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These grammar and Latin schools served a yery smlal percentage of society-—approximately a tenth of the population, those ■who made up the lawyers, doctors, ° and gentlemen farmers.
After World War 1, it was agreed that many of the people had lacked educational advantages. A change was needed. Everything else was changed, so a change was expected in the education system, too.
The changes came—by the thousands. Like all change, the pendulum swung from ope extreme to the other. The public schools became a wild bed of experimentation. Every theory, concocted in a nightmare of some rattled-brain professor or evolved by the heavy thinking of a few wise men took its turn in the ex-, perimentation. There was tthe period of “let the little darlings do whatever they wishsome /ellow tried “never let the little dears know what failure is, for they will become inhibited." To put it mildly, the schools tried _ everything except reading, writing, and arithmetic.
Within the past two years someone discovered that the Three R’s were missing. They are trying to correct that now.
Please bear in mind that many of the present-day teachers came through schooi in those “experimental1’ days. They may even have hit the era of learning to read and spell by the ight method and the sound of a letter may be as foreign to them as the race of Pheidippides. It is not their fault. The school system is reaping what it sowed.
You can look at the public school system in the light of being democratic. The schools must serve all. Those old grammar and Latin schools served a very small number. The children who did not fit the school dropped out, some in the third, some in the fifth, and some went as far as the seventh grade. The school no longer met their needs.
There was no tax burden to make a school fit ten per cent of the population. It is going to be an entirely different picture when tiie schools have to meet the needs of all the children, but, according to democracy, that is their job.
The schools today must still have the old grammar and Latin classes, fqr ten per cent of the children must not be neglected; but there must also be trade schools for another large per cent; and there must be schools
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