The Development of American Secondary Schools
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Urbanization and the High School In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the convergence of several significant socioeconomic and educational trends created a favorable climate for the establishment of high schools. The United States was changing from an agricultural and rural society to an industrial and urban nation. For example, New York City’s population quadrupled between 1860 and 1910. By 1930, more than 25 percent of all Americans lived in seven great urban areas: New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, Detroit, Los Angeles, and Cleveland. The high school was an educational response to an urban and industrial society’s need for more specialized occupations, professions, and services.28 This socioeconomic change was concurrent with important developments in adolescent psychology. G. Stanley Hall, for example, argued that adolescents, at a crucial stage in their development, were best educated in high schools.
Reshaping the High School Curriculum Since its establishment, the purposes
Committee of Ten A committee of
the National Education Association chaired by Charles Eliot, which shaped the high school curriculum through its recommendations of a four-year program and a curriculum that included academic subjects for all students.
Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education A National Education
Association commission that shaped the high school curriculum through its recommendations in The Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education (1918).
of high schools has been debated. Whereas liberal arts and science college professors saw them as college-preparatory institutions, vocational educators wanted high schools to prepare adolescents to enter the workforce. In some large cities, high schools, called “people’s colleges,” offered liberal arts and science courses as well as work-related programs.29 In 1892, the National Education Association (NEA) established the Committee of Ten , chaired by Harvard University President Charles Eliot, to define the high school’s mission and purposes. The committee made two important recommendations: (1) subjects should be taught uniformly for both college-preparatory students and those who completed their formal education upon graduation; and (2) an endorsement of the pattern of eight years of elementary and four years of secondary education.30 It identified four curricula as appropriate for the high school: classical, Latin-scientific, modern language, and English. These recommendations reflected a general college-preparatory orientation because each curriculum included foreign languages, mathematics, science, English, and history. By 1918, all states had enacted compulsory attendance laws, with thirty states mandating full-time attendance until age sixteen.31 Increasing enrollments made high school students more representative of the general adolescent population and more culturally diverse than in the past when students came primarily from the upper- and upper-middle classes. The NEA’s Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education in the Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education (1918) responded to the socioeconomic changes in the high school student population. The Commission redefined the high school as a comprehensive institution serving the country’s pluralistic social, cultural, and economic populations. It recommended the following: (1) establishing differentiated curricula to meet agricultural, commercial, industrial, and domestic as well as college-preparatory needs; and (2) maintaining the high school’s integrative and comprehensive social character.32 The Commission’s recommendations paralleled Herbert Spencer’s curriculum theory based on needs as discussed in Chapter 4, Pioneers of Teaching and Learning.
William J. Reese, The Origins of the American High School (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995); David F. Labaree, The Making of an American High School: The Credentials Market and the Central High School of Philadelphia, 1839–1939 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). 29 Jurgen Herbst, The Once and Future School: Three Hundred Years of American Secondary Education (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 95–106. 30 National Education Association, Report of the Committee on Secondary School Studies (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1893). 31 L. Dean Webb, The History of American Education: A Great American Experiment, p. 176. 32 Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education, Cardinal Principles of American Secondary Education, Bulletin no. 35 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1918). 28
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