labor market and with graduates of his school.

Certainly the high school must prepare students for life. Whether, in
addition, it shall constitute itself a Public Employment Bureau, finding
positions for students, keeping in touch with their careers, and
assisting in their advancement, is a matter yet to be determined.

XII The High School as a Public Servant

Will the high school retain its present form? Probably not. If the
Berkeley-Los Angeles plan prevails, there will be three steps in the
public schools,--from elementary to junior high, to high school. If the
Gary plan wins, there will be twelve years of schooling, following one
another as consecutively as day follows night. Whether the Los Angeles
or the Gary plan is adopted, one thing seems reasonably certain,--the
high school will keep in close touch with life.

The high school is securing a surer grip on the world with each passing
day. It is reaching out toward the grades, calling the pupils to come;
it is reaching out into the world, making places there for them to
occupy. The modern high school has ceased to be an adjunct to the
college. Instead, it is a distinctive unit in educational life, taking
boys and girls between the ages of fourteen and nineteen and relating
them to the world in which they must live.

The era of the high school course is being succeeded by the era of the
high school boy and the high school girl. First, last, now and always,
the boys and girls, not the course, deserve primary consideration.
Whatever their needs, the high school must supply them if it is to
become a public servant, responsible for training children of high
school age in the noble art of living.

CHAPTER VI

HIGHER EDUCATION AT LOWVILLE[20]

I Lowville and the Neighborhood

Away off in northwestern New York State, where the sun shines fiercely
in the summer mid-day, where the ice forms thick on the lakes, and the
snow lies on the north side of the hills from Thanksgiving well on to
Easter, there is a town of some three thousand inhabitants, called
Lowville. The comfortable homes, brick stores, wide tree-bordered
streets, smiling hills and giddy children look very much the same at
Lowville as they do in any one of a thousand similar towns east of the
Mississippi. Situated far back from the line of ordinary travel, the
town is typical of a great class.

Stretching in all directions about Lowville is a fertile, prosperous,
agricultural region, farm