High Schools

History and Reform Efforts

Latin Grammar Schools were the first form of secondary education in America. Adopted from the English model, from the late seventeenth century to the late eighteenth century, these schools offered the sons of the social elite a classical curriculum that emphasized formalistic study of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew languages and literature. A Latin Grammar School education prepared students for postsecondary study toward positions in the clergy, law, and politics. With the founding of the new nation in the late eighteenth century, a new form of secondary education emerged, the academy. In response to the demands of a rising mercantile middle class, the academy offered a relatively diversified curriculum that emphasized practical subjects over the classical curriculum. In addition to algebra, geometry, English, and modern foreign languages, academies included in their curriculum vocational subjects such as bookkeeping, navigation, and surveying. Academies were financed through tuition, public funding, or both.

With the founding of English High School in 1821, in Boston, the public high school began to develop alongside academies. Although previously, the distinction between public and private schools had been unclear, with both public funds supporting private academies and publicly funded academies accepting tuition, during the mid-nineteenth century, fully tax-supported high schools emerged. After the Civil War, public high schools largely supplanted academies, the latter typically either merging with public high schools or becoming private boarding schools, a number of which still exist, especially in the Northeast. Although remaining an elite institution in both theory and practice until the early twentieth century, the public high school had by that time gradually expanded both its curriculum and enrollments.

Between the 1890s and the Great War, the American high school underwent a sort of revolution. During this time, in response to industrialization, immigration, and urbanization, enrollment and curriculum offerings expanded rapidly, and the high school began to be viewed as a mass institution. In 1890, for example, high school enrollment represented about 5.6% of 14- to 17- year-olds, and high school graduates represented about 3.5% of the population of 17-year-olds. By 1910, these figures were 14.3% and 8.8%, respectively; by 1920, they were 31.2% and 16.8%. Continuing a practice that began with the academies and that during the late nineteenth century received impetus from the vocational education movement, during the early twentieth century, vocational courses increasingly comprised part of the high school curriculum.

Around 1910, a debate occurred over whether American high schools should emulate European, especially German, models of secondary education in which academic and vocational studies and students were organized into separate educational systems, the latter governed by business interests, or whether vocational [Page 460]and academic courses should be offered under the same roof. From this debate emerged a unique educational institution, the comprehensive high school. By assembling academic and vocational programs and pupils under one roof, the comprehensive high school sought to fulfill two functions. The specializing function would provide a comprehensive curriculum to accommodate the specialized interests, aptitudes, and aspirations of a heterogeneous adolescent population. The unifying function would provide opportunities for students from different walks of life to intermingle in order to promote social solidarity and cohesion. In a departure from the elite vision of the high school of the nineteenth century, the comprehensive high school would serve all youth.

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