The President's Address, or more particularly the relation of Education to Labor, was discussed by Dr. TAPPAN, Dr. BUCHANAN, Dr. RUNKLE, Gen. CARRINGTON, STEVENS of Louisville, and Prof. BROUN.

The following members agreed to take the number of copies of the Proceedings of the Association for 1877, following their names: M. A. NEWELL, 12 copies; WM. F. PHELPS, 12 copies; S. H. WHITE, 20 copies; J. P. WICKERSHAM, 50 copies.

Adjourned.

Papers Omitted in the Preceding Pages.

THE RELATION OF THE PREPARATORY OR GRAMMAR SCHOOL TO COLLEGE OR UNIVERSITY.

BY PROF. W. R. WEBB, OF CULLEOKA, TENN.

[This paper was not received in time for its publication in its proper place.]

The preparatory or High School in America, the Grammar School in England, and the Gymnasium of Germany, occupy the same relative position to the Colleges or Universities of their respective countries. In connection with a College it is called the preparatory or sub-college department. In the best system of education its curriculum comprises, in mathematics, arithmetic, algebra, geometry, and trigonometry, with its application to navigation and surveying; in Latin, grammar, reader, Cæsar, Sallust, Ovid, Virgil, prose composition, as included in Bingham's or Harkness's Grammar and Arnold's Composition, through first part, or their equivalent, in Greek, grammar, four books of Xenophon's Anabasis and two in Herodotus, and Jones's or Arnold's Greek Prose Composition, or their equivalent.

A good parallel course in English will of course be included. The work of this school is a thorough drill in the forms and principles of language, and in the formulæ and principles of mathematics, which drill simply means the constant repetition of those forms and principles and their repeated application. To enter a preparatory school a boy should be familiar with the four fundamental rules of arithmetic, and should read fluently. It is in its discipline and course of study intended for boys. A college or university with a more extended course in these, together with other studies, takes up the work where the preparatory school leaves it, and continues it. Its course of study and discipline are adapted to men. The purpose of this paper is to discuss their relation, whether they should be combined under one administration and management, or should be entirely disconnected.

The true principle, it seems to me, is the concentration of university work with a diffusion of preparatory work.

The expense necessarily incident to a University so extended in its course as to impart liberal culture, with its buildings, its gymnasiums, its laboratories, its philosophical and chemical apparatus, its observatories and astronomical instruments, its libraries and museums of natural history, its geological and mineralogical cabinets, and last, the most expensive and most important, its corps of learned professors, makes a large endowment an indispensable prerequisite. This necessarily involves concentration. The expense of a University absolutely precludes the possibility of having one in every county, much less in every community.

Now taking it for granted that it promotes the interest of the individual student in preparatory work to be connected with the sub-college department, remembering that in education, as in government, that system is best which brings the greatest good to the greatest number, is the cause of education at large subserved by opening to him the doors of the College and University?

In every organization of men, lodges, societies, associations, clubs, ecclesiastical and political assemblies, there are always a few men who constitute the nucleus around which the organization clusters, the centre of life, the heart, so to speak, of the body, from which proceeds the vital influence that gives energy and efficiency to the entire assembly and without which it would be a useless and lifeless organization. They are known as the working or leading members. So it is in a school. In almost every community there are a few energetic, ambitious spirits, who have an elevated ideal standard of excellence, and who by their diligence are daily approximating that standard, and whose thirst for knowledge is increased by every draught, and whose influence and energy impart life and vigor to the teacher and school.

Now if it promotes the interest of the individual to join the preparatory department of a College, these are the very persons who will avail themselves of that privilege. Then the life-giving power imparted by the leading spirits who constitute this nucleus is gone, and the school is abandoned or drags out a sickly and profitless existence. In all probability, the very community that contributed most liberally to the cause of general education by endowing the University, which endowment enabled it to compete advantageously with their own school, is the very community called upon to suffer by such competition. They find their own school, with its morale, its esprit de corps gone, and that they themselves provided the boomerang which destroyed their own educational life.

If it brings the greatest good to the greatest number, that the few have the highest culture and the very large majority be thereby totally or almost totally deprived of education, then, indeed this is the best system. To preserve the esprit de corps of the schools and keep up a healthy interest in them is surely the right method to bring fair opportunities to both the few and the many, and this method in no way diminishes the number who have the finest opportunity for the best educational advantages; while on the contrary, by combining the preparatory schools and the college, the schools are decapitated and the number who have fair opportunities materially decreased.

This life-giving power is lost to the school, is it added to the college? The preparatory department being subordinate, the college is the object of absorbing interest with faculty, students, and citizens. College ideas, college notions, college phrases, college ways, prevail. The ambitious "prep "as, in college parlance, he is called, naturally desires to associate with the students of that department which receives so much deference from all, and he associates with the worst elements of the college, and for the following very obvious reason. Those enthusiastic students, whose influence gives tone in morals and scholarship to the institution are in their rooms at work. They give but little time to social enjoyment, and

very naturally devote that time to those who are congenial by reason of age and scholarly attainments. They are seldom seen by the public, and then but for a few moments at a time. They are not acquainted with students of the preparatory department. The worst elements of the college, cut off from the association of the better class of students, because they are the worst, are the public characters, who are seeking, at all times, for associates. The institution is measured and its standard of excellence in scholarship and morals is judged by the unthinking multitude from these specimens who are most frequently and most prominently on exhibition. Among the unthinking we class the boys of the preparatory department. They are flattered by being associated with college boy's, who seem, in their youthful imagination, to be separated from them by an infinite distance, and who are to them oracles of the profoundest wisdom. Why not? Do not the professors exhibit for the college students a profound respect? The unsuspecting and unsophisticated youth soon catches the flippant ways of his comrades, and out-Herods Herod, in order to win the good opinion of his admired companions.

The model student of the village school too often returns from college to disappoint the expectation of friends and to damage, in their estimation, and in the estimation of others, college education, for it is always said that he was in college, not that he was in a school in connection with a college. Boys go to school; young men go to college. Young men govern themselves-boys need supervision, restraint, compulsion. The discipline adapted to one is not adapted to the other. In school the teacher stands in loco parentis, addresses his pupils by their given names, and adopts such a code of laws as you would find in any well-regulated family. In college the professor stands in loco magistratus, addresses the young men by their surnames, with Mr. prefixed, and adopts such a code of laws as will be found in a well-governed State. While character is in its formative state it is difficult to determine the relative value of discipline and scholarship. While there can be good discipline and inferior scholarship, there can not be inferior discipline and good scholarship. Discipline is then a necessity for boys. Colleges take but slight supervision over their students when off of recitation, and lay no restraints upon them with reference to absence from their premises—not even at night. The students are never called to account for failure in their lessons, and rarely for failure to attend recitation. They are stimulated to their work only by a sense of duty, a desire to excel, and by the prospective examination and grading which are far in the remote future. They select their own boarding-houses and change them at will. When a young man is ready to enter college, he is a young man; his parents, his companions treat him as a young man, and Professors in college must likewise treat him as a young man. There is a date when he must assume the toga virilis, the responsibilities of manhood, and why not upon his entrance into college? The law draws a line between his majority and minority, a principle perfectly arbitrary, as there are many on each side of the line that ought to be on the other. No safer line, it seems to me, could be adopted than the beginning of a college course, where the standard is an elevated one, and rigidly adhered to.

Boys ready to begin a preparatory course are too tender in age to be

allowed such large liberties. They need supervision in school and out of school. They must be required to perform their tasks, as they are not old enough to know what is best for them, and at that age they cannot always be sufficiently stimulated by a sense of duty or a desire for excellence. They must often be detained as delinquents, admonished for shortcomings and misdeeds. Penalties, too, must be inflicted for infraction of law or for omission of duty. It is not necessary that they be severe, but that they be certain. In college the only penalties are reproof and dismission. In school boys should not be dismissed until after moral suasion and reproof, the virtue of restraints and severer punishments have been exhausted. When these two classes are combined under college discipline, the boys generally suffer in morals and scholarship, and being treated as men, they become fearfully afflicted with an undue sense of self-importance, a disease of the brain, an enlargement of the head, that prevails especially in institutions of this character. To see a venerable professor, whose head is silvered o'er with the frosts of many winters, address a little boy as Mr. and ask him to please spell baker, or if he will be kind enough to decline penna, is a picture too ludicrous to be dwelt upon in the presence of this learned body, and should be reserved for Harper's Weekly.

On the other hand should these classes be combined under discipline adapted to boys, the college students are robbed of that liberty to which they are justly entitled by their attainments and maturity of character. As a fact young men would not submit to such restraint, and it is not desirable that they should. Under such a system, individuality of character, self-respect, and self-reliance would not be sufficiently well developed. Is it possible for the two kinds of discipline, one adapted to boys and the other to young men, to be administered in the same institution and by the same set of officers? This would beget so much dissatisfaction and would produce such longing on the part of the boys for the liberties which they see others enjoy, that those unpleasant issues about rights which are deprecated by all administrators of discipline would inevitably occur frequently and present many questions of doubtful and difficult solution. Hesitation would result and discipline cease to be vigorous. When there is no longer a vigorous administration of law, discipline ceases to be a valuable element in the formation of character. I know of no compromise between these two systems that would produce the best results for either class.

My experience has been that the same men are not usually successful in managing both classes. Those who have succeeded with the first have failed utterly with the second, and vice versa.

Not only do they fail in discipline; they fail in that particular in which teachers accomplish their greatest good; they fail to create a thirst for knowledge-to excite enthusiasm in their younger students. The reason is obvious: they are overworked and feel no enthusiasm themselves. Taking the curriculum I have given for a preparatory school and combining with it an extended and thorough college course, and you make, at the lowest possible estimate, seven hours' work per day, provided a class is formed each year and one hour per day is devoted to each class. This does not constitute, by any means, the entire work. The written exercises, which form a very considerable part of a student's duty, are to be cor