

1. What are the needs for services to youth in the state? 

2. What are the institutional resources now available i in the 

state for meeting these needs for services? 

3. What, if any, additional services will be necessary to meet 

these needs? 

4, What financial resources will be available for these needs, 

and what additional resources will be required? 

The next essential step in such a program is the development 
of a new service--one which will successfully correlate the functions 
of the schools with those of the employers of labor. The first feature 
of this service must be a system for collecting occupational and 
employment data on a nation-wide scale. This can best be done 
through an employment service, national in scope, and inclusive 
in character. An adequate plan for the collection of data on em- 
ployment requires a continuous inventory of the number and types 

There is necessity for careful correlation of the work of 
the federal and state employment services with the operation 
of state unemployment insurance systems under the Social Se- 
curity Act. The most effective correlation, if it could be 
achieved, would provide that these employment exchanges 
should administer relief, unemployment insurance benefits, and 
receive all unemployment data from employers and employees 
in their respective districts. If these functions were thus cor- 
related, when one went for unemployment insurance or relief 
he would automatically register as available for work, and if 
there were appropriate work available he should not get relief. 








DEPARTMENT OF SECONDARY-SCHOOL PRINCIPALS [November, 


This service should have a central statistical office in Wash- 
ington where the data should be interpreted and made available 
for use to the entire country. This office should have a staff of 
trained research workers whose responsibility it should be to con- 
duct basic research in occupational trends, the number and types 
of jobs and men available, classification of jobs, specifications of 
job requirements, analysis of traits, aptitudes, capacities, and 
interests of individuals in relation to job requirements. 


There must also be a system for the dissemination and use of 
these data in industry, schools, colleges, universities, and for all 
other intersted groups. 


There should also be an organization in each community 
throughout the country, which will serve as a part of the national 
system. for the collection of occupational data outlined above. 
This will require the codrdination of all local agencies con- 
cerned with the problems of employment, education, and place- 
ment of youth. This means a close codperation between indus- 
try, the schools, the Employment Service, and other local 
groups and agencies. 


There should be associated with this service in each commu- 
nity a guidance center for youth, in which all local agencies should 
codperate in an analysis of community needs and opportuni- 
ties; an analysis of individual youth’s characteristics, guid- 
ance, placement, and supervision of individual youth. 


The guidance work in the schools should be definitely related 
in a functional way to this local employment service. Counsel 
in the schools, in order to be effective, must be more closely related 
to the placement of youth, for it is futile for the schools to try to 
counsel unless they also have some part in the placing of youth 
in employment. Hence, there must be developed an effective 
correlation of the schools with the Employment Service. Con- 
siderable experimentation is needed to determine the most effec- 
tive administrative and functional relationships between the 
schools and the Employment Service. 

















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BROADCASTING AS A HIGH-SCHOOL ACTIVITY 


 Boyp F, BALDWIN 
Principal, Terry High School 
Terry, Montana 


Production of radio programs by school boys and girls is be- 
coming a worthy addition to the modern school activity program. 
A thoughtful review of well established activities will reveal that 
their positions are held by reason of their educative contributions 
to young men and women. 

An activity ought to increase the participant’s contact with 
culture, and contribute to his need for vocational guidance. If 
radio broadcasting by students can successfully build interest and 
appreciations for cultural experiences, it probably is a worth-while 
activity. If, likewise, it introduces youth to new vocational possi- 
bilities, and uncovers latent abilities, then student broadcasting 
should be placed on the school’s program. 

The radio committee of the Montana Education Association 
has been interested in stimulating any use of radio facilities, which 
might thus make cultural and vocational contributions. Until 
recently most attention has been given to reception of radio within 
the classroom and its possible contributions to the school curri- 
culum. The difference between radio-receiving and radio-casting 
is peculiarly representative of the difference between academic 
pursuits and the activity program--the former tending toward a 
static condition of receptivity, the latter toward a dynamic con- 
dition of productivity. Recognizing the dynamic values of radio- 
casting the committee has been anxious to see many students 
benefactors from the movement. 

Several years ago a few schools utilized local amplifying 
equipment for the presentation of fake radio programs within 
their own building. The history department of the high school 
at Plentywood, Montana, produced historical plays for broadcast 
from a studio to a classroom. Members of the class alternated 
in writing script, broadcasting, and listening. Under this system 
programs never go on the air, but have all the practical effects of 
studio work, and can be arranged at low cost by a school removed 
from a broadcasting center. 

When the United States Office of Education offered radio 
scripts to American schools in September of 1936, the chairman 
of the state radio committee encouraged the dramatic department 
of the Terry High School to undertake the experiment. All ar- 
rangements were made and the radio cast made its initial appear- 
ance over KGHL, Billings, Montana, radio station, two hundred 


BROADCASTING AS A HiGH-ScHOOL ACTIVITY 27 
























28 DEPARTMENT OF SECONDARY-SCHOOL PRINCIPALS [November, 


miles distant. Due to this great distance Terry High School re- 
luctantly gave up the broadcasts which were continued by the 
Billings High School. 

The state radio committee undertook to publicize the broad- 
casts and to encourage listening groups in schools within the sta- 
tion area. Fan mail indicated that over one hundred rural and 
village schools enjoyed the programs. 

Other exceptional values accrued to the radio group itself. 
This new experience vitalized the music and dramatic departments 
because this project is required to meet exacting professional speci- 
fications. Directions for production of music, speech, and sound 
effects are provided by the U. S. Office of Education with scripts. 
When so prepared the project becomes an experience of value to 
both performer and listener. 

Students were brought in contact with cultural experiences 
of highest sort. The scripts were prepared by experts in radio 
writing and the materials were exceptionally well chosen. The 
U. S. Office now has a new catalogue of programs mostly centering 
around biography and science, available upon request. Music 
is available in most cases. 

The market for radio workers is good. The industry com- 
prises a vast number of artisans and tradesmen. Students thus 
have an opportunity to see them at work and to test their own 
capabilities at the microphone. 

Many schools will aspire to build their own programs and to 
give their talented students the additional training of script writ- 
ing. Local color is more easily injected when a school prepares 
its own script. One Montana high school has successfully written 
and produced a weekly series of programs. 

The Flathead County High School of Kalispell has a private 
studio connected with station KGEZ. One-half hour of broad- 
casting each week has reached into every department and given 
radio experience to more than two-hundred-fifty students during 
the past year. All radio programs are produced in the classroom 
as the result of class discussion and study. The radio dramati- 
zation, followed by cla$sroom discussion brings about broader ap- 
preciations of the subject studied. Each student receives special 
instruction in the science of radio art: developing voice, modula- 
tion, articulation, pronunciation, diction rate, tone quality, ex- 
pression, and coloring affected through voice and microphone 
placement. 

With loud speakers in all rooms, the entire student body lis- 
tens to the broadcast and gains a better conception of develop- 
ment in other departments. In this way, the broadcast serves as 
a continuous guidance agency and tends to eliminate confusion at 


















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1987] 


registration periods by familiarizing students with the actual work 
in other subjects. In addition, it informs the public of depart- 
mental achievement and contemplation. 

In one Montana city the radio station has invited the super- 
intendent of schools and his staff to act in an advisory capacity 
regarding the quality of general broadcasting. This committee 
is actively participating in the direction of program content look- 
ing toward the elimination of broadcasting objectionable to the 
aims of general education. 

The writer feels that all school officers should participate in 
the direction of general broadcasting and that all students should 
be given the opportunity to take part in the broadcasting activity. 


CITIZENSHIP BASIS OF SCHOOL’S MARKS 
JOHN LUND 


A new public high school in the Connecticut town of Ham- 
den is completing a second year of experiment with an original 
marking system. It has one thousand two hundred and fifty 
students, most of whom formerly attended high schools of the 
neighboring city of New Haven. 

In setting up this educational enterprise, the board of ed- 
ucation had resolved that building, equipment, policy, and pro- 
gram were to be modern and forward looking. The school was 
to be concerned fundamentally with effective growth of per- 
sonality and character. 

Thus the school discarded the system of marking that is 
held to foredoom a substantial number of students to failure 
before they start, stress inferiority and superiority, and chal- 
lenge children to beat the game. 

The new plan for marks and reports in this new school is, 
in brief, as follows: Three times during the year every student 
takes home an envelope containing statements of progress 
made out by the home-room teacher and each subject teacher. 
It tells whether or not the general quality of work in terms of 
this student’s ability is satisfactory. Also, whether the stu- 
dents has given evidence of satisfactory growth in the use of 
power to learn; the use of power to think independently; in 
general school citizenship; ability to complete tasks assumed ; 
making contributions to group activity; consideration for the 
rights of others; happy and harmonious adjustment; respect 
for and use of materials and equipment; the use of initiative. 


BROADCASTING AS A HIGH-SCHOOL ACTIVITY 29 












































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DEPARTMENT OF SECONDARY-SCHOOL PRINCIPALS [November, 


30 


NON-VOCATIONAL PRINTING INSTRUCTION 


FRED J. HARTMAN 
Educational Director 
The National Graphic Arts Education Guild 
Washington, D. C. 


Graphic arts education, as related to organized education, 
has developed slowly but steadily during the past twenty-five 
years. There are to-day more than two thousand five hundred 
schools, public and private, that offer some form of printing 
instruction. The total teaching staff numbers about three 
thousand. The instruction reaches no less than five hundred 
thousand young people during each school year. 

Printing, as a subject of instruction, owes its place in 
the school system to the printing industry. In 1911 the United 
Typothetae of America, an international trade association of 
master printers, started a movement for better educated and 
better trained personnel for all branches of the industry—for 
the shop, the office, and the field. The leaders of the move- 
ment, although recognizing the importance of industrial edu- 
cation of the day, were of the opinion that the plant printshop 
was the logical place for training craftsman and other techni- 
cal workers for the industry. 

These forward-looking men, however, did everything pos- 
sible to encourage the school phase of the training program, 
by supplying the source material for educational texts, by 
codperating with local school boards, and by employing an ed- 
ucator as the director of education to offer strictly education- 
al service to school administrators and teachers of printing. 
The result was that from the very beginning school instruction 
in printing got started on the right foot. 

As a result of the codperation between industry and the 
school, strange as it may seem, the development was not in the 
direction of loading the school system with large numbers of 
expensively equipped vocational schools. In the entire United 
States there are less than twenty-five strictly vocational 
schools on a secondary level that are equipped to train crafts- 
men for the printing industry. These are located more or less 
strategically, and with several private schools, such as the 
Wentworth Institute in Boston, the Dunwoody Institute at 
Minneapolis, the Chicago School of Printing, are meeting much 














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1987] NON-VOCATIONAL PRINTING INSTRUCTION 31 


of the demand for vocationally trained young people for in- 
dustry. 

It ought to be stated, lest there be misunderstanding as 
to apprenticeship and craftsmanship training for the printing 
trades, that organized labor, specifically the International 
Typographical Union and the International Pressmen and 
Assistants’ Union of North America, have well-organized train- 
ing programs independent of the public-school system. The 
former offers high grade correspondence courses to young men 
affiliated with the union as operated by the pressmen at Press- 
men’s Home, Tennessee. There is really no excuse, therefore, 
for the shortage of apprentices in the basic printing’ processes, 
except by the failure of the industry to use the training facili- 
ties that are already on hand through schools and through 
trade channels. 

The greatest and perhaps the most important develop- 
ment in graphic arts education is along the lines of non-voc- 
ational instruction in printing. The great majority of the 
educational institutions offering this type of instruction are 
senior and junior high schools. In the senior high school, 
printing, by reason of its well-known educational values, is an 
excellent industrial arts subject of instruction. For this pur- 
pose there is no need for elaborate equipment, merely work, 
and simple bindery operations. It thus becomes a laboratory 
course and, in an integrated program, has a highly stimulating 
effect upon such fundamental subjects as English and art in- 
struction. 

In the junior high school, printing instruction adapts it- 
self admirably as a finding or exploratory course for both boys 
and girls. On this level the equipment is not nearly as im- 
portant as the right type of teacher. The shop equipment 
should be the simplest possible for teaching hand composition 
only and for presswork and other elementary operations that 
do not require the use of power machinery. Some of the very 
best printing teachers in America may be found in our junior 
high schools. This is as it should be. The value of this in- 
struction, in the short time that can be alloted to it, is to stress 

the importance of printing as a means of communication; to 
point out its historic significance in the development of educa- 
tion, business, government, and religion; its modern status 
in American business and life; and the opportunities it offers 
for a worth-while career to young men and young women. In 
showing its related values to other subjects of instruction— 








32 DEPARTMENT OF SECONDARY-SCHOOL PRINCIPALS [November, 


theoretical and practical—calls for an instructor skilled not 
only in teaching technique, but with a good background of 
knowledge and training in the graphic arts processes. 


The real purpose of non-vocational instruction in printing 
in both senior and junior high schools may be designated as 
appreciation of printing. This has an academic and a practical 
significance to every: pupil in our schools. It certainly is not 
the proper function of an industrial arts course or of an ex- 
ploratory course to train directly for the industry. This is 
the work of the vocational or trade school. The fact that each 
pupil uses the printed word in his school work in the form of 
text material, school publications of various types, in the re- 
quired and non-required books, papers, magazines, that he 
reads, and varied printing material he will use for the rest of 
his life, whatever his business, profession, or calling—makes 
it necessary that he knows something of the functions and 
uses of printing. 

Printing is being considered more and more as a branch 
of fine arts and as such involves the elements of arrangement, 
balance, design, color, and certain styles and forms that con- 
form to the different style periods in American life. Higher 
schools recognize the educational and practical values; and 
hence we have colleges and universities that teach printing as 
a fine arts subject, as an engineering subject, as a manage- 
ment subject, and as a teacher-training subject. 

But to get back to the non-vocational work of the junior 
and senior high-school levels—printing adapts itself also to the 
modern student-activities program. During the past two 
years this has been tried out in the organization of student 
graphic arts clubs in some of the leading schools of printing 
in the United States. These ten objectives and purposes are 
being aimed at and, to a considerable extent, have been real- 
ized: 

1. To unite the students and instructors in the graphic arts field for 
mutual and educational benefits. 

2. To emphasize the cultural and practical aspects of graphic arts 
education. 

8. To conduct regular student projects and to award recognition for 
outstanding pupil achievements. 

4. To stimulate pupils to appreciate and to use the several methods 
of graphic duplication for personal pleasure and social betterment. 

5. To promote printing and allied processes as handicraft or manual 
arts hobbies, for now is the time boys are interested in developing hob- 
bies. 








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1937] NON-VOCATIONAL PRINTING INSTRUCTION 33 


6. To encourage schools to improve their printing courses for edu- 
cational purposes instead of using the printing department merely as a 
mechanical convenience. 

7. To encourage a wholesome, frank, personal relationship between 
students and instructors, and to relate this spirit of comradeship to com- 
munity life. 

8. To promote and develop pupil activity and leadership. 

9. To get the pupils’ viewpoint and to work with them instead of 
on them. 

10. To carry on a systematic exchange of ideas and samples of work 
between clubs and graphic arts instructors and educators. 


School administrators, alert to educational values in a 
subject of instruction that is simple and yet profound enough 
to run the whole gamut of education from the elementary 
school through the university, have not been slow in introduc- 
ing the subject in the various courses of study. The added 
fact that their school subjects, from the student-activities 
standpoint, can and does hold the active interest of that large 
group of high-school students who employ it as an extra-cur- 
riculum outlet for literary or journalistic effort, for manual 
and artistic skill, for promotion of the interests of the local 
school in the community,—as distinguished from the compara- 
tively small group that can take part in the athletic program— 
is worthy of a much wider use in the secondary schools of the 
country. 

The old idea that the school printshop is the place for 
printing the various forms, pamphlets, booklets, and student 
organs, etc., is definitely outmoded. This has not only retarded 
the educational values of printing as a subject of instruction, 
but has brought school training and activity in disrepute with 
the printing industry. The school-printing laboratory, as con- 
ceived of to-day, is not a production shop for school printing. 
It is a place for experimental study and the application of prin- 
cipals of science and of art and of educational theory. 

The high standard that had been established for printing 
instruction is due to a group of school-minded industry lead- 
ers, and to a group of industry-minded school people who have 
worked together through the years. At present the directing 
agency of these codperative bodies is The National Graphic 
Arts Education Guild, with its offices at 719 Fifteenth Street, 
N. W., Washington, D. C. 





34 DEPARTMENT OF SECONDARY-SCHOOL PRINCIPALS [November, 


AN INFORMED PUBLIC IS A SYMPATHETIC 
PUBLIC 


J. ERLE GRINNELL 
Director, Division of Liberal Arts 
The Stout Institute 
Menomonie, Wisconsin 


Up and down the streets of Middletown men and women 
talk of the high school because they talk of their children. They 
talk of the high school and they are proud of it, as they are 
proud of their children. They slap one another on the back 
in common exultation when the basketball team wins a district 
championship, or when the high-school band in spanking new 
uniforms marches down the street. The universal urge for 
victory, the love of pageantry, the parental instinct—all these 
and other instincts and emotions make our citizens friends 
and allies of the school. Unhappily, principals in general have 
been satisfied, and in normally prosperous times have not had 
their complacency jolted. When the mass of people had no in- 
sistent worries, when they could enjoy the tide of life from day 
to day and put aside a little against the college education of 
the children and their own declining days, they were not moved 
to be critical about what the children were obviously enjoying. 

But when times grew hard, when the savings stopped, 
when the normal pleasures had to be curtailed, and worry be- 
gan to be reflected in people’s features, normally indulgent citi- 
zens fell to asking questions about their tax money: Why was 
the high school costing so much? The record in a thousand 
communities reads the same. Once the questions were asked, 
citizens discovered that they knew very little of what the mod- 
ern high school was attempting. They had a vast amount of 
confused and pointless information on athletics and a general 
impression that the chief activity of the high school was extra- 
curriculum. They began to listen to what certain cranks were 
saying about fads and frills. The words were convenient and 
the argument seemed sound. They asked about the new serv- 
ices of the high school and from their informants on the 
street, and in their clubs, and at church learned little except 
that it “is beginning to look as if we’ll have to put a stop to the 
foolish expenditures of the high school and get back to funda- 
mentals.” Parents heard the criticisms and asked children 
about them. The children didn’t know of anything especially 
new. High school was fun, they were not interpreters; they 








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1937] AN INFORMED PUBLIC Is A SYMPATHETIC PUBLIC 35 


could not see or tell the educational purpose or significance of 
most of what they did. 

Little by little the criticisms grew more insistent and more 
articulate. Friends of fatter years augmented the chorus of 
disapproval. Organizations which have never been friendly 
to school expenditures were emboldened to strike. School 
boards felt growing pressure toward economies and sugges- 
tions as to what the economies might be. New departments of 
the high school were dropped, teachers were thrown out of 
work; others had to teach impossibly heavy loads in crowded 
and insanitary classrooms. Soon it became apparent to stu- 
dents of the times that education, particularly secondary edu- 
cation, was suffering more consistent and more damaging at- 
tacks than any other division of public service. 

Nor is the road ahead all bathed in sunshine. Educators 
have seen what can happen in two or three years to an intri- 
cate structure reared painstakingly through a score of years; 
and many of them have understood WHY it happened. The 
community must know the school as it knows its church and 
its own firesides. 

It must know that home economics, industrial arts, the 
cafeteria, the health service, guidance, and the club program 
are not only relatively new but extremely vital to the growth 
of the children of the community. The principal has seen that 
he must explain these activities and others through every 
means at his command; he must make the average citizen feel 
that the high school must carry on without emasculation of de- 
partments; that it cannot serve the public well unless its teach- 
ers have decent wages and time enough to stretch and breathe 
and be citizens of the community; that buildings must be kept 
in repair so that children may continue to live normal, healthy 
lives. 

Moreover, the principal has realized with a tightening of 
the jaw muscles that if he is to let the searchlight of inquiry 
and explanation play about his high school from alpha to 
omega he must have his house in order from alpha to omega. 
If he is going to teach the public to want good teachers and to 
recognize them, he must have good teachers. If he is going 
to sell modern methods of teaching to Middletown, he must 
have modern methods to sell. If he is to make the public dis- 
tinguish between athletics for the sake of winning victories 
and athletics for better bodies and cleaner lives, he must 
cleanse his athletic stables. As a matter of fact, the sooner 








36 | DEPARTMENT OF SECONDARY-SCHOOL PRINCIPALS [November, 


he begins to interpret his whole school, the sooner he is likely 
to find bad spots which if left to spread would soon corrupt. 
He must be an interpreter, and in so being he will force him- 
self to be a better principal. 


Why has all this come about? There may be a score of 
contributory reasons, but the main one is this: Principals have 
not been educated to the need of interpreting their schools to 
the public, nor trained in the means for doing it. If prin- 
cipals have had little opportunity to study school interpreta- 
tion, teachers have had even less; teachers’ colleges in the 
main have failed to see any relationship between the class- 
room and the community. A few well-planned courses are 
appearing in the larger universities of the country, and one 
may perhaps feel some little optimism. For years, a few 
prophets have insisted that the public must know more about 
the schools. The field was new; it wanted experts. Young 
men for the most part were drawn into the more established — 
fields, those in which the landmarks were better recognized, 
where teaching positions in university or teachers’ college 
were better assured. As a result principals (and teachers) 
have been graduated year after year with but the faintest 
inkling of their duties as interpreters and how to discharge 
_ those duties. 

Every principal should be a student of interpretation; if 
he cannot get a good course in a summer session, he should get 
it for himself. His course should include some basic work in 
journalism ; study of the philosophy of school interpretation ; 
organization for school interpretation ; attitudes of editors and 
characteristics of newspapers; school publications as inter- 
preters; teachers in the school and out; exhibits, demonstra- 
tions, etc.; radio and amateur movies; the school plant, and 
the community itself as interpreter through its organized 
groups. Directors of interpretation whether so titled or not 
have experimented successfully in many of the larger cities. 
A few principals have written about the visible results of their 
endeavors at interpretation and a few capable investigations 
of practice, especially in newspaper publicity, have been made. 

Some journalistic training will teach the principal that 
there are universally accepted news values. A brief examina- 
tion of each of them will prove that the school is rich in news. 
The first is timeliness—Almost every day something happens 
in a school, as in a community. An honor is bestowed, a vic- 
tory is won, an important project is completed, a fundamental 











1987] AN INFORMED PuBLic Is A SYMPATHETIC PUBLIC 37 


change is made—all of these are timely and they must be re- 
ported while the news is “hot.” Another is consequence— 
Even the dullest of readers can be made to see the consequence 
to the community of broad school movements, of health devel- 
opments and researches, of inadequate housing, of high rat- 
ings on state tests; of guidance, vocational education, and 
individualized instruction. A third is proximity—The high 
school is just down the street or around the corner. Nothing 
could be much closer to the homes of Middletown. Most im- 
portant is human interest—Drama is ever present in the 
school. Most of the worth-while developments can be reported 
in such a way as to utilize the reader’s yearning for some of 
the following: for contrasts, for achievement against odds, for 
combat, for the unusual, for sacrifice. 

Knowing how to write for newspaper readers is of tre- 
mendous importance. Many a well meant but tedious article 
about the school has been withheld by an editor to make place 
for a lively story about the gang activities of a group of junior 
high-school boys or the firing from the team of a star athlete. 
Newspaper editors want to interest their readers. Newspa- 
pers demand a style different from the style of textbooks or 
pedagogical papers. Every conscientious principal must give 
himself a course in newspaper writing. He must learn to be 
concrete, brief, and pointed. Nouns and verbs must be his 
stock in trade. He must look for the specific activity that will 
explain service. He must learn the value of pictures and some- 
thing of the art of taking them. 

Along with his fundamental work in journalism, the prin- 
cipal who would be an interpreter of his school must study all 
the means of conveying knowledge to the public. He must un- 
derstand the basic: principles of public relations in the business 
world and in his own. He should study the relative merits of 
continuous and campaign publicity; indeed, he should arrive 
at a satisfactory distinction between publicity and interpreta- 
tion. Every agency which might serve to carry his story of 
the school to the people should be scanned; every fact to be 
told should be studied that it may be made understandable and 
attractive in the telling. 

The rdéle that high-school publications may play in ex- 
plaining the school should occupy his serious attention. The 
newspaper is constantly growing in importance as the voice of 
high-school students; it is to the high-school community what 
the commercial press is to the community at large. Pupils, and 














38 DEPARTMENT OF SECONDARY-SCHOOL PRINCIPALS [November, 


back of pupils the parents, are influenced through its columns. 
Significant also in a good interpretation program are such pub- 
lications as handbooks, programs, magazines, and yearbooks. 
Allowed to take their course like Topsy they may be of little 
value to anyone. Skillfully directed in the light of a unified 
program, they may be of untold value. 

The most casual of them, the printed program, may for 
instance entertain the patron with background facts about the 
show or the concert and explain how several departments of 
the school codperated in the enterprise. Not many principals 
consider the program as of any importance except to bear in- 
formation about the specific program it announces. Making 
it attractive has not even been considered an obligation to pa- 
trons or to the school. 

The handbook is fast attaining a place of commanding im- 
portance in the larger high schools. As a means of specific 
interpretations to pupils and to parents it is invaluable. At 
little expense even small high schools may and do have good 
handbooks. Magazines and yearbooks have become more in- 
teresting rather than less interesting when designed to give 
unified and truthful impressions of school activities. 


The activities themselves must be included as a part of 
any course in school interpretation. How many athletics, dra- 
matics, musica] organizations best represent the educational 
values desired by the school? They are, as the principal must 
see, direct apostles of the school, representing ideals of edu- 
cation in concrete form. If the ideals miscarry under the blun- 
derings of stupid or selfish directors, the public will brand the 
whole school accordingly. Some types of activities such as 
assemblies and commencement programs: have been among 
leading means of conveying significant information to pupils, 
parents, and others. 

The course in school interpretation will necessarily include 
study of means of using the club program of the high school 
to establish friendly relations with the community and to fos- 
ter understandings. Character clubs, civic clubs, government 
clubs, and hobby clubs all have distinct points of contact with 
groups of the neighborhood. The more the principal can draw 
on the community in the furtherance of his club program the 
more the ideals underlying it will be manifest to the people. 
The program of public relations will lack depth and breadth 
if it does not bring the people of the community into intimate 











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1987] AN INFORMED PUBLIc Is A SYMPATHETIC PUBLIC 39 


relations with teachers and pupils at as many points as pos- 
sible. 

The pupils themselves can be good interpreters. Beyond 
maintaining a good school the principal must learn what has 
been done and what can be done to teach school objectives and 
ideals to pupils through home rooms, courses, and special talks. 
Parents can hardly be expected to get correct impressions of a 
school that the pupil understands but hazily. Not often has 
the pupil been led to see his program as a unified whole. 

At no point will the principal’s preparation for interpre- 
tation be more exacting than in his consideration of the teach- 
er’s place in the program. What part of it is connected with 
the classroom, what part with extra-class activities, and what 
with the community? Teachers are becoming aroused to their 
responsibilities and will probably be increasingly prepared to 
assume an active part in developing public understanding and 
support. 

Most principals have had some experience with exhibits, 
demonstrations, and some application of the open house idea. 
American Education Week has given much impetus to prac- 
tices of inviting the public to the schools and attempting once 
a year to demonstrate what the school is doing. The princi- 
pal will not rest with the one week of intensive interpretation. 
He will weave into every week some exhibits or demonstrations 
of the educational activities of the school. He will learn how 
he may gain the codperation of business men to give show win- 
dows for continuous exhibitions of the handiwork of pupils, or 
how he may use empty stores, as others have done, for demon- 
stration and exhibition purposes, to enable people passing to 
and from work to observe typical classes at work and to exam- 
ine pupil products in woodwork, needlework, cookery, arts and 
crafts, fine arts, inventions, and other activities. 

An exceptionally promising but as yet little developed field 
is that of amateur moving pictures and radio. The 8 milli- 
meter and 16 millimeter cameras are not expensive to operate 
and are extremely effective in teaching fundamental activities 
of the school. In Jersey City activity from kindergarten 
through high school has been depicted. Other cities have found 
both movies and radio excellent means of cultivating under- 
standings in the community. Both fields involve som@technical 
difficulties which must be studied by the interpreter. School 
photography in general is increasing in importance as a means 
of interpretation. The nation is becoming picture conscious; 











DEPARTMENT OF SECONDARY-SCHOOL PRINCIPALS [November, 


40 


it is being taught by new-type magazines to read pictures and 
brief description instead of long articles. The school must 
keep abreast of the times. 

Principals active in school interpretation have found the 
school plant itself very useful in teaching facts about the 
school. They have urged community groups to use the school 
as a community center; they have conducted groups through 
the buildings, making careful explanations of school building 
standards in relation to pupil health, comfort and learning. 
Moreover, principals are coming to see that beauty and utility 
of school grounds and buildings are in themselves a warrant 


of school ideals. 

Finally, principals will have need to make an exhaustive 
study of the community and its organized groups as interpret- 
ing agencies. Many of such groups include in their objectives 
the promotion of education. Usually they are willing to help 
if they are given some leadership. Service organizations, in 
particular, have a record of activity in taking school matters 
to the community. Community character clubs such as. the 
Boy Scouts, Campfire Girls, Y.M.C.A. and Y.W.C.A. will be 
seen to have an intimate connection with school and may serve 
to unite in better understanding the community and the high 
school. Churches, of course, have always been allies of the 
school and must not be overlooked in a thorough program of 
interpretation. Patriotic organizations have too often had 
more zeal than guidance in their educational programs. The 
principal will find need for tact and skill in directing their 
activities in behalf of his school. Women’s clubs are quick to 
help in any school project when they can see what is to be done. 
Most important of all are the parent-teacher groups. Much 
of the success of the principal’s program will depend upon the 
vigor and temper of the Parent-Teacher Association. 

The future of all public education, but especially of public 
secondary education, depends upon the extent to which prin- 
cipals recognize their new responsibility to make of themselves 
skilled interpreters of their schools. It cannot be done over- 
night or in a single year, but it can be done and will be done 


with some effort. 























41 


19387] PENNSYLVANIA PRINCIPALS’ ASSOCIATIONS 


PENNSYLVANIA PRINCIPALS’ ASSOCIATIONS 
AS DISCUSSION GROUPS 


F. G. DAvIs 
Head Department of Education, Bucknell University 
Lewisburg, Penna. 


In March, 1930, some thirty Pennsylvania high-school 
principals met in a hotel dining room to discuss school prob- 
lems and determine whether they desired to organize for co- 
Operative thinking on matters related to their profession. 
The director of secondary education for the state, told of the 
growing number of local principals’ groups and suggested that 
they perfect such an organization. There being no dissenting 
voice, the organization was quickly set up and then the men 
began to tell what they wanted to consider in future meetings. 


Here the real enthusiasm of the group was shown. The 
chairman had a bit of difficulty keeping the privilege of the 
floor in the possession of one man at a time. It seemed that 
everyone present had some problem that he was keen about 
having solved as soon as possible. They were real problems 
with which these busy men were wrestling every day. When 
the smoke cleared away, the secretary had in his minutes the 


following: 
“The meeting was a most enthusiastic one, the men being 


thoroughly alive professionally and desirous of assistance in the 
solution of their pressing problems. Some of these problems were: 
courses of study, guidance, standard tests in high school, what 
constitutes graduation, college board examination, the home room, 
ability grouping, student councils, failures, supervised study, over- 
agedness, types of diplomas, report cards, and permanent record 


cards.” 

This secondary-school principals’ association is now in the 
eighth year of its existence and the members are as enthusi- 
astic as they were on that first evening. Floods and severe 
winter weather have occasionally interrupted and cut down 
the attendance but a meeting has never been called off. No 
effort has been necessary to build up attendance artificially. 
In the winter of 1936 a questionnaire was sent to the presi- 
dents of the fifty-five associations in the State of Pennsylvania. 
Thirty-six of them returned the questionnaires carefully filled 


out. Replies indicated that the associations ranged in size 


from twelve to two hundred with a median of twenty-five. 











42 DEPARTMENT OF SECONDARY-SCHOOL PRINCIPALS [November, 


The median attendance reported was twenty-three, just two 
less than the median number of members. 

There is nothing unusual about the enthusiasm of these 
men for codperative discussion of their problems. This has 
been done since the first two hunters met in the forest and, 
by whatever means of communication they possessed, dis- 
cussed their kill for the day. They may even have considered 
better methods of snaring the elusive prey. But recently 
special emphasis is being placed on the value and possbilities 
of codperative consideration of common problems. In this 
age when the radio and movie and newspaper and billboard 
are threatening to transform education into propaganda, many 
frontier thinkers are recommending that the leaders in the 
educational field emulate the townspeople of New England 
and get together for discussion of vital problems, 

School men in Pennsylvania have reported to the Depart- 
ment of Secondary-School Principals fifty-six local associa- 
tions. Not all of these are made up exclusively of secondary- 
school principals but the problems of secondary-school prin- 
cipals are prominent in the discussions of all the organizations 
reporting. It is significant that the oldest organization report- 
ing came into being in 1918, the year in which the NEA Com- 
mittee on the Reorganization of Secondary Education came out 
with its recommended aims of secondary education. Another 
was started in 1919. When we consider the great increase 
in enrollment in secondary schools since 1920, we have one rea- 
son for the rapid growth in groups whose purpose is to study 
the problems which are constantly arising in the attempt to 
meet the needs of this increasing population. 

These groups meet from two to ten times during the 
school year, the median number of meetings being seven. 
About half of the associations hold their meetings at one place, 
the remainder moving around from place to place. One-third 
of those reporting plan their year’s program in advance while 
the remainder plan for only one meeting at a time. Only one 
in six charge membership fees. 

In 1935-36 the subjects most frequently discussed were 
guidance, records and reports, testing programs, marking 
systems, curréculum, supervision and character education, 
these subjects ranging in frequency of mention from seven 
to three. Additional topics mentioned less frequently were 
textbooks, discipline, forensics, debating, pupil progress (how 
best to determine), the credit union, adult education, reading, 














XUM 


1937] PENNSYLVANIA PRINCIPALS’ ASSOCIATIONS 43 


backward children, county music and literary league, safety, 
coéperative buying, unifying standards for large and small 
high schools, failures, promotions, significant experiments in 
secondary education, recent trends in industrial education, re- 
ports of national and state departments of secondary-school 
principals, extra-curriculum activities, community contacts, 
selection of texts and tests, testing program for all eighth- 
grade pupils, possibility of a county-guidance clinic, and inter- 
preting the schools to the public. 

A study of programs for 1936-37 reveals the following 
additional subjects of discussion: achievement, marks, honor 
rolls, awards, legislation, programs (assembly, graduation, 
etc.), public relations, reading, the library, secondary school 
and college, current educational problems, the supervising 
principal, the assignment, background for reorganization of 
schools, budgets, handwriting, how we learn, the junior high 
school, mental hygiene, philosophy of education, results of 
English projects, salary increments in fourth class districts, 
teaching mathematics, and vocational agriculture. 


Much might be gained in our principals’ associations by 
giving the patrons of the school a place on the discussion pro- 
grams. Many local organizations may be brought in for co- 
Operative consideration of these vital secondary-school prob- 
lems. Among such organizations are: parent-teacher assoc- 
iations, boy and girl scout leaders, young people’s Christian 
and Hebrew associations, Association of University Women, 
Lions, Kiwanis, Rotary, Chamber of Commerce, American 
Legion, ministerium, leaders of political parties, United States 
and State Employment services, labor leaders, legislative re- 
presentatives, librarians’ associations, government agencies 
including WPA educational leaders and CCC representatives. 
Representatives of institutions of higher education which re- 
ceive products of the high schools should participate in such 
discussions. It is even conceivable that moving picture, radio, 
and newspaper workers might be helpful in the solution of 
certain secondary-school problems. Certainly, also, all adult 
education organizations of whatever type should be welcomed 
to discussions carried on by secondary-school principals. 





Digests 


from 


Lay Magazines 


THE LEARNING PROCESS 


By KATHERINE TAYLOR 
Headmistress of Shady Hill, a school in Cambridge 
Condensed from The Atlantic, October, 1937, pp. 496-502 

8 Arlington Street, Boston, Mass. 

There will always be mystery about how learning occurs. 
Children can be given hundreds of standardized group tests, 
and the net results will be some information about the ability 
of each individual child so examined to meet the conditions of 
the test in question. But these tests do not tell us very much 
about how children learn. They tell us that certain children 
can or cannot do these specific things at this time. They do 
not tell us what has led to success or failure. 

Teachers have little chance to become complacent, for if 
they notice children at all, they realize how much that is taught 
is not learned, and how much that is learned is not taught by 
those paid to teach. Trivial subject matter may frustrate 
excellent teaching, but subject matter which has beauty, 
depth, and relation to life or to ideas, can sometimes reach 
across a wilderness of poor teaching to a child’s mind. How- 
ever, for the one who can learn despite barrenness in the teach- 
ing there are many who slip away from learning because no 
illumination of thought has occurred. 

Learning does not occur easily or casually; it requires 
discipline, careful direction, and hard work. But when work 
is related to meaning, the result is a motion towards some- 
thing definite and a deepening of discipline. If a teacher’s 
relation to his subject is superficial, the children will not be 
enlisted, since learning depends partly upon a contagion of 
thought from one person to another. 

Learning is an affair of the entire personality. If you 
listen to any young child’s questions about the things he deals 


44 














1937] DIGESTS FROM LAY MAGAZINES 45 


with, or about the nature of the universe, you cannot fail to 
see that his curiosity of mind, his zest for knowledge and for 
experience, are part of his being. To see this, and to direct 
these superb energies without letting them become dimmed or 
scattered, is part of the job of a school. 


Children fourteen years old are on the margin of adult 
living. They want to know what makes people behave as they 
do, and what is at the root of questions that concern the adults 
of their own day. Yet they often evade the questions which 
command their interest, lest they expose their inadequacy. 
The teacher of ninth-grade English devoted part of the course 
to something which would help the children to see that most 
contemporary questions are the current phases of problems 
that have existed in human society for a very long time. A 
six or seven weeks’ study was organized around a topic, which 
involved consideration of the individual in relation to author- 
ity. The class read the Constitution of the United States and 
its Amendments, in order to get some idea of what our gov- 
ernment expects from the individual and offers to him; a large 
part of the court record of the trial of Jeanne d’Arc; Bernard 
Shaw’s Saint Joan, and part of the Preface; and the Trial of 
Socrates. The Latin teacher read with them in Latin from 
the Vulgate the account of the trial of Jesus before Pilate. 
Individual members of the class worked on special topics. 
Some of the subjects were taken from literature, as the an- 
alysis of a part of Milton’s Areopagitica; some were taken 
from current affairs as an inquiry about control of broadcast- 
ing in the United States and Great Britian. 


Current issues which were related to this general idea 
were discussed. News clippings describing specific events 
were brought in, and the class attempted to discriminate be- 
tween those which were highly tinged with editorial opinion 
and those which confined themselves to the statement of fact. 
Many questions came up upon which information was wanted. 
Some of these were: How have the laws on freedom of the 
press and of speech in the United States differed in times of 
peace and in times of war? How do our laws on these subjects 
differ from those of other countries? May advertisers make 
false statements about their own or competitors’ goods? May 
soap-box orators say anything they want to? Do our laws 
discriminate against special groups? Does truth constitute 
a sure defense in a libel suit? 





46 DEPARTMENT OF SECONDARY-SCHOOL PRINCIPALS [November, 


The class organized these questions under several headings, 
and referred them to one of the parents, a lawyer. He came to 
the class and discussed some of the questions with the chil- 
dren from the point of view of the rights and obligations of 
the individual in a commonwealth. 

In the process of the work the children learned a good 
deal about how to find information from both primary and 
secondary sources. They had practice in note making and 
outlining, and in expository writing. They wrestled with a 
good many incidents in the search for the ideas within them. 
Although they could not fully assimilate these ideas, they 
perceived them and established a basis for later encounters. 

Looking back upon their own dealings with each other as 
younger children, they identified some of the motives beneath 
their behavior. They were then able to consider some of their 
present actions with the same kind of discernment. They be- 
gan to see that objective thinking comes hard and that mo- 
tives are often wrapped up in formulas which have little to do 
with the case: Socrates was “corrupting the youth”; Jesus was 
“destroying the law”; Jeanne was “a heretic”. They watched 
three great and courageous persons coping with the forces 
that were out to defeat them. 

The sequence of learning in the field of human situations 
is less apparent than in mathematics or a foreign language. 
Yet the essential elements are present. Children may be 
comparing the conditions of travel or employment in the time 
of the ancient Greeks or the American pioneers with these con- 
ditions to-day. They observe facts and find relationships. They 
learn a systematized technique. There are moments when 
concepts are unearthed, such as the idea of the heroic as it is 
seen in the Iliad, in the journal of an American family cross- 
ing the plains in a covered wagon, and some aspect of twen- 
tieth-century life. 

Learning how people have struggled to solve the problems 
of human society may help children to realize that human af- 
fairs demand much from the individual, and that in matters of 
life the evidence is never fully assembled. 

Imposed competition seems to clutter learning unneces- 
sarily. It is unrealistic in that it takes too little cognizance 
of growth or circumstance. A weak will can be kept going by 
means of external stimuli, but it is doubtful whether either 
the will or the intellect is changed for the better when sub- 
jected to the prize system. The will, thus aroused, is likely to 














— 9 


me ned 











1937] DIGESTS FROM LAY MAGAZINES 47 


attach itself to the idea of winning rather than to the idea of 
learning. Children must be kept informed regularly of their 
progress, in the terms of the work they are doing, but when a 
school uses a system of public grading and prize giving as the 
chief energizing factor in its pupils’ work, confusion of values 
seems almost inevitable. 

Occasionally one finds a child who has lost his self-confi- 
dence, or one for whom no facts or ideas seem to have any in- 
terest, or a child who is unable to look objectively at his own 
progress. Such children must for a time be shown, daily or 
weekly, a chart of their own progress. But these same chil- 
dren might be prostrated at that time by having their rela- 
tive academic standing publicly announced. They have some 
basis for competing with their own work of the previous week, 
but they have no clear basis for intellectual competition with 
their neighbor, who is a different person altogether. 

The sooner children can learn to recognize their own dif- 
ficulties, the more likely are they to lend their will power to 
solving them. The intrusion of prizes into this simple situa- 
tion adds an element of chance which obscures the facts of 
growth, of legitimate individual differences, and of the subject 
studied. It diverts the attention from the real object. 


TOWARD IMPROVING LANGUAGE 
INSTRUCTION 


By M. M. GUHIN 
Condensed from The American-German Review, September, 1937 
; pp. 39, 50, 51 
Published by Carl Schurz Memorial Foundation-Inc. 
225 South 15th St., Philadelphia, Pa. 

In 1986, a group of educators were sent to Germany, 
Austria, and other Central European countries to study their 
methods of teaching foreign languages. The objects of this 
tour were to obtain ideas that European experience might con- 
tribute to American education in this field and to promote bet- 
ter understanding between the peoples of America and Eu- 
rope. The Education Group consisted of nine men, among 
whom were Dr. Paul Packer, Dean of Education, University of 
Iowa; Dr. Aubrey Douglass, State Supervisor of Secondary 
Education for California, and Dr. M. M. Guhin, Instructor in 
Teachers College, Aberdeen, South Dakota. 








48 DEPARTMENT OF SECONDARY-SCHOOL PRINCIPALS [November, 


In Germany all children attend the Grundschule for the 
first four grades. All children do work equivalent to the 
Volkschule which ends with the eighth grade. Only about 
ten per cent of the children do the work in the Gymnasiums 
corresponding to our high schools. After the Volkschule, a 
large percentage of German children enter trade schools or 
begin their work as apprentices. Only children with good 
scholastic and citizenship records are accepted in the upper 
(high-school) classes of the Gymnasium. 

Language teaching is carried on by the direct method; 
that is, objects, pictures, movements, and class discussions 
are stressed rather than textbook work. A text is not used 
at all for the first six weeks or two months. Translations 
are not stressed and grammar is taught incidentally as the 
need arises. In the higher classes the discussions pertain to 
the life, ideals, history, and achievements of the people whose 
language is studied. Language is a means of expression. An 
effort is made to get the pupils to think in the language 
studied. The walls of the room are almost covered with pic- 
tures, graphs, maps, etc., depicting important facts in the 
history of the people. 

We were impressed with the possibilities of developing 
an intelligent, sympathetic understanding of the people whose 
language is studied by the method observed in Germany. 
French is begun the first or second year in the Realgymna- 
sium (our fifth or sixth grade) and English usually a year 
later. Making due allowance for select groups and longer 
courses, it seems as if the direct method gets results in ability 
to use the language that are not equalled by our high schools. 

The Carl Schurz Memorial Foundation project, promotion 
of international goodwill and understanding in the hope of 
ultimately eliminating the scourge of war, is surely a worthy 
altruistic objective. 


EDUCATION AND INTERNATIONAL RELA- 
TIONS 


By ELIZABETH WISKEMANN 


Condensed from The Contemporary Review, September, 1937, 
pp. 308-315. 


Published by British Periodicals, Ltd., 19 Curistor St., London E.C. 4 


International relations are profoundly affected by educa- 
tion. Not even the most arbitrary dictatorship dares to 








XUM 





ns 
ed 
ns 
he 


se 














Dicests FROM Lay MAGAZINES 49 





1987] 


take important international action without having sought to 
convince its subjects that this action was necessary and just- 
ifiable. 

In shaping the attitudes of children towards international 
questions, history is the most important subject. Here, the 
achievements of France are of interest. In 1926 the National 
Union of French Elementary Teachers decreed a boycott 
against chauvinistic history textbooks. ‘We wish to end hist- 
orical misrepresentation which contains the germs of suspi- 
cion, of hatred and of war; we hope that a great gratitude and 
a great pity will be born in them (their pupils) for all men 
of all ages and of all countries.” The teachers were backed 
by the French Trades Union Congress, and publishers found 
it impossible to sell sufficient copies of history textbooks with 
a jingoistic flavor. Typical of a group of textbooks is the 
sentence, “Pasteur, who served humanity so well, saved more 
millions of lives than ever the folly of men destroyed upon 
battlefields.” 

While the large majority of French elementary school 
teachers has had pacifist and internationalist sympathies for 
a sufficient number of years to affect the results of Parlia- 
mentary elections in spring 1986, the accession of the Blum 
cabinet removed what little resistance was offered by the 
Ministry of Education. Teachers are left almost entirely free 
to choose textbooks so long as they prepare their pupils for 
the examinations set by the state. In the secondary schools 
the teachers are divided between the Right and the Left. In 
private schools a nationalistic note prevails. In the Lycées 
and Colleges the Malet-Isaac textbooks have been generally 
used. They have been purged of everything chauvinistic. M. 
Isaac has even included an account by a German colleague 
both of the causes of the war of 1870 and of that of 1914. 

It is alleged that there can be no codperation between 
states which have strikingly different political systems. In 
France and England, however, the defense of democracy, as 
it is presented to children, is based upon the necessity for 
tolerance which provides a foundation for internationalism 
and involves the condemnation of war. Among contemporary 
German educationists there is an overwhelming number of 
assertions that history must be taught as part of the Nation- 
alist Socialist Weltanshaung, and that it is foolish for Ger- 
mans to attempt to understand anything but a German point 
of view. 








DEPARTMENT OF SECONDARY-SCHOOL PRINCIPALS [November, 


50 


The attitude to war in Nazi Germany is summed up in 
the sentence, ‘‘War the father of all things, is also our father.” 
Whereas in France history teaching has turned away from 
battles, in Germany the view is taken that in order to awaken 
comprehension of military questions, “the history of war must 
be more cherished than under the Republic.” 

The word international has been turned by Nazi ide- 
ology into a term of abuse. Modern internationalism is bit- 
terly denounced along with the Treaty of Versailles and the 
League of Nations in the history books. 

The second obstacle placed by German educationalists in 
the way of international agreement is the Race Theory. The 
Germanic race is held to be superior to all others with a mis- 
sion to rule others—how the others are to be ruled unless they 
are conquered is not clear. Nazi doctrine is taught in special 
national-political lessons, which are attended twice a week by 
all school children in Germany, with the exception of the top 
classes in the secondary schools; the Race Theory prevades 
the history lessons as well. 

The most fanatical teaching occurs in the Adolph Hitler 
Schools which prepare boys from twelve to eighteen for the 
final training of Nazi leaders. Care is taken to ensure that 
teachers are impregnated with the Nazi point of view. Stu- 
dents training to become teachers are sent to camp near some 
village on the German-Polish frontier. Here they are made to 
feel that German is superior to Slavonic culture, and that 
across the frontier there is space for Germans from over- 
populated cities. Camping expeditions are made by the Hitler 
youth groups. There is nothing in democratic countries to 
compare with this virtually compulsory state organization. 
In France, for instance, none of the scouting has anything to 
do with the state nor is there any pressure upon the boys to 
go in for it. 

The history of Germany and of Italy makes intelligible 
a reaction against anything that savours of international con- 
trol. Yet however explicable these attitudes are, the con- 
sequent educational systems are such as to tempt one to ac- 
cept the inevitability of the division of the world into politi- 
cally irreconcilable blocs. 

Two mitigating achievements, however, deserve to be 
mentioned. The reading books recently brought out in Austria 
provide an example of an authoritarianism which is not pro- 
vocative. Although in an official reading book, one finds that 











rber, 
) in 
or ” 


ken 
ust 


de- 


it- 
the 


ial 





1937] DIGESTS FROM LAY MAGAZINES 51 


democracy is condemned, and that homage is paid to military 
heroes, yet war is not praised qua war, nor are internation- 
alists decried. Whereas all the new German books refer to the 
present frontiers of the Reich as if they could not be its 
future ones, the Austrian reading books refer to the tremen- 
dous losses of Austria in 1919 without any implication that 
lost territories should be recaptured. F 

The second mitigation consists in an agreement early 
this summer between some French and German professors 
with regard to the teaching’ of history in the secondary schools. 
Late in 1935 two German historians suggested to a member 
of the French Ministry of Education the elimination of the 
most glaring discrepancies in the history textbooks in use on 
each side of the frontier. A joint memorandum had been 
compiled when, in June 1936, the German Government caused 
the transaction to be broken off. In March of that year, Herr 
Hitler had himself proposed that in education in France and 
Germany, “everything should be avoided which might be cal- 
culated to poison the relationship between the two peoples’’, so 
that this interference seemed inconsistent. Any compromise 
with the French, however, would necessitate the revocation of 
all the history books which have appeared in Germany since 
1933. 

It is all the more perplexing that in the spring of 1937 
the negotiations were allowed to be resumed, and the results 


‘were published in two educational journals in both France 


and Germany. 

The discussions were difficult especially in regard to more 
recent controversies. Over the Moroccan question (1904- 
1911) agreement was possible, but over the outbreak of the 
war in 1914, reparations, and the post-war period, the dif- 
ficulty increased. The agreement is nevertheless an astonish- 
ing achievement. The negotiators have agreed to exert all 
their influence to get their recommendations applied not only 
in secondary but even in elementary schools. In Germany it 
can scarcely be imagined that educational publications and ap- 
peals, which condemn objectivity and denounce internation- 
alism, will be effected. 











52 DEPARTMENT OF SECONDARY-SCHOOL PRINCIPALS [November, 


THE FUTURE OF EDUCATION IN AMERICA 
AND FOR AMERICA 


By WILLIAM H. KILPATRICK 
Professor Emeritus of Education, 
Teachers College, Columbia University 
(Valedictory on Retirement) 


Condensed from Vital Speeches of the Day, September 15, 1937, 
pp. 706-708. 
Published by City News Publishing Company, 
33 West 42nd Street, New York, N. Y. 


The actual educative process walks on two legs, the psycho- 
logical and the social. The American education of the future will 
continue to study both factors, but not as much as hitherto in 
separation from each other. 

It may be well at the outset to speak generally about some 
specific matters. 

1. It seems probable that our country will continue to keep 
church and state separate. However, we shall much better than 
heretofore take care of the spiritual side of child growth. 

2. The national government will very soon give aid to public 
education, primarily to equalize educational opportunity through- 
out the nation. Danger, however, will lurk in the step that na- 
tional control (particularly of the curriculum) may seek to follow 
national support. 

3. Adult education must become a recognized part of the 
public educational enterprise. Three lines of adult education 
seem to stand out: re-education along vocational lines; education 
for leisure; and, principally, the study of current social problems. 

4. The junior college bids fair to become well-nigh universal. 

5. Competitive college athletics have, in great probability, 
passed the peak of popularity. 

Besides the foregoing there are certain more important prob-, 
lems that confront American education. 

1. The scientific study of education. The early attempts at 
the scientific study of education have mistakenly counted that 
laboratory situations could be indefinitely simplified and still give 
us psychologically reliable results. It has believed that thinking, 
valuing, and personality could be analyzed into study elements 
that were non-thinking, non-valuing, non-personal. The result 
has been to slight the highest manifestations of personality and 
thus to reduce education to formal procedures. Life and educa- 
tion are too precious to be trusted to Newtonian physics. 








l 





1937] Digests FROM LAY MAGAZINES 53 

2. Democracy in education. For elementary and secondary 
education our ancestors brought from Europe an autocratic pro- 
cedure. The child was required to have his will broken. We 
now give lip-service to respect for personality, but we have not 
made general any adequate school procedures whereby democracy 
and respect for personality may be actually lived. Not only the 
classroom but the school system in its management is too often 
autocratic. My large class this summer estimated that seventy- 
five per cent of superintendents run their schools autocratically. 
According to the best opinion democracy demands that all con- 
cerned in a decision should have a hand in making the decision. 


3. The educative process. The education of the future will 
more consistently consider the whole child. Mental hygiene 
is here to stay. Also education will put before learning the im- 
proving of life qualitatively considered. The central aim will be 
to make life good for all. This will, however, succeed only as we 
remake our social-economic¢-political system so as to put life before 
private gain. We must study what constitutes the life good to 
live and how to develop this life in childhood and youth. While 
we must :nake provision in high school for specialized study along 
chosen lines, the pursuit of the good life must come first. Always 
must we put first the wish that others may live well. 


4. Educational and social change. All education tends to 
carry us in some one social direction, and it is necessary that we 
know whither our endeavors tend. Our typical school indoctri- 
nates in the ideas current fifty years ago. Pseudo-patriotic pres- 
sure groups agitate to fix this indoctrination, a practice which 
tends to make closed minds amid change. But it does not follow 
that the proponent of newer things should indoctrinate for his 
measures. If fe claim that we are right and therefore should 
indoctrinate, we are preparing the other side when it comes to 
power to make the like claim for itself. The proponent for better 
things must build a better social intelligence and trust that to act 
intelligently for us. This is the only just procedure for a school 
where citizens differ as to what is wise. 

Will America allow teachers in building the open mind to 
discuss controversial issues? Within limits, yes. Just now, most 
people in this country do not belive in free speech, that is, not for 
those who would speak on the other side. They fail to see that 
intelligent democraey must stand for all by free speech. We, as 
educators, must help our citizens to see this, and win their consent 
to make their children intelligent students. 





54 DEPARTMENT OF SECONDARY-SCHOOL PRINCIPALS [November, 


THE APPLICATION OF PSYCHOLOGICAL 
METHODS TO SAFETY EDUCATION 


By SADIE SHELLOW 
Consulting Psychologist, Milwaukee, Wisconsin 
Condensed from The Journal of Educational Sociology, September, 1937, 
pp. 9-18. 


Published by The Journal of Educational Sociology, 
26 Washington Place, New York, N. Y. 


Four thousand school children were killed by automobiles 
in the United States last year. Most of these deaths could have 
been prevented. The earliest attempts in education for safety 
were by the use of posters with such slogans as, Drive Safely ! 
Safe driving depends upon building specific safe habits. If posters 
are to be used, they should tell specifically how to perform a 
particular act safely. Motion pictures have been utilized, but 
here, horror outweighs demonstrations of specific habits of safety. 
Drivers schools are a much nearer approach to effective education, 
but they reach only a small percentage of drivers. 


If people could be educated to want to be considered safe 
drivers rather than clever ones, a real forward step would be taken 
in accident prevention. When automobiles first came into use, 
they were a luxury and were looked upon as a high-class toy. 
This toy psychology has carried over. The game is to see how 
fast one can go, or whether one can talk the officer out of a ticket. 
Social approval must be shifted from admiration for the driver 
who boasts of his narrow escapes to distinet disapproval of those 
who take chances. 


The richest field for education is, of course, among the school 
children. The establishment of any habit must be based upon an 
emotional drive. On safety education much stress has been laid 
upon fear, but there must be as strong a drive to do the right thing 
as there is fear of doing the wrong thing. 


One of the strongest emotions in children when they are mem- 
bers of a group is loyalty. If safety education can somehow be 
tied up to the spirit of loyalty, it will do much to instill attitudes 
that will promote safe behavior. Just as the boy can be encour- 
aged to keep in good physical condition so that he may play on 
the football team and win glory for the school, so he can be inter- 
ested in a contest among schools to go through the year without an 
accident to any child. A pennant presented by the police depart- 
ment, the safety commission, or the board of education, might 
serve as a reward for the efforts made by the children. 








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1937] DIGESTS FROM LAY MAGAZINES 55 


The rules of the contest might include accidents occuring any- 
where in the community. The idea that a child attending, say 
the Bancroft High School, is a safe child on all thoroughfares could 
readily be impressed, 

The training might include the making of posters illustrating 
proper ways of crossing a street and other common situations; 
talks by principals, police officers, safety experts: and weekly 
safety slogans. Each child could be stimulated to feel responsi- 
bility for every other child. For example, John would not permit 
Bill to cross in the middle of the street. The traffic officer could 
help when he saw a child about to cut in front of a car, by remind- 
ing him of the contest. 

The Lane Technical High School in Chicago has recently 
offered a course in driving. If all young people could build safe 
habits at the beginning of their driving experience, re-education 
during adulthood would not be necessary. Industrial experience 
in the prevention of accidents has pointed to the rule that the 
way to prevent accidents is to teach the beginner safe habits as 
he learns to operate any machine, and to supervise him carefully 
until those habits become automatic. If along with the drivers 
course, ideals of carefulness, pride in skill, and respect for law are 
stressed, we will find our accident fatalities dropping in proportion 
to the young people so trained. 

In some communities there has been established a Safety 
Week each year. There is a psychological value to intensive 
campaigns, and there are also disadvantages. The attention 
may be so relaxed afterwards that even more accidents occur. 
But if the whole year were devoted to a safety campaign, and each 
month featured a specific unsafe habit, improved habits could be 
formed. The schools might concentrate next month on careful 
crossing of streets, crossing with traffic, looking both ways, etc., 
until this one source of accidents would be uppermost in the con- 
sciousness of the members. This is the application of a psycho- 
logical principle; that habits are built up by constant repetition, 
and that one cannot learn too many things at once. 

The use of constructive suggestions, the tying up of the de- 
sire for safety with a fundamental motivation, the stress on the 
perfection of specific safety habits, and the constant hammering 
away at accident causes, together with methods of preventing 
them--all must be utilized in safety education. 








News Notes 


SCHOOLS OFFERING CORRESPONDENCE COURSES 
in Wisconsin are now required to submit copies of their courses 
and sales contracts to the State superintendent of public instruc- 
tion, and file an indemnity bond ranging from $2,000 to $10,000. 


DR. CHARLES H. JUDD, Chairman of the Department of 
Education, University of Chicago, has been granted leave of ab- 
sence to July, 19388, to serve as Chairman of the Committee on 
Survey of Govermental Relations to Research of the National 
Resources Committee. 


THE CURRENT VOGUE of telling stories with pictures is 
exemplified by the superintendent’s latest annual report of the 
Detroit (Michigan) public schools. Brief explanatory texts give 
parents and other interested citizens an understanding of the work 
and methods carried out in the public schools. 


FIFTY-SIX HIGH-SCHOOL BOYS AND GIRLS of Cleve- 
land recently returned from a student exchange trip to Germany. 
The journey was made in the interest of universal peace. The 
group visited many places of interest in Germany, lived for a time 
in the homes of Berlin residents, and camped in woods outside of 
Berlin for three weeks. 


ERASMUS HALL HIGH SCHOOL, in Brooklyn, celebrated 
its 150th anniversary on October 6, 7, and 8, with pageants por- 
traying Erasmus, the Dutch scholar; the Rockaway sachem 
Eskemoppas selling the land to the Dutch burghers; the Academy 
days; the transfer of the Academy to the board of education; and 
modern scene of pupils at work in various groups. 


HIGH SCHOOLS IN NORTH DAKOTA are beginning with 
the current session a new codperative marketing course pro- 


vided for in the last legislative session. The subject is an 
elective, yielding one-half unit of credit, to be offered in schools 
where there is a sufficient demand for it. A tentative course 
of study has been worked out by the State Department of Pub- 
lic Instruction for experimental use during this first year. 


FOR SIX YEARS students in the Latin department of the 
Cleveland Heights (Ohio) High School have published Hermes, an 
English-Latin paper appearing twice a semester. Income from 
the sale of single copies at five cents each is the sole support of 


56 











1987] NEws NOTES 57 


Hermes, six hundred copies of which are printed for each edition. 
This journal was started by Miss Ida J. Bouck in 1981, and last 
year won the Hildesheim Vase awarded by the Ohio Classical Con- 
ference. 


AGNES SAMUELSON, Superintendent of Public Instruction 
of Iowa, announces that the state will award a certificate for care- 
ful driving to school bus drivers during the school year of 1937-’38. 
Bus drivers eligible to receive the certificate will be the ones who 
have been employed by the school board throughout the year to 
transport pupils and who have operated the school bus in accord- 
ance with Iowa laws and the regulations of the board of education 
without accidents involving personal injury or property damage 
during the year. 


A CLOSER TIE-UP between CCC camps and the public 
schools, particularly the secondary-school system, is expected to 
result from a survey recently completed by the United States 
Office of Education. Fifteen state school systems either grant 
elementary-school certificates or high-school diplomas to CCC 
boys on special examination, or authorize state and county schools 
todoso. Nine other states are arranging to accredit CCC educa- 
tional work in the near future. Still others are providing job 
training in the camps and few give correspondence courses. 


JUNIOR ACADEMIES OF SCIENCE have developed 
steadily during the past ten years and are now reported in several 
states, including: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, 
Louisana, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Texas, and West Virginia. 
The science clubs which had previously existed in many high 
schools were brought together by the state academies as junior 
academies. The meetings of the junior academies, held in con- 
nection with those of the adult groups, are managed almost en- 
tirely by high-school students. 


DURING THE PAST FEW MONTHS the Department of 
Public Instruction of Pennsylvania has been studying the practices 
found in twenty-five cities and states regarding standards and poli- 
cies of secondary-school graduation. A conference of principals 
and superintendents was held on the subject last August. Follow- 
ing a similar conference in October for deans and registars of col- 
leges and universities, the Secondary-School Division of the De- 
partment will complete a statement concerning new secondary- 
school requirements for graduation. 


AMERICAN BOOK WEEK “Reading--the Magic Highway 
to Adventure” is to be the theme of exhibits and programs during 








58 DEPARTMENT OF SECONDARY-SCHOOL PRINCIPALS [November, 


the 1937 American Book Week, November 14-20, which has been 
observed annually since 1919 by public libraries, bookshops, teach- 
ers’ colleges, and other organizations which are concerned with 
child welfare. Information about programs and posters for 
the week may be secured by writing to Book Week Headquar- 
ters, National Association of Book Publishers, 347 Fifth Ave- 


nue, New York City. 


EUGENE B. ELLIOTT, Michigan Superintendent of Public 
Instruction, has announced the appoinment of G. Robert Koopman 
as Co-ordinating Director of Curriculum, and of John C. Parker as 
Director of the Michigan Study of Secondary-School Curriculum. 
Mr. Koopman has just completed a term as Associate Di- 
rector of Curriculum. Mr. Parker, until recently Director of Re- 
search, Curriculum, and Guidance of the Fort Worth, Texas, 
public schools, will take charge of the newly inaugurated study of 
Michigan high schools. This study is financed partly by a grant 
from the General Education Board. Earl E. Mosier, Lansing, 
Michigan, has been appointed Curriculum Associate, and Miss 
Katherine Brook, Lansing, as Research Assistant in the Division 
of Curriculum. 


INSTEAD OF THE TRADITIONAL commencement exer- 
cises with invitations, speeches, and parties, the twenty-seven 
members of the 1937 graduating class of the Herculaneum, Missouri, 
High School took a two-weeks’ tour with all expenses paid. The 
Board of Education furnished two school busses with drivers and 
the thirty dollars in cash, which had been used formerly to pay a 
commencement speaker. A fund of $450 to cover the balance of 
the expenses of the tour had been raised by the class during the 
school year. The only expense either to the student or to his 
family was ten dollars for personal incidental expenses. The 
students traveled approximately 2,400 miles. The _ itin- 
erary included four days in Washington, D. C., several days along 
the coast of New Jersey, and two days in New York City. 


EDUCATION NEWS is the title of a weekly newspaper for 
educators which was started October 1 at Minneapolis, Minnesota, 
under the editorship of Ray Blackwell, former assistant to the 
president of the University of Louisville, Kentucky. The new 
publication will report educational conventions, conferences, and 
meetings; new methods of teaching and administration; building 
activities; current contributions to educational literature; legis- 
lative acts and judicial decisions of interest to educators; educa- 
tional broadcasting and motion picture news which concerns edu- 
cators; resignations, appointments, and other personal news. Ed- 








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1937] News NOTES 59 


itorial office of Educational News is located at 420 Sexton Building, 
529 South Seventh St., Minneapolis, Minnesota. 


THE SECOND NATIONAL CONFERENCE on Educa- 
tional Broadcasting will be held at the Drake Hotel, Chicago, 
November 29, 30, and December 1, 1937. The objectives of this 
second national conference are: (1) To provide a national forum 
where interests concerned with education by radio can come to- 
gether to exchange ideas and experiences; (2) To examine and 
appraise the situation in American broadcasting as a background 
for the consideration of its present and future public service; (3) 
Toexamineand appraise the listener’s interest in programs that 
come under the general classification of public service broadcast- 
ing; (4) To examine the present and potential resources of edu- 
cation through broadcasting; (5) To examine and appraise the 
interest of organized education in broadcasting; and (6) To bring 
to a large and influential audience the findings that may become 
available from studies and researches in the general field of educa- 
tional broadcasting, particularly such studies and researches as 
may be conducted by the Federal Radio Education Committee. 


A SCHOOL WITHIN A SCHOOL is a novel experiment 
launched at the beginning of the school year at Evanston, Illi- 
nois, Township High School under the direction of Francis L. 
Bacon, principal. It is called the New School, and comprises a 
special home-room division of one hundred thirty pupils se- 
lected as a representative cross-section of the entering fresh-. 
man class. The New School is a codperative project sponsored 
jointly by the Township High School and Northwestern Uni- 
versity School of Education. The local school is offering the cus- 
tomary facilities, while the School of Education is contributing 
a Curriculum Director, who will be in charge of the instruc- 
tional policies and organization, a number of instructors, and 
the services of several specialists on the University faculty. 
New ideas, methods, and materials will be tried out and evalu- 
ated in an effort to increase the horizons of educational oppor- 
tunity for those who are especially interested, or to give appeal 
to those who might not respond with satisfaction to the tradi- 
tionally known and the historically established. 








60 DEPARTMENT OF SECONDARY-SCHOOL PRINCIPALS [November, 


GRANTS OF $8,156,250 for the part-time employment of 
needy high school students during the academic year 1937-38 
were recently announced by the National Youth Administra- 
tion. This allotment is a reduction of $2,918,750 from last 
year’s budget. Special grants amounting to $310,650, however, 
for additional young people in the ten Mid-Western states af- 
fected by the summer’s drought have been authorized. 


Since the inception of the program in 1935 the schools 
have been authorized to extend aid to a number equal to 
twelve per cent of their enrollments as of October, 1934. The 
base date now has been advanced to October, 1936, and the per- 
centage reduced to ten. Average payments of six dollars a 
month to each secondary-school student is the limit permis- 
sible under the program. On this basis aid will be extended 
to 151,000 students, but in as much as the average monthly 
payment is reduced in most schools, it is expected that ap- 
proximately 185,000 young people of secondary-school age 
will benefit from the program. 


TWO NEW BOOKLETS have been released in the American 
Council on Education Series. These are The Motion Picture in 
Education: Its Status and Its Needs (pp. 32, 10c),a survey of the 
current problems and suggested approaches to their solution), and 
Teaching with Motion Pictures A Handbook of Administrative 
Practices (pp. 67, 40c,) by Edgar Dale and Lloyd Ramseyer of 
_ Ohio State University. The latter is intended for the teacher and 

administrator and provides concrete answers to the questions 
most frequently raised pertaining to motion pictures and other 
visual teaching materials. 








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Book Notices 


Bacon, Francis L. and Kirkpatrick, James D., Editors. Shakespeare’s 
Most Popular Plays. Evanston, Illinois: Row, Peterson and Com- 
pany, 1937. Pp. 608. 


These six plays for English classes were chosen on the basis 
of a survey of curricula and courses of study to make available 
those most acceptable for high-school usage. The plan of the 
book makes possible wide variety in classroom organization and 
use in acquainting the student with thescope and significance of 
Shakespeare’s dramatic works. 

Chapman, Paul W. Occupational Guidance. Atlanta: Turner E. Smith 
and Company, 1937. Pp. xiv+632. $1.76. 

In spite of profound changes in the economic and social order, 
the responsibility for selecting and preparing for an occupation 
still remains with the individual. The author has written this 
book to help those charged with guidance responsibilities to bring 
to young people “‘an understanding of the changing patterns of 
modern vocations.” 

Dakin, Dorothy. Talks to Beginning Teachers of English. Boston: D. 

C. Heath and Company, 1937. Pp. xii+478. $2.40. 

Miss Dakin has written this book as the result of many years 
of experience in dealing with the special problems of teaching 
English in a small high school and later in larger high schools, 
supervisory work, and college teaching. 

Williamson, E. G. Students and Occupations. New York: Henry Holt 
and Company, 1937. Pp. xxiv-+437. $2.50. 

This book provides an antidote to the Horatio Alger concept 
in choosing a vocation. ‘Youth,’ he writes, “must be taught to 
approach the problem of choosing a vocation realistically by means 
of a guided and professional inventory of personal assets and liabil- 
ities and a frank appraisal of job requirements and opportunities.” 
Wesley, Edgar B. Teaching the Social Studies. Boston: D. C. Heath 

and Company, 1937. Pp. xviii+635. $2.80. 

The purpose of this volume is to synthesize the knowledge 
concerning the teaching of the social studies in the light of (1) 
the widespread interest in current affairs, (2) the increasing per- 
centage of time assigned to the social studies, and (3) the findings 
of the Report of the Commission on the Social Studies. The book 
is divided into seven parts: the foundations of the social studies, 
history and status, making the curriculum, equipment, teaching 
and learning, some recognized methods, and measurement and 
evaluation. 

61 











62 DEPARTMENT OF SECONDARY-SCHOOL PRINCIPALS [November, 


Thomas, Frank W. and Lang, Albert R. Principles of Modern Educa- 
tion. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1937. Pp. 340. $2.50. 
This volume is intended to provide a text for the culminating 

education course in teacher training to furnish the student with 

a perspective or preview of the school work upon which he is soon 

to become engaged. 

Engelhardt, Fred and Overn, Alfred V. Secondary Education. New 
York: D. Appleton-Century Company, 1937. Pp. xvi+620. $2.75. 
This book is intended primarily for students preparing for 

careers in any of the various phases of the secondary field. The 

authors have made an analysis of the historical and social factors 
affecting the development of the American secondary school, add- 
ing to it a summary of the best practices prevailing throughout 


the country. 


Grinnell, J. Erle. Interpreting the Public Schools. New York: McGraw- 
Hill Book Company, 1937. Pp. xii+360. $2.75. 


Because of the reductions in budgetary provision for edu- 
cation during the late depression a new principle, according to 
the author of this book, has evolved: “If our communities are 
to support a forwardlooking program of free public education, 
they must be told what the schools are doing for their chil- 
dren.” 

Grizzell, E. D. American Secondary Education. New York: Thomas 

Nelson and Sons, 1937. Pp. 312. $2.00. 

The author of this latest book in the field portrays secondary 
education as the “expanding effort of a democratic society to 
meet the educational needs of all its youth.”” The major function 
which the secondary school must assume is that of codrdinating 
the efforts of a wide range of social agencies in the education of 
all the youth of the community. 


An Introduction to Modern Education. Edited by Charles E. Skinner and 
R. Emerson Langfitt. Boston: D. C. Heath and Company, 1937. 


Pp. xvi+491. $2.80. 

This introductory text has been written primarily to meet 
the needs of the relatively new field of the orientation or survey 
course in education, but it is directed to school administrators 
and others interested in the field as well. Each section is written 
by an expert in his particular field. 


Norton, John K. and Norton, Margaret A. Wealth, Children and Edu- 
cation. New York: Bureau of Publications, Teachers College, Col- 


umbia University, 1937. Pp. xx+100. $2.00. 

The authors have provided in this small but compact volume 
material relating to educational economics to support their con- 
tention that the support of public education is properly a function 


of the Federal Government, 








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1937] News NOoTEs 63 


OTHER BOOKS RECEIVED 


Basic Reference Books. Prepared by Louis Shores for the American Li- 
brary Association. Chicago: The Association, 1937. Pp. x+406. 
$4.00. (Preliminary edition in paper covers, planographed.) 

Books About Jobs. Prepared by Willard E. Parker. Published for the 
National Occupational Conference by the American Library Asso- 
ran ag Chicago, 1936. Pp. xiv+402. $3.00. (Preliminary edi- 
tion. 

Brah, Stanley M. A Ten-Year Record of Apprentice, Training. Scran- 
ton, Pennsylvania: International Correspondence Schools, 1937. 
Pp. 20. (Paper.) 

Brink, William G. Directing Study Activities in Secondary Schools. Gar- 
den City, N. Y.: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1937. Pp. xiv+738. $3.00. 

Casner, Mabel B. and Peattie, Roderick. Exploring Geography. New 
York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1937. Pp. x+481. $1.96. 

Chambers, M. M. Youth-Serving Organizations. Preliminary Report 
to the American Youth Commission of the American Council on Edu- 
cation. Washington: The Council, 1937. Pp. x+327. (Plano- 
graphed, Paper.) 

Chave, Ernest J. Personality Development in Children. Chicago: Uni- 
versity of Chicago Press, 1937. Pp. xiv+354, $2.50. 

Commins, W. D. Principles of Educational Psychology. New York: The 
Ronald Press Co., 1937. Pp. xiv+596. $3.00. 

Cowardin, Samuel P. and More, Paul Elmer. The Study of English Litera- 
ture. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1936. Pp. x+405. $1.60. 

Fifth Yearbook of School Law. Edited by M. M. Chambers. Washing- 
ton: American Council on Education, 1937. Pp. 144. $1.00. (Paper.) 

—— Burton J. Bulwark of the Republic. Boston: Little, Brown 
and Company, 1937. Pp. xxviii+467. $3.50. 

Hosford, Frances Juliette. Father Shipherd’s Magna Charta. Boston: 
Marshall Jones Company, 1937. Pp. xii+180. $1.50. 

The Improvement of Education. Fifteenth Yearbook of the Department 
of Superintendence of the National Education Association. Wash- 
ington: The Association, 1937. Pp. 328. $2.00. 

Jaffe, Bernard. New World of Chemistry. New York: Silver, Burdett 
and Company, 1937. Pp. xii--+566-+xxx. $1.35 net. 

Keohane, Robert E., Keohane, Mary P., and McGoldrick, Joseph D. Gov- 
ernment in Action. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1937, 
Pp. xvi+845. $1.84. 

The New International Year Book, 1936. Edited by Frank H. Vizetelly. 
New York: Funk.& Wagnalls Company, 1937. Pp. xiv+802. 

Pelsma, John R. Essentials of Debate. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell 
Company, 1937. Pp. x+168. $1.00. 

Reeder, Ward G. An Introduction to Public-School Relations. New 
York: The Macmillan Company, 1937. Pp. xiv-+260. $2.25. 

Research Memorandum on Education in the Depression. Prepared by 
the Educational Policies Commission under the Direction of the 
Committee on Studies of Social Aspects of the Depression Bulletin 
No. 28. New York: Social Science Research Council, 1937. Pp. 
xi+173. $1.00. Bibliography on Education in the Depression. 
Washington: The National Education Association, 1937. Pp. 118. 
$.50. Both in paper covers. 

Survey of Journalism. Edited by George F. Mott. New York: Barnes 
& Noble, Inc., 1937. Pp. xxiv+376. $2.00. 

Symonds, Percival M. Education and the Psychology of Thinking. New 
York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1936. Pp. xii+306. $2.50. 

The Unique Function of Education in American Democracy. Report of 
the Educational Policies Commission of the National Education As- 
sociation and the Department of Superintendence. Washington: 

The Association, 1937. Pp. xi+129. $.50. 





STUDENT LIFE 


The Department is issuing a publication called Student 
Life, a monthly illustrated magazine about activities in the 
secondary school written for students, much of it by students. 
It is the official organ of the National Honor Society and of 
the National Association of Student Officers. It contains in- 
teresting and instructive articles about various phases of 
extra-curriculum activities, such as student forums, dramatics, 
music, art, and student government, with special features in 
the field of photography, contests, classics, and humor. 


SUBSCRIPTION PRICES 

. Single subscription price, $1.00 a year to persons not connected 
with the Department of Secondary-School Principals, the Na- 
tional Association of Student Officers, or the National Honor 
Society. 

2. In clubs of three or more, all mailed to the same address, 50 
cents per year. 

. Special price to members of the Department, to faculty sponsors 
of the National Honor Society and of the National Association of 
Student Officers, single subscription, 50 cents per year. 

. Membership fee in National Association of Student Officers of 
$1.50 includes three subscriptions mailed to the same address. 





ANNUAL CONVENTION 
February, 1938 


The annual convention of the Depart- 
ment of Secondary- School Principals 
will be held at Atlantic City, New Jer- 
sey, from February 26 to March 2, 1938. 
Hotel Traymore will be the Depart- 
ment Headquarters. 











DIRIECTORY NUMBER 
The December issue of the BULLETIN will be the annual 
directory number. If there has been a change in your posi- 
tion or address since the issue of the Directory of last year, 
or if there is any other correction of the entry under your name 
to be made, please communicate with the Executive Secretary 
at once, 5835 Kimbark Avenue, Chicago.