e.

The technical high school has not gained its prestige easily, however.
The bitter contests between the old and the new are well portrayed by
one dramatic episode from the history of the Los Angeles High School.
Mr. John H. Francis, now superintendent of the schools of Los Angeles,
was head of the Commercial Department in the Los Angeles High School.
Despite opposition and ridicule the department grew until it finally
emerged as a full-fledged technical high school, claiming a building of
its own,--a building which Mr. Francis insisted should contain
accommodations for two thousand students. The authorities
protested,--"Two thousand technical students? Why, Los Angeles is not a
metropolis." Mr. Francis gained his point, however, and the building was
erected to accommodate two thousand children. When the time for opening
arrived it was discovered, to the astonishment of the doubters, that
more students wanted to come into the school than the school would hold.
When Mr. Francis announced that students up to two thousand would be
admitted in order of application, excitement in school circles ran high,
and on the day before Registration Day a line began to form which grew
in length as the day wore on, until by nightfall it extended for squares
from the school. All that night the boys and girls camped in their
places, waiting for the morning which would bring an opportunity to
attend the technical high school.

Though less dramatic in form, the rush toward technical high school
courses is equally significant. It is not that the old high school has
lost, but that the new high school is drawing in thousands of boys and
girls who, from lack of interest in classical education, would have gone
directly from the grammar school into the mill or the office.

IX An Up-to-Date High School

The modern high school is housed in a building which contains, in
addition to the regular class rooms, gymnasiums, a swimming tank,
physics, and chemical laboratories; cooking, sewing, and millinery
rooms; wood-working, forge, and machine shops; drawing rooms; a music
room; a room devoted to arts and crafts; and an assembly room. This
arrangement of rooms presupposes Mr. Gilbert's plan of making the high
school, like the community, an aggregation of every sort of people,
doing every sort of work.

Physical training in the high school has not yet come into its own,
though it is on the road to recognition. All of the newer high schools
have