American High School Today, The

The American High School Today: A First Report to Interested Citizens was published in 1959 by James B. Conant. A noted U.S. chemist, long-time president of Harvard University, participant in the development of the atomic bomb in the 1940s, [Page 34]and educational commissioner of Germany in the early 1950s, Conant turned to a Carnegie Corporation-funded study of U.S. high schools as his major project after stepping down from his post in Germany.

Conant's interest in high schools was longstanding, though it should also be said that he had little experience with, and in, the institutions about which he wrote. His notoriety as Harvard president, however, made him a formidable voice in any educational arena in which he spoke. His interest in elementary and secondary education issues was cultivated through a long relationship with elementary and secondary educators with whom he served on the Educational Policies Commission (EPC), a blue-ribbon panel of U.S. educational leaders founded by the National Education Association and the American Association of School Administrators in the 1930s. Conant served several terms on the EPC and by the late 1950s when he wrote The American High School Today, he had spent more than a decade as an EPC member. Conant himself spoke often of the significance of his work on the Educational Policies Commission.

Of particular importance for Conant was the 1944 publication of the EPC's Education for All American Youth. That volume endorsed an approach to the high school that valued both the traditional academic studies that had been the backbone of the high school curriculum and the newer vocational studies that were making their way into that curriculum. Thus it should not be surprising to find in The American High School Today a firm endorsement of both academic and vocational education in the high school.

Conant based his findings and argument in The American High School Today on a study of many U.S. high schools he conducted, with a four-person research team. In this volume, Conant analyzed, and praised, the “comprehensive” high school as an institution capable of building U.S. society in the present and future. For Conant, the term comprehensive denoted a high school that served several groups of students under one roof. These students included those with academic talent and interest, those with vocational background and goals, those with other needs relating to commercial pursuits, and those needing education for their futures as U.S. parents and citizens. For Conant, the key point was that only in a comprehensive high school offering a full range of cur-ricular options were the needs of the wide variety of youth who enrolled accommodated. He added that the best examples of comprehensive high schools were found in smaller cities and some suburban locations, where there were enough students of various types to fill the spaces in classes in the various curricula. Larger cities and rural communities were prevented, largely through considerations of size, from getting a wide variety of students and offering the proper range of courses that those students needed. Conant stressed that comprehensiveness was a key in achieving the proper goals of a secondary education in a democratic society. Those goals were of two kinds: studies appropriate to the various destinations toward which the different groups of students were headed, and studies that were geared to unifying the diverse groups of students despite their varying backgrounds, abilities, and destinations.

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