Synopses & Reviews
Review
"As all sides lament a decline in education and sling blame with abandon, William Reese's new book on the history of the American high school takes a long view of public education in the 19th century and tempers our current debates with needed perspective and entertaining detail. Free public high schools, he argues, have been the focus of political debates from their start in 1821 when advocates and critics questioned the propriety of establishing high schools. It may surprise some to read early criticisms bashing high schools as bastions of aristocratic privilege committed to educating a few college-bound sons of the better classes. School advocates countered by promoting the high school as a republican institution, characteristically American, where low-born and high succeeded by individual merit and not by wealth. Reese's wide reading in 19th-century diaries, letters, and educators' journals allows him to peer through schoolroom windows and spy on English and arithmatic lessons to recapture 19th-century pedagogy and student culture." Reviewed by Andrew Witmer, Virginia Quarterly Review (Copyright 2006 Virginia Quarterly Review)
Synopsis
This engrossing book tells the story of American high schools in the nineteenth century. William Reese analyzes the social changes and political debates that shaped these institutions across the nation--from the first public high school, established in Massachusetts in 1821, to the 1880s, by which time a majority of secondary students in the North were enrolled in high schools. Reese also explores in generous detail the experience of going to school. Drawing on the writings of local educators and school administrators as well as on student newspapers, diaries, and memoirs, he brings to life the high schools of a century ago, revealing what students studied and how they behaved, what teachers expected of them and how they taught, and how boys and girls, whites and blacks, and children in different parts of the nation perceived their schools.
America's earliest public high schools were built in major cities along the eastern seaboard, and they became an important factor in the building of free public school systems, bringing a broad range of middle-class citizens into their orbit. Reese shows that although high schools were condemned by critics as elite institutions of classical learning, they were in fact largely dedicated to offering talented, mostly middle-class youth a quality education in modern, practical subjects.