Teaching High School Students about High Schools: How Did We Get Here?

“When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school, it’s a wonder I can think at all. Though my lack of education hasn’t hurt me none. I can read the writing on the wall.”

Paul Simon, “Kodachrome” (1973 released on the LP There Goes Rhymin’ Simon)

High school in the United States exists in a searing duality, representing a crucible of opportunity and constraint. On one hand, it’s a gateway to higher education, promising access to the hallowed halls of universities where futures are forged, potentials are tapped, and dreams begin to take shape. A stepping stone, an on-ramp to success where seeds of ambition are sown, high school can evoke the best in students.

On the other hand, high school too often unfolds in tedium and conformity where the vibrancy of the young gives way to uniformity and unquestioning obedience, where creativity and individuality are sidelined in favor of rigid standards and homogeneity. The search for knowledge feels shackled by chains of monotonous routines and pervasive controls. High school is a prescribed and tightly controlled space in the United States where students navigate its dual realities without much real understanding of its guts. It might be worthwhile to educate high school students about the institution which seems to hold their lives in its hands.

How did we get here?

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Our Civil War laid bare for a broken nation a critical need for public schools to rebuild the democracy. The Constitutionally sanctioned slave economy in the South was disrupted by the war to reappear in a new guise under Jim Crow laws. In antebellum America, schools of any sort were rare, and high schools were very few in number, serving only the children of the elite. Horace Mann, born into financial hardship and poorly educated as a child, earned a law degree and entered politics to draw attention to the societal costs of lack of schooling, planting the seed of the sentiment that democratic society could not survive in the age of a new kind of freedom in an industrialized nation in the absence of the capacity to teach and to learn.

The year 1865 was a watershed year for education in relation to the economy. The country faced an uncertain future with labor displaced and economic reverberations rattling the caste system of yore, a White, male, European paradise riding on the shoulders of slaves and poor white trash. Harris (1878) published an essay in the North American Review titled “The Readjustment of Vocations” (Vol. 127, No. 26) outlining links among a newly educated labor class and an expanding middle class. Jobs were becoming more technical, more dependent on knowledge and skill that would be outdated within a few years and needed renewing. Those managing and organizing society in accordance with elite knowledge of science, philosophy, literature, law, and the like, were faced with compelling reasons to rethink what the laboring class was all about in an era where intelligence on the job was more valued than brawn. An inversion was in the offing: less need for people to do brute labor with greater opportunity to live and work in higher, more personally meaningful echelons of society:

“The vocations devoted to obtaining natural productions, to their elaboration (manufacturing), to their exchange and distribution, and to the public protection, are destined to employ mankind in a gradually decreasing ratio; while those vocations which are devoted to human nurture and education, to the Church, to the reflection of human life through artistic and literary productions, and to pure science, will be followed by an increasing number of people” (Harris, 1878, p. 272).

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We no longer raise profound questions about the purpose of high school as a lever to improve life for everyone. We seem to have resigned ourselves to giving up on this last opportunity for children to reinvent themselves before stepping onto the adult stage—we are satisfied just to get them “ready” to go to work. Indeed, the high school as preparation for college, as a GPA factory, as a sorting mechanism seems somehow right as rain.

High schools today serve the mission of university systems and consider students who don’t attend college as low wattage. Whether young people want college or not, mainstream curriculum assumes the labor class requires a sophisticated knowledge base spelled out in common standards. As a result, students from laboring families experience the same curriculum as students from affluent families. In 1897 Paul Hanus published “The Preparation of the High School Teacher of Mathematics” in The School Review (Vol. 5, No.8) and wrote about the effect of this culture-blind curriculum:

“Superficial knowledge,…limited mental power, narrow views of life, rusticity of manner—all of them marks of meager culture—rarely escape detection in a high school; and particularly for the brighter and socially superior pupils offer a serious obstacle to the teacher's usefulness, if they do not destroy it altogether” (Hanus, 1897, p.205).

All of the cognitive shortcomings of the working poor nullify the power of the teacher, particularly in a discipline like mathematics. On this view neither the poor student nor the affluent benefits from high school teachers. Hanus found another way in which high school teachers may ironically be obstacles to learning. Normal schools—university preparation for teachers—were available at the time, but not required. It would not be unusual for students to find themselves cognitively hemmed in by an undereducated teacher. Instead of seeing high school as a place for student self-discovery, well-meaning teachers saw it as a place for discipline and uniformity:

“It is a serious disadvantage to every high-school pupil, whether he [sic] is aware of it or not, perhaps even more serious if he does not know it than if he does, to have his mental horizon determined by the narrow mental horizon of his teacher; his 'intellectual vistas and sympathies limited or dwarfed by the inadequate intellectual insight and want of perspective on the teacher’s part” (Hanus, 1897, p. 505-506).

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Fortunately, in addition to taking and passing education courses, participating in supervised student teaching, and passing a rigorous performance assessment, today’s high school teachers are required in every state to demonstrate subject matter competence through completion of an accredited undergraduate program in the discipline in which they teach—or pass subject matter tests. It makes sense to align undergraduate degree requirements in universities with subject area teaching credentials in high school. University admissions criteria are keyed to disciplines under the big tent—Arts and Humanities, Sciences and Mathematics, and the Social Sciences. High school teachers are educated under the watchful eyes of teachers who have been in the big tent and then go forth to spread the wealth in classrooms, preparing young adults to enter the tent.

Students in high school must complete stipulated course sequences with a grade of C or better to be eligible for admission to the University of California (UC) and California State University (CSU) systems. They have to take a) courses in world and U.S. history and/or government, cultures, and historical geography (a cottage industry for teachers and professors); b) four years of English focused on reading, writing, listening, and speaking, integrating literature, composition, and language (a bonanza for publishers); c) three years of math including elementary and advanced algebra and two- and three-dimensional geometry (a treacherous symbolic dance of abstractions); d) two years of laboratory science in two of three areas: biology, chemistry, physics (a small business); e) two years of a foreign language (a philanthropic gesture); f) one year of visual and performing arts (a wink and a nod); and g) one year of electives (a “by the way”).

Fourteen years of requirements with one year of electives fulfilled in four years. The elasticity of time in the educational system tracing back to the Carnegie unit is a fascinating cultural fossil illustrating just how antiquated and convoluted the factory model has become. COVID exposed this credit system for what it is: a strategy based on seat time that stops working when seat time goes online. Interestingly, the Carnegie Institute itself has published about the insidious nature of the Carnegie unit going forward as a society:

“Today, the Carnegie Unit is under intensifying critique from educators and education policymakers who want to make student performance more transparent and the delivery of education more flexible. They see the Carnegie Unit as a significant impediment to the changes they seek. They advocate for innovations that support transparency and flexibility, including competency-based education models¹” (Sylva, White, & Toch, 2015)

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Writing in 1904 in The School Review Vol 12, No 7 (“The High School of the Twentieth Century”), David Jordan had the luxury of imagining the possibilities of this new high school in its infancy. Early in the essay, Jordan insisted that universities should keep their hands off these high schools, that any effort to turn high school into preparation for college would betray children. As he discussed his vision on the kind of high school which would deeply impact the twentieth century, he reflected a progressive inclination left somewhere on the road to today:

“With the greater attention to the individuality of students characteristic of all educational advances, this means still greater range of elasticity in courses of study, with still further diminution of prescribed work. It will clearly appear that there is no reason why a group of young men and women of the same age should take the same studies” (Jordan, 1904, p. 545)

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) exist today as evidence that the 20th century did not turn out as Jordan had hoped. Billed as a set of clear, consistent guidelines for what students in kindergarten through 12th grade should know and be able to do in English Language Arts and Mathematics, the purpose is to create young adults who are college and career ready.

Although the word “career” is used, CCSSs are squarely focused on academic skills, particularly in literacy and math—in my view, teaching algorithmic literacy for career readiness is a distortion serving neither college nor career readiness. The CCSSs also guide teachers to cultivate critical thinking, problem-solving, and analytical skills with learners—but not for their own purposes and questions. Content is co-opted by university admissions requirements.

When a portion of high school graduates finally get to college, they face the prospect of another two years of “general education” mandated according to a credit matrix. In California that means amassing dozens of credits with a passing grade across five broad domains representing different corners of the big tent. By this point the individual student has largely accepted the rules of the game and is ready to replicate it.

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1. Sylva, White, and Toch (2015). THE CARNEGIE UNIT: A CENTURY‐OLD STANDARD IN A CHANGING EDUCATION LANDSCAPE. Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching 51 Vista Lane Stanford, California 94305 650-566-5100 www.carnegiefoundation.org