History
In 1921, the National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP) officially established the National Honor Society. Under the leadership of Dr. Edward Rynearson, principal of Fifth Avenue High School in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the organization grew from the original Alpha Chapter at the Fifth Avenue School to more than 1,000 chapters by 1930.
Based on the NHS constitution, four purposes are said to guide NHS chapters. They are:
- to create enthusiasm for scholarship
- to stimulate a desire to render service
- to promote leadership
- to develop character in the students of secondary schools
These purposes are supposed to translate into the criteria used for membership selection in each local chapter.
NHS is sponsored and supervised by NASSP, which appoints a National Council, the controlling body of NHS. In addition, National Council members serve as the selection committee for the NHS Scholarship, which has been administered annually in schools with NHS chapters since 1921.
In 1929, NASSP founded the National Junior Honor Society (NJHS), a sister organization to NHS, to recognize students at the middle school level.
Read more about this topic: National Honor Society
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—Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)
“No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept.... For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.”
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“This above all makes history useful and desirable: it unfolds before our eyes a glorious record of exemplary actions.”
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