Lyman Hall High school - Singer Chronicle Yearbook (Wallingford, CT)

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THE CHRONICLE 9 NEW SCHOOLBOOKS FOR OLD Essay with Salutatory Rank Welcome, parents and friends, to these graduation exercises. We of the Class of 1935 are especially privileged, for we have two three hundredth anniversaries to celebrate. We are the only class that can ever be graduated from this school during the Tercentenary of Connecticut and during the three hundredth anniversary of the founding of the first high school in America. It is, therefore, with this fact in mind that we hold these exercises. Again I bid you welcome. Ever since its beginning in 1635, American secondary education has been associated with textbooks. The schools of America have always been “book schools.” The use of textbooks has been developed to a great extent in this country, far more than jS1 Europe, and a great many changes have been made since early Colonia mes. The textbooks of the seventeenth century seem to have reflected the life of those times. Looking through a book, one could picture the life of the people. In a Latin grammar written in the difficult days of William and Mary, one comes to phrases like this: “Knaves confer with Knaves when they are about to plot against the King,” or “They that design the destruction of the King, first detract from his Honour and his Wisdom in governing the Commonwealth.” The textbook writers of the eighteenth century put a great deal that was imaginative into their books; in fact one person speaks of an eighteenth century arithmetic textbook as being “delightful reading. lie quotes the following problem in geometric progression as an example of this: “A merchant having a soft young man to son, covetous enough, but scarce able to keep a shop-book, was minded to purchase for him considerable lands in the country and bid him inquire out some handsome estate that would be sold, and he would buy it for him. The young man, overjoyed at the news, runs to an inn, where he heard divers country gentlemen lodged, and in all haste asked them if any one of them would sell their estates? Most of them were very angry, and near beating of him; but one of them being a facetious gentleman, resolved to play a trick upon him and told him that he had a neat hall with a goodly park and manor on the bank of a pleasant river, and a great number of sufficient tenants, all of which, with the royalty of a fair, market-town, and patronage of a parish-church, belonging thereto, should be his, upon condition that he would lay down one penny on the threshold of the porch-door belonging to the hall, twopence at the next door, fourpence at the third door, and so on, doubling till he had gone through all the doors, which were sixty-four in all. ‘I will have it,’ saith the young man, ‘and here is a piece in earnest,’ and in all haste tells his father what a purchase he has made, wishing him to give him a hundred pounds, for that, he thought, could not but abundantly satisfy. ‘Thou calf,’ quoth his father,' the King of Spain's revenues would not pay what thou hast promised, if they were sold at twenty years’ value; much less can my estate, for it will not bring thee past the twenty-fourth threshold. The best is, the gentleman knows thee not; but I will warrant he is making merry with a fool’s earnest.’ Now I desire to know what the sum laid down on

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Senior Play Cast

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10 THE CHRONICLE the twenty-fourth threshold was and what the whole would come to?” Such was the mathematics that the student of the seventeen hundreds had to study. In 1788 there was published a mathematics textbook in which there was nearly everything known about the subject at that time. It was Nicholas Pike’s A New and Cornpleal Arithmetic Composed for Citizens of the United Stales. This textbook contained five hundred and twelve pages; four hundred and eight devoted to arithmetic, sixty to plane geometry, trigonometry, and mensuration, thirty-three to algebra, and ten to an introduction to conic sections. It was bound in leather, as were most textbooks of that time. This book was presumably of a more prosaic nature. In the early nineteenth century the books studied by the higher classes in a girls’ academy were Morse’s Geography, Murray’s English Grammar, Pope’s Essay on Man, Blair’s Rhetoric, and the Bible. Although we do not know exactly what was the nature of some of these books, their titles do not sound so imaginative as those of the previous century. As the nineteenth century advances, we notice among others the history textbooks. These contained a great deal about the Civil War. There were long, detailed accounts of battles, while comparatively little was presented about the social and economic life of the times. ' The textbooks of the present time have lost the imaginative qualities which characterized the early textbooks. Their content may be placed under five different headings: statements of fact; records of thinking, such as arguments or demonstrations of geometrical theorems and propositions; results of generalization; descriptions or expressions of feeling; and explicit learning exercises. A greater part of the contents of high-school textbooks can be classified under statements of fact and results of generalizing experience. Usually the material in books cannot be called any one type, for description and records of thinking will almost always contain statements of fact. Among the newest textbooks are books on motion pictures written for school use. Such texts are very interesting. They aim to show the student how to choose the most worth while moving pictures and also to increase his appreciation of the pictures which he sees. Recently many high schools have adopted periodicals to supplement their textbooks. The magazines used in school are those of the highest type, such as The Reader's Digest. This magazine is a good one because it contains in a condensed form worth while articles from many other magazines. There have been many things right and many things wrong about textbooks since their beginning. The early textbooks were very imaginative, as we have seen from the example quoted above. The books sounded just like fairy tales. Someone has said that he did not see how a lad could help doing such fascinating problems. But it seems to me that the idea of the problem is lost when such an elaborate story is built around it. These textbooks lacked the element of ”real-lifeness” which, it seems to me, is necessary to bring home an idea to a student. Present textbooks are a great improvement over the early ones. They have lost the imaginativeness and perhaps in some cases have gone almost