b to textbook, from tradition to school, from practise to
science, is long and intensely interesting. I can touch only a few
phases of it.

First consider the lengthening of the school period for children. I do
not think it is possible accurately to compare the present length of
this period with that which existed a century or a half ago; nor would
such a comparison interest us. It is enough for our purpose to know that
years have been added to the school life of many thousands of the youth
of all classes. As a single illustration, consider the effect of the
high school, whose development into a large and popular institution, an
institution affecting great masses of the people, belongs almost wholly
to the period within the life of the generation now on the stage. A half
century ago the public high school was almost unknown and the private
academy reached very few persons. Only a generation ago the number of
students in secondary schools was hardly one-tenth of the present
number. The attendance on institutions of secondary grade has thus
increased five times as rapidly as the population. Within the past
fifteen years the attendance in the high schools of Milwaukee has more
than trebled, while only a little more than fifty per cent. has been
added to the population of the city. In Racine almost exactly the same
ratio holds, and so for many other cities of the United States, the
increase being least marked in New England cities, and greatest in the
cities of the West.

The formative influence of the high school youth are far more
extensively and exclusively books than were those of his father or
grandfather, who probably began to learn his trade, or his business, at
about the age when his boy enters the high school, and who therefore,
during the period of adolescence, received his training from action
rather than from study, from oral rather than from printed experience.

One may find to-day in the writings of many teachers jeremiads over the
shortness of the average school life of children. I would not contradict
their statistics and would join in their regrets, but the fact remains
that the most striking phenomenon in the life of the children of the
past thirty years is the extent to which their training has been
committed to the use of books and the rapid growth of the use of books
as the period has advanced. Few as the school years of the children now
are, those of any older generation have been fewer. This aspect