DEVOTED TO THE SCIENCE, ART, PHILOSOPHY AND FRANK HERBERT PALMER, EDITOR CONTENTS New Educational Publications STARCH: Educational Measurements (1916) The only book in which are assembled all standard scales $1.25 HALL-QUEST: Supervised Study (1916) $1.25 The supervision of study in the high school-the principles and methods applied to high school subjects. JESSUP and COFFMAN: The Supervision of Arithmetic. Incorporates the results of surveys and investigations relating BIGELOW: Sex-Education (1916) A discussion of sex-education in its broadest aspects that $1.10 $1.25 HORNE: Story-telling, Questioning, and Studying (1916) $1.10 A practical discussion of the three school arts: Story-telling, Questioning, and Studying. Devoted to the Science, Art, Philosophy ana Literature VOL. XXXVII. of Education DECEMBER, 1916 No. 4 A Decade of Tendencies in Curricula of BY GEORGE E. WALK, PH. D., LECTURER ON EDUCATION, F ¤† OR some years past the writer has had occasion to familiarize himself with the progress achieved by state normal schools in preparing students for the profession of teaching. To this end he has made an attempt to trace systematically the evolution of some outstanding tendencies. It has seemed to the writer that this could be done most satisfactorily, if data could be procured showing the status of the same school for two different years widely separated. In this wise some intelligent conception could be gained of the success with which a given school was adapting itself to the constantly and enormously increasing demand for better facilities and higher ideals for professional training. If now, further, the information needed could be got from schools whose geographical distribution and varied character would provide a fair sampling rather than a picked lot, the tendencies deduced might be said to typify fairly the practices of the average or median school the country over. With this end in view the writer some time since addressed requests for catalogs corresponding to the academic years 1903-04 and 1913-14 to each of more than 150 selected schools located in all sections of the country, east, west, north, and south. From every school some response was obtained. In many cases, however, catalogs corresponding to the earliest of the years mentioned had not been preserved. For yet other schools the catalogs obtained did not provide the information necessary. To cover both these cases and in order to amplify generally the facts conveyed by the catalogs, many supplementary data through special correspondence had to be obtained. The catalogs alone, however, receive explicit mention in this article. Altogether 60 usable pairs of catalogs with the supplementary data before mentioned were obtained after considerable difficulty. They did not all correspond to exactly the same academic years, but the interval obtaining in each case was uniformly a decade. The schools represented in this study are located in 35 different states, as follows: The tendencies treated in the present article have to do with Courses of Study. Four distinct aspects are considered: (a) Number of Courses, (b) Types of Regular Courses, (c) Vocational Subjects both as Regular Branches of Study and as Bases for Courses leading to Supervisors' Certificates or Diplomas, and (d) Professional Subjects. Number of Courses. An examination of TABLE I reveals an interesting situation. Fifty schools in 1903-04 had 202 courses: in 1913-14 the same schools offered 277 courses. The extremes for 1904 are seven schools with one course each and one school with 13 courses: in 1914 we find four schools having one course each, and one school having 15 courses. The mode for 1904 is four courses with eleven cases, and for 1914 it is three courses with eight cases. The number of courses per average and median school for each of the two years is indicated by the table. The outstanding fact revealed by TABLE I is, thus, the movement toward multiplication of courses. A close analysis of all the data that I have collected shows that this increase of courses has resulted in two ways: (1) through an increase in the number of standard or regular courses, but especially (2) through the addition of special vocational courses. This diversification of activity is strikingly illustrated in the case of a certain school which, ten years since, offered two standard courses: an English (or Latin) curriculum of four years, and a "professional" curriculum of one year. In these latter days the same school is able to exhibit the following 15 distinct courses: (a) Regular: one-year rural school, four-year elementary normal, one-year elementary high school, five-year advanced normal, two-year advanced high |