The author--after twenty years of close contact with secondary education as a teacher, high school principal, and director of training schools--has modified materially his own ideas concerning the function of the American high school. Out of administrative experiences has come the firm conviction that the high schools of this country will in time become really Americanized. Believing that democratic citizenship can not be developed in secondary schools under the Prussian lock-step administration, and believing that intellectual life can not be developed under the academic traditions that have made "lesson getting" a fetish, the writer has ventured to present this discussion, with the hope that the point of view may be helpful in stimulating teachers, principals, and educators in general to think more intensely about the problems of secondary teaching.