Secondary Schools
In 1880, American high schools were preparatory academies for colleges, but by 1910 they had been transformed into core elements of the common school system. The explosive growth brought the number of students from 200,000 in 1890 to 1,000,000 in 1910, to almost 2,000,000 by 1920; 7% of youths aged 14 to 17 were enrolled in 1890, rising to 32% in 1920. The graduates found jobs especially in the rapidly growing white-collar sector. Cities large and small across the country raced to build new schools. Few were built in rural areas, so ambitious parents moved close to town to enable their teenagers to attend. After 1910, vocational education was added, as a mechanism to train the technicians and skilled workers needed by the expanding industrial sector.
Read more about this topic: History Of Education In The United States
Famous quotes containing the words secondary and/or schools:
“Readers are less and less seen as mere non-writers, the subhuman “other” or flawed derivative of the author; the lack of a pen is no longer a shameful mark of secondary status but a positively enabling space, just as within every writer can be seen to lurk, as a repressed but contaminating antithesis, a reader.”
—Terry Eagleton (b. 1943)
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—Anna Howard Shaw (1847–1919)