Secondary school is an educational institution where the second stage of the three schooling periods, known as secondary education and usually compulsory up to a specified age takes place. It follows elementary or primary education, and is sometimes followed by university (tertiary) education. The term high school is used particularly in North America and North Western England though the two types of school are far from synonymous.
There are very many different types of secondary school, and the language used varies around the world. Children usually go to secondary school between the ages of 11 and 16 years, and end between the ages of 16 and 18 years, although there is considerable variation from country to country.
The following descriptions and definitions pertain to state-funded education unless otherwise stated.
Read more about Secondary School: Nomenclature
Famous quotes containing the words secondary and/or school:
“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)
“A sure proportion of rogue and dunce finds its way into every school and requires a cruel share of time, and the gentle teacher, who wished to be a Providence to youth, is grown a martinet, sore with suspicions; knows as much vice as the judge of a police court, and his love of learning is lost in the routine of grammars and books of elements.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)