HisTorical researcH

Secondary School Curriculum

Historians have made the secondary school curriculum a subject of study much more often than the elementary school curriculum, and thus most of this entry is devoted to secondary education. The U.S. high school emerged as a near mass institution in the early 20th century. The shape of the curriculum in the high school has been the subject of vigorous debate, at least since the 1890s. In that decade, the Committee of Ten of the National Education Association prescribed four versions of academic studies that it saw as appropriate for high school students. The versions differed in the amount of classical language study prescribed, ranging from near majority in one to almost missing in another, with middling amounts in the other two. The importance of the Committee of Ten was not specifically in its stance on classical studies, however. Rather, it committed the high school curriculum to various versions of academic study, with greater or lesser emphasis on history, the sciences, and other subjects in addition to the classics in its four alternatives.

Two decades after the Committee of Ten, enrollment in the high school had grown significantly, including segments of the population in its student body that heretofore had not stayed in school past the elementary years. To reach these students, curriculum makers and school administrators developed a social efficiency approach to the high school that stressed vocational subjects, testing, and ability grouping of students to decide who would take what subject, as well as extra academic experiences [Page 443]to extend the impact of the institution. The ideas of the social efficiency educators were profiled in the first of two volumes on the history of the U.S. high school written by Edward A. Krug. He showed how social efficiency led to an approach to the high school curriculum that privileged vocational studies and other useful studies such as home economics and business education. Krug also showed how addressing extra academic concerns such as student play, vocational readiness, and adjustment to a new industrial society were major concerns of the social efficiency educators. The single document of the social efficiency movement was the Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education, produced by a leading committee of educators and published by the National Education Association near the end of World War I.

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