Documents of the Senate of the State of New York Volume 18 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1902-01-01 edition. Excerpt: ...and, after a reasonable amount of experience, succeed. If a technical education be necessary to success, as it so often is in these days, let it be obtained in the technical school. Judged by this standard our schools are doing good work and our graduates are fairly well equipped to go out into the world. That they do succeed we know from our own experience and our own observation. But we must remember that when they leave the high school they are boys and girls and we can not expect from them at once the work of adults. While it is true that the schools are doing good work, it is also true that they may do better work and that our high school graduates may be much more efficient than they are. If this were not true there would be little incentive toward school improvement. This betterment I think will come not so much through improved courses as through improved methods. We have been tinkering too much with courses of late and we have come, unconsciously perhaps, to strive after quantity rather than quality. I think that in the future we should pay less attention to extent and more to intent, less attention to the mass and more to the individual, and that we should insist on thoroughness before all things else. There is room for changes of this sort in all our schools. Each institution has its own problems and must work them out in its own way. There are two classes of schools, however, that are specially unfortunate. These are the large city high schools and the small village high schools. As in city life, so in the city high school the individual is lost in the mass. In spite of the best efforts of boards of education these schools are almost invariably overcrowded and the best qualified and the most earnest teachers can give...