Page:Collier's New Encyclopedia v. 05.djvu/29

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HIGH SCHOOLS 13 HIGH SEAS and the English High School of Boston. Horace Mann and Henry Barnard were the pioneers in the movement to estab- lish high schools in every large city of Massachusetts and Connecticut, and it is largely due to their zeal that the move- ment spread beyond New England and by the time of the Civil War had taken a firm hold on the Central and Western States. The latest available figures give the number of high schools in 1913 to be 11,277, in which are enrolled 1,134,771. The private schools were long ago eclipsed in point of numbers by the pub- lic high schools, there being but 2,168 of them with an enrollment of 148,238. Since 1914 the number of pupils going to private school has been largely in- course of study. The colleges have shown a commendable spirit of co-opera- tion in this particular, offering a large and steadily increasing number of electives in their entrance requirements. The high schools led the way in this par- ticular and the colleges followed. The objective in view is to prepare the stu- dents in the high schools for their en- trance into college and at the same time give to the vast majority who do not enter college an education that shall be useful and function in their every- day life. In recent years many high schools in addition to becoming what they really are, "city colleges," have reached to lower grades to secure their students. In many States the scholastic life of a child is divided into three parts : THE DE WITT CLINTON HIGH SCHOOL BUILDING, NEW YORK creased, because the private school more effectively meets the college entrance re- quirements, and also the increase in wealth of great numbers of the popula- tion of the United States augmented the class of people that can afford the ex- pense of a private school. It is esti- mated that even with the rapid increase in the number and size of the high schools only 23 per cent, of the children have at any time in their lives attended a school higher than the grammar grades. The percentage of those completing a high school course is barely half of the number who enter. Many high schools still have as their object the equipping of boys and girls for college, but as the greater part of the children who attend the high schools never go to college there has been ob- servable a tendency to broaden out the Vol. V- From 6 to 12, elementary education, from 12 to 14, grammar school education, and from 14 to 18 high school educa- tion. A still more recent tendency has been to establish what is called tha "Junior High School" with a course cov- ering the six years from 12 to 18, eliminating the division of grammar school education. This has been adopted mainly to give those children who can only get one year of the four year high school course a special training to fit their needs. There is little uniformity in the courses offered in the various high schools throughout the United States, the local conditions influencing their curriculums a great deal. HIGH SEAS, the open sea or ocean. The claims of various nations to exclu- sive rights and superiority over extensive -Cyc — B