Abstract
The public comprehensive high school was a development of the twentieth century. Its origins lay much earlier in time. The idea that a school could include students of any background and talent—but restricted to a certain age—only slowly emerged with the transformation of schools that took place over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The idea that a school could be detached from particular religious denominational influence on curriculum and governance took long enough to develop also, especially in the schools of Britain and its Empire. Even the term ‘secondary school’ was virtually unheard of until almost the eve of the twentieth century. Rather than being seen as a ‘stage’ of education, the boys’ schools that became known as ‘secondary’ were initially influenced by educational traditions drawn in part both from the long standing predominance of classics and the classical curriculum as well as the more commercial and vocational subjects that had emerged in the eighteenth century. In the English-speaking world those schools associated with the classical tradition often assumed the title of a ‘grammar school’; those offering a more vocational or practical curriculum were often described as ‘academies.’ In practice, these distinctions sometimes carried little substance. The creation of new and reformed secondary schools in the nineteenth century was closely associated with the formation of the middle classes in Europe, Britain, and the ‘new world’ of North America as well as those other mainly English-speaking ‘settler societies’ which emerged in the nineteenth century.
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Notes
John Roach, A History of Secondary Education in England, 1800–1870 (London: Longman, 1986), p. 4.
See also June Purvis, A History of Women’s Education in England (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1991), pp. 65–95.
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See Alfred Williams, “Preliminary Report of the Director of Education Upon Observations Made During an Official Visit to Europe and America 1907 …” (Adelaide: Education Department, South Australia, 1908).
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See Lawrence A. Cremin, The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876–1957 (New York: Random House, 1961),
Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Vintage, 1963).
Mark Peel and Janet McCalman, Who Went Where in ‘Who’s Who 1988?’: The Schooling of the Australian Elite (Melbourne: University of Melbourne, 1992). See also Campbell, “Secondary Schooling, Modern Adolescence and the Reconstitution of the Middle Class,” Peter Gronn, “Schooling for Ruling: The Social Composition of Admissions to Geelong Grammar School 1930–1939,” Australian Historical Studies 25, no. 98 (1992),
G. Sherington, “The Headmasters—E. N. McQueen, L. C. Robson and J. R. Darling,” in Pioneers of Australian Education: Studies of the Development of Education in Australia 1900–50, ed. C. Turney (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1983).
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Campbell, C., Sherington, G. (2006). Origins. In: The Comprehensive Public High School. Secondary Education in a Changing World. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403982919_2
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