SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLS

From the Dean's office again issues the information that graduates from public high schools are consistently more successful in their college courses than the products of private academics. The contention of the private schools that all their graduates enter colleges, while only a few picked high school graduates continue into more advanced institutions conceals with its plausibility several rather ugly holes in their armor of defense.

The duty of the preparatory schools is to prepare men for college. On the academic side this purpose is largely perverted by the attitude that sets up the entrance examinations as an end rather than a means. To push students onward to the end a system of extensive academic review occupies the final third of the preparatory school year. Months of dummy scrimmage against ghosts of past college entrance tests, while valuable in the emergency of the moment, are poor preparation for college courses where examinations are more incidental, and individual initiative must replace careful management by instructors.

What the members of preparatory schools receive in any inordinate degree is a preparation for the features of college life, unrecorded, except when carried to extremes, in the Dean's office Football, publications, activities of all sorts are bathed in holy light through out the quadrangles of many a famous church school. One studies to get into college so that he may engage in these activities on a large scale and once in this same person studies only that he may remain, and become a Big Man. The constant information that seeps back to the old school about former graduates who are now Big Men in various colleges fans this fire nowhere so violently as in the private preparatory schools.

The decline of the sort of extracurricular devotion that puts men on three publications and numerous athletic teams is so obvious in college today as to need no elucidation to a college audience, but it has not been properly understood in many private schools. High schools, owing to the decentralization of personnel and their largely vocational nature, have not suffered from this misinterpretation of college life, principally through the accident of an only distant connection with it. By their very refusal to focus their entire attention on college preparation, the high schools have unwittingly avoided mistakes. By their diversity of purpose they have discouraged undue homage to the monotheism of activities, and fostered an interest in knowledge other than as a means for passing examinations.