High School Legislation In Oregon shall cease to oppose them." 39 The rock that had blocked the wheels of educational progress until Oregon was many years behind the rest of the country, had finally crumbled. III. The Period of Organization — 1901-1910 The third part of this paper will deal with the organiz- ation period of Oregon high schools from 1901, the date of the first general high school legislation, to the close of State Superintendent Ackerman's administration on De- cember 31, 1910. The effect of the District and County High School Law upon the development of secondary edu- cation in the state will be considered, together with the need for and enactment of further legislation. This is spoken of as the Period of Organization because the chief task of this decade was to get high schools started throughout the state. Something was done in the direc- tion of standardizing them but for this period, standard- ization was a secondary consideration. It is unfortunate that the section providing for the organization of grades above the eighth could not have been eliminated from the Daly school code when the Dis- trict and County High School Bill was introduced. Prac- tically all the village and city high schools of the state have been organized under the latter measure, but when the time came that high schools were popular in Oregon, many rural districts seized upon the short law as their sanction for requiring their teachers to give one or two years of high school work. In many of these schools, the teachers had plenty of work on their hands to take care of the elementary grades and few of them were prepared to teach the high school subjects. They were rarely pro- vided with even a minimum of equipment for teaching the advanced work. As a result, the elementary work suffered, while many of those who had taken the ad- vanced subjects went on into city high schools only to 39 Interview with Dr. William Kuykendall.
