Quality High Schools

Newsweek has a piece on quality high schools, The 100 Best High Schools in America. However I will quibble with their little historical introduction. Since the advent of the university in the middle ages, students would be tutored in basic literacy then enter the university around 12-14 years old. By the end of the 18th century, so much new learning had taken place, and was available at the university, that it made sense to introduce an intermediate school, between grammar school and college. This was the high school.

Newsweek says, "Ever since, Americans have been trying to figure out exactly what public high schools should do. Should they concentrate on preparing the best and the brightest for college? Should there be more emphasis on vocational training? Should students with different abilities and goals learn in the same classrooms, or should they be segregated into different tracks or even different schools?"

But this is untrue. For their first century, public high schools were preparation for college. Most people stopped after 8th grade armed with a strong literacy (read Civil War letters by soldiers) ready to become citizens in a free republic and economic actors in a market capitalism. Those who went on to high school were preparing for the university. It is with the rise of the progressive education movement before and after WWI that alternate theories and uses for the high school were developed. Debate and disagreement about the purpose of the high school are a feature of the high school's second century. This is even evident by examining the evidence within the article. For example, "The initial graduates were all white males who studied literature, science, math and history." This is college preparation. Its the development of vocational arts, home economics, and health and sexual education that now has crowded out so much of the old curriculum.