That is being succeeded by a positive programme that
thinks very definitely of the boy's fullest development and of his social
spiritualization. The schoolhouse has become, or is in the way of
becoming, the civic centre of the nation.
But on top of the eight years' training of the elementary school, which
was considered at first the full measure of the obligation of the
community, the State in that region came to build additional years of
discipline--the high schools, first to equip young men for colleges or
universities and then to fit them for the meeting of the more highly
complex and specialized problems of life. These schools multiplied in the
upper Mississippi Valley at an extraordinary rate after the elementary
schools had prepared the way. In the northern part of that valley alone
sixteen hundred were established between 1860 and 1902. And there is
hardly a community of five thousand inhabitants that has not its fully
organized and well-equipped high or secondary school; while even towns of
a thousand inhabitants or less have made such provision.
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