140 CHAPTER 5: Historical Development of American Education
5-4 The Development of American Secondary Schools With the establishment of public elementary schools, the first rung of the American educational ladder was now in place. The highest rung was filled by the state colleges. However, these upper and lower steps remained disconnected in the middle. The next section examines how the establishment of public high schools completed the ladder.
5-4a The Academy: Forerunner of the High School Anticipated by Benjamin Franklin’s plan, the academy replaced the colonial Latin grammar school as the major American secondary school in the first half of the nineteenth century. By 1855, more than 6,000 academies enrolled 263,000 students. Unlike the Latin grammar schools, which were exclusively attended by males preparing for college entry, academies were both single-sex and coeducational. They offered collegepreparatory programs as well as a range of other programs. Academy programs followed three patterns: (1) the traditional college-preparatory curriculum, which emphasized Latin and Greek; (2) the English-language curriculum, a general program for students who would end their formal education upon completing secondary school; and (3) the normal curriculum, which prepared elementary-school teachers. Some males also attended military academies such as the Citadel in South Carolina. Some academies were founded to educate young women. For example, in 1821, Emma Willard, a leader in the women’s rights movement, established New York’s Troy Female Seminary. Along with domestic science (household management and familyrelated skills) and women’s arts (sewing, weaving, and sketching ), women’s academies offered classical and modern languages, science, mathematics, art, music, and the teacher-preparation, or normal, curriculum. Although most academies were private, some were semipublic institutions partially funded by cities and states. Academies were popular secondary schools until the 1870s, when public high schools began to replace them. Today, private academies still provide secondary education for a small percentage of the school-age population.
5-4b The High School high school A secondary school for
students that typically includes grades 9 or 10 through 12.
Although a few high schools, such as the Boston English Classical School, were operating in the early nineteenth century, the high school became the country’s dominant secondary school after 1860. In the 1870s, the courts ruled in a series of cases (especially the Kalamazoo, Michigan, case in 1874) that school districts could levy taxes to establish and support public high schools.25 By 1890, public high schools enrolled more than twice as many students as private academies.26 In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the states passed compulsory attendance laws that established the age range that students had to attend school. While students could attend approved nonpublic schools, the states set minimum standards for all schools. The progressives supported compulsory attendance legislation. They worked for the enactment of child labor laws, such as the Keating-Owen Child Labor Act of 1916, which restricted employment of children and adolescents so that they would attend school rather than enter the workforce. Compulsory attendance was sometimes opposed by immigrant parents, who feared it was a strategy to erode their children’s ethnic heritage, and among farmers, who needed their children to work on the farm.27 See Stuart v. School District No. 1 of Village of Kalamazoo, 30 Mich. 69 (1874). L. Dean Webb, The History of American Education: A Great American Experiment (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Merrill/Prentice Hall, 2006), pp. 173–183. 27 Michael McGeer, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920 (New York: Free Press, 2003), pp. 190–111. 25 26
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