Tomorrow's High School

Progressive Education has passed its high-school test. An unofficial supreme court of educators, delivering its verdict in the famed Eight-Year Study this week, found that graduates of Progressive preparatory schools were more successful in college than their contemporaries. Many considered its report (The Story of the Eight-Year Study; Harper; $1.75) a death sentence for the traditional system of U.S. high-school education.

The study began in 1932, when 300 liberal arts colleges gave the Progressive Education Association a green light to experiment by agreeing to admit graduates of 30 Progressive schools without the usual entrance requirements. The 30 schools, ranging from Denver's public high schools to Massachusetts' swank Milton Academy, eventually delivered four classes (1936 to 1939) to the colleges. A staff of impartial college judges paired each of 1,475 Progressive students with a conventional-school graduate of the same intelligence, sex, age, interests, family background.

Result: the judges found that the Progressive students got slightly better marks from their professors (2.52 v. 2.48); won more academic honors (Phi Beta Kappa, et al.); were more precise and systematic in their thinking, more resourceful in meeting practical problems; read more books; did more dancing; went to more concerts; took a keener interest in world affairs; went out for more extracurricular activities; were elected to more student offices. Clinching fact: graduates of the six most progressive schools had the best record, the biggest margin of superiority over their fellows.

How They Did It. In the light of these findings, The Story of the Eight-Year Study (author: Ohio State's Wilford M. Aikin) may outline the high-school pattern of the future. It begins with a dismaying picture (as of 1933) of the nation's junior and senior high schools, which almost 10,000,000 U.S. youngsters attend yearly. The investigating commission found the schools dull and unchallenging, lacking in a central purpose, their graduates not even "competent in the use of the English language." Though five out of six high school graduates do not go to college, college preparation was still the schools' prime goal.

From this background, the 30 schools jumped off into empty space. Given a free hand to build an entirely new curriculum that would serve all their students, they floundered, philosophized, struck out in all directions. They launched courses ranging from The Progress of Man Through the Ages to Football from the Spectator's Point of 'View. Eventually they gathered principals, teachers, parents and students and sat down to get their bearings. Their decision: "A school is something more than curriculum and teaching. It is a society in itself, composed of young people and adults living and working together."

Thereupon the schools addressed themselves to problems of living and working. To their students this meant learning how to study, to choose and get a job, to get along with one's family, to solve the problems of sex, marriage, food, clothes, houses, government, "the meaning of life."

Because few textbooks told the students and teachers what they wanted to know, they did their own research. In Boston a school reported: "We use the city we live in as a kind of demonstration laboratory for elementary economics, civics, science and architecture." In Tulsa, students started and helped carry through a revamping of the city's park system. One Tulsa junior high-school class took over as their own "problem house" a shack on the outskirts of town (just bought by a pair of newlyweds) and helped the couple rebuild, furnish, landscape and budget their home. One of the most Progressive school systems in the study, Tulsa also built two model Progressive high schools, named one for Will Rogers.

Teachers, parents and students all took a hand in running the schools. Because the problems of no two communities were exactly alike, each school had to chart its own road. Teachers, no longer able to discharge their duties by assigning lessons from a textbook and listening to recitations, had to learn their job all over again. Says Author Aikin: "The teacher has always had the leading role in schools everywhere. In democracy's high school his part becomes even more important. He does not merely play his assigned part; he helps select the play and is concerned with the whole production."

Upshot. The 30 schools proposed these prime objectives for U.S. high-school education: 1) every student should learn to read, write and speak the English language with skill and understand mathematics; 2) cut-&-dried textbook teaching should give way to teaching about the problems of modern living; 3) the concerns of U.S. youth should be the heart of the curriculum; 4) the schools should promote students' physical, mental and emotional health; 5) their "one clear central purpose" should be "to bring to every young American his great heritage of freedom . . . inspire devotion to human welfare."

Many a college educator heartily seconded these objectives. Canvassing his own faculty, Columbia's Dean Herbert E. Hawkes, an adviser to the commission, reported that they "wanted boys who could read with good speed and comprehension . . . who had a reasonable facility in self-expression . . . who knew how to tackle a hard intellectual job and carry it through to completion . . . who knew an idea when they saw one."

To free U.S. high schools to pursue these objectives, said the commission, colleges must drop their old entrance requirements, adopt new ones that will not prescribe high-school curricula. The commission's proposal: let colleges choose students on the basis of 1) their all-around high-school record, 2) scholastic-aptitude tests, 3) other new tests (such as the commission itself has developed) which measure a candidate's character and abilities instead of his specific knowledge.

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