184 INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS OF EDUCATION. 
To simplify our subject, nothing will be said in this paper of the strange 
and hurtful isolation of the private schools and academies from the public 
high-schools—two classes of schools that should, in the necessities of the 
case, have very much in common. They are both doing collegiate prepar- 
atory work, and pupils are constantly, in all parts of our land, being 
transferred from one to the other, and usually with considerable embar- 
-assment to both pupils and teachers. 
Looking at the question before us in its entirety, it concerns two hun- 
dred and fifty thousand pupils in our public high-schools and two hundred 
thousand in private schools of secondary grade. Our brief,” then, is in 
‘he interests of nearly a half million boys and girls, many of whom are to 
swell the one hundred thousand enrollment of the five hundred American 
colleges! Surely this is a leading question in the education of the day. 
By necessary consequence, by unescapable implication, we are face to face 
with some of the deeper questions of education, such as the age of admis- 
sion, the contents of a course of secondary instruction, and the profes- 
sional training of teachers. 
But some one will say, directly you suggest supervision of what has 
been deemed private business: <“ This is a republic. Long ago we burst 
the bonds of a meddlesome paternalism. Intelligent individualism is the 
regulative principle, and we will not return to any of the forms of des- 
potism.” But this is hasty speech, and ignores the many forms in which 
we voluntarily submit to authority in every relation of the citizen life. 
If republican institutions ‘do wake to life unexampled energies in the 
whole mass of the people, and bestow upon the people unexampled power 
;0 work out their will,” these same institutions should induce the highest 
self-control and guidance. It were a strange folly to add to the impulsive 
forces of a people without also adding to their regulating forces. If it be 
indeed true that the next generation shall contain a larger percentage of 
men and women graduated from our higher institutions, men who in the 
aature of the case shall exert mighty influence in the affairs of the nation, 
't ill befits us to bandy words about private rights in a business that con- 
ditions so profoundly the welfare of the state. We create and maintain 
a national Congress, convening annually, at incredible expense, to regu- 
late the tariff, internal improvements, and currency ; we have State legis- 
latures to legislate about every conceivable subject ; we have courts, sitting 
and moving to adjudicate upon the rights of person and property of every 
degree of importance ; and yet here is a large section, in some respects 
;he most important section of education, which has received literally 
aothing thus far in the way of organization and united effort. 
We grant freely the high character, skill, and devotion of many worthy 
private school-teachers and proprietors, but it is straining unduly our 
poor human nature to ask it to work as well without as with direction, 
supervision, and accountability. Nor does it meet the objection to say 
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