Fairmont Public School - Tiger Yearbook (Fairmont, NE)

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THE FA IRMONT1CELLA Normal Training Department The one great purpose of our High School is to pre- iits pupils for a life of usefulness. The High School attempts to do this in two ways: First, to prepare the pupil to enter and complete his education in an institu- tion to higher learning; Secondly, to prepare pupils to go directly into their life work. In the first of these purpos- es we have succeeded very well for a number of years, as is attested by our rating by the State Department of Education and by recognition given us by the State University and Colleges of Nebraska. In the second of these great purposes we have not been prepared to succeed so well. It takes money to equip a school to emphasize the industrial side of education. State Supt. J. L. IVfcBrien in 1005, wrote to tin superintendents of all of the larger towns of the state and got the following statistics from sixty answers. During the preceding three years, these sixty schools had graduated two thousand three hundred pupils. Fight hundred immediately entered business (farming, clerking, housekeeping, etc.,) nine hundred immediately took to teaching and six hundred entered institutions of higher learning. If our school .just prepared for college, we would be catering to only about one fourth of our graduates. The industrial side should be emphasized for the other three fourths. But the High Schools of the state could not stand the expense necessary to meet this need. The state could not advance money enough to prepare for all of the industries. The above statistics showed that a greater number of graduates went into teaching than into all of the other kinds of work taken together. Here was a chance to reach a great per ceni on the industrial sidt of Education, and the Legislature f 1005 passed the High School Normal Training Law. This law provided for the giving of three hundred and fifty dollars each year to seventy strong High Schools scattered throughout the State, that they might equip themselves to prepare pupils to teach in the ele- mentary grades of Nebraska. Fairmont High School was