Conclusion

Abstract

The past century and a half has been a period of unparalleled expansion and reform in American public schooling. In the two decades following the 1837 accession of Horace Mann to the secretaryship of the Massachusetts Board of Education, the foundation was laid for a state-mandated, state-coordinated, tax-supported system of common schools, open to the children of every community. At the turn of the century the high schools were transformed by the entrance of the “children of the plain people.” In 1890 less than 4 percent of the nation’s fourteen-to-seventeen-year olds attended public high schools; thirty years later, the percentage approached 30 percent. In the interim, the high schools could proudly be proclaimed the new “people’s colleges.” In the post-World War II decades it was higher education that was expanded and reformed. The promise of a college education was offered first to the returning veterans and then to the majority of high school graduates. Where in 1940 under 15 percent of the eighteen-to-twenty-one-year-old population attended college, thirty years later the proportion approached 50 percent. In each period of reform, schooling systems were transformed from “elite” to “mass.” But was this “massification” a “democratization”? Did the expansion of access indicate a corresponding increase in opportunity? Let us look first at the common school crusade. This period of reform, unlike later ones, did not result in a significant increase in the proportion of children in school. There was an increase in public school enrollment, but this increase reflected more a shift of students from private and parochial schools than an influx of newly enrolled students. Those who had been excluded from schooling before the common school reform movement were not affected by its triumph. The poor and immigrant children of the factory towns and cities could not have attended school without child labor legislation and family income subsidies, neither of which were forthcoming. Girls, always expendable as far as formal schooling was concerned, remained no less so in the common schools. For blacks the period was one of diminishing opportunity.