Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

High School in Transition: Community, School, and Peer Group in Abilene, Kansas, 1939

1997; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 37; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/369902

1748-5959

John Modell, J. Trent Alexander,

Education Systems and Policy

The evolution of the high school has emerged as a key issue in the histo? ry of American education. Between about 1890 and 1940, the American high school was transformed from an academically oriented privilege for the few to a near-requirement for the many. As student ranks swelled and high school became an increasingly common experience, the meaning and impact of the schools themselves underwent fundamental changes. Three ineluctably connected levels of change transformed the high school's role in the lives of students and the nation as the broadened schools became places where complex cognitive and social sorting occurred. Institutional historians have documented in detail high schools' intro? duction of the new comprehensive curricula designed to attract and retain the broader segment of society that they now sought to educate. Somewhat less investigated by historians has been schools' inevitably reformulated contribution to the reproduction of the social order of communities. Least examined of the changes American high schools underwent over the course of the half century when they became universal was a pervasive differentiation of the experience of student life.1 This article seeks to contribute to our historical understanding of the coevolution of these three elements by focusing attention on the least studied of them?students' social experience?seen in relationship to both curricula and the community's social order. Reed Ueda, examining an eastern, suburban high school soon before the transformation and in its early stages, suggests that early high schools had a pervasive impact on the few young people they served. When chil? dren of working-class families were able to get into the schools and attend until graduation, Ueda shows, they were immersed in standard academ? ic curricula and left with almost as good a chance of going to college and