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HISTORICAL STUDIES IN EDUCATION
New Perspectives on
the History of
the Twentieth-Century
American High School
Edited by Kyle P. Steele
Historical Studies in Education
Series Editors
William J. Reese, Department of Educational Policy Studies,
University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA
John L. Rury, Education, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, USA
This series features new scholarship on the historical development of
education, defined broadly, in the United States and elsewhere. Interdis-
ciplinary in orientation and comprehensive in scope, it spans methodolog-
ical boundaries and interpretive traditions. Imaginative and thoughtful
history can contribute to the global conversation about educational
change. Inspired history lends itself to continued hope for reform, and
to realizing the potential for progress in all educational experiences.
More information about this series at

https://link.springer.com/bookseries/14870
Kyle P. Steele
Editor
New Perspectives
on the History
of the Twentieth-
Century American
High School
Editor
Kyle P. Steele
University of Wisconsin Oshkosh
Oshkosh, WI, USA
Historical Studies in Education

ISBN 978-3-030-79921-2 ISBN 978-3-030-79922-9 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79922-9
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2021
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc.
in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such
names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for
general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and informa-
tion in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither
the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with
respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been
made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps
and institutional affiliations.
Cover credit: Harris & Ewing, photographer. Central High School. United States Wash-
ington D.C. District of Columbia Washington D.C, None. [Between 1910 and 1920]
Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2016854783/.
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Series Editors’ Preface
The high school is an institution that almost all Americans are familiar
with, but its past is still being explored by historians. Focusing on the
twentieth century, this volume offers a diverse collection of essays exam-
ining various facets of that history. It begins with two accomplished
scholars reflecting on their own influential books and proceeds with
chapters considering a range of issues in the social history of secondary
schooling. Most deal with facets of high school experiences that previous
generations of scholars have neglected, raising questions and offering
insights along the way. In these respects the volume highlights new
perspectives on this uniquely American institution and sketches a research
agenda for the future.
As editor Kyle Steele points out, high schools began as rather elite insti-
tutions in the nineteenth century, but continued to be an avenue to higher
social status throughout the twentieth century. David Labaree suggests in
the book’s second chapter that secondary schools have contended with
dual purposes of equal access and unequal outcomes for most of this
time. The tensions inherent in this set of circumstances are a focal point
to one extent or another in each of the essays herein. They are evident
in discussions of curricular reform in “essential” schools and other insti-
tutions, gendered inequity in Philadelphia, status distinctions in students
activities, racial conflict during the Civil Rights era, public perceptions
of institutional quality, and inequality in the physical structures of these
v
vi SERIES EDITORS’ PREFACE
schools. The result is a rich and rewarding collection of viewpoints on the

conflicted history of American secondary education.
Professor Steele also reminds us that the “high schools” years occupy a
special place in the individual and collective memories of most Americans,
and this too is a feature of its history. So many of the essays in this book
rely upon such recollections in oral history accounts and first-hand reports
of events that impacted thousands of lives. In these respects the book’s
chapters offer methodological and interpretive insights as well, issues for
other scholars to consider in future research on secondary schooling.
Beyond that, it is possible that members of the public at large, the elusive
“general readers” that publishers yearn for, may also find many of these
essays quite interesting. After all, everyone has been to high school (or
nearly so), and the themes exhibited in this volume have touched upon
the experiences of many. This book offers an opportunity for all to reflect
upon their meaning and significance.
William J. Reese
John L. Rury
Acknowledgments
This volume would not have been possible without interest and encour-
agement from Bill Reese and John Rury, who recommended it be consid-
ered for their Historical Studies in Education series at Palgrave Macmillan.
The volume also benefitted greatly from its editor at Palgrave, Milana
Vernikova, who was remarkably helpful in moving it through its various
phases, always doing so with both efficiency and care.
I feel very fortunate to have worked with this group of scholars. I
was regularly humbled by their talents and skills as historians, and I was
impressed, to a person, by their professionalism. Truth be told, I was
warned that editing a book could be quite cumbersome. “It’s like herding
cats,” one colleague joked. That certainly was not my experience. I found
the process to be delightful. It is worth mentioning, too, that nearly all
of the editorial back and forth took place during the pandemic. So, at a
time when it was easy for us all to feel disconnected, I was thrilled to have
an excuse to talk writing and ideas (and, often, to just chat) over email,
on the phone, and on Zoom. I truly looked forward to our conversations
about the history of the high school—but, just as much, our conversations
about the rest of it all. Special thanks to Walter Stern, Erika Kitzmiller,
Bill Reese, Alex Hyres, Cam Scribner, Kevin Zayed, Jon Hale, Liz Hauck,
Bob Hampel, and Caitlin Cieslik-Miskimen, all of whom helped shape my
thinking about this volume and, in some cases, read all or parts of my own
contributions.
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Lastly, I want to thank my kids, Henry (6) and Jack (4), for tolerating
me sometimes reading after dinner and sometimes pacing around talking
(“too loud,” they said) to other historians on the phone. As this volume
was wrapping up, they were wrapping up a school year with extended
closures, then intermittent closures, virtual learning, masks, and COVID
tests. Their flexibility and joy during it all were a reminder of precisely
what I should be grateful for during a pandemic, as well as what school is
really about.
Contents
1 What Is the Twentieth-Century American High

School? An Introduction 1
Kyle P. Steele
2 Politics and Markets: The Enduring Dynamics

of the US System of Schooling 13
David F. Labaree
3 Renovations in the Citadel 29
Robert L. Hampel
4 “Intellectual Power” for All: Theodore Sizer

and the Origins of the Coalition of Essential Schools
at Phillips Academy, Andover 53
John P. Spencer
5 “A Living, Breathing, Curriculum”: Harlem Prep
and the Power of Cultural Relevance, 1967–1974 81
Barry M. Goldenberg
6 Gendered Anxieties Pave the Way for a Separate

and Unequal Co-educational High School 115
Erika M. Kitzmiller
ix
x CONTENTS
7 A Window into the World of Students: An Analysis

of 1920s High School Student Newspapers 139
Caitlin Cieslik-Miskimen
8 Books, Basketball, and Order of the Fish: Youth
Culture in Midwest Small-Town High Schools,
1900–1930 169
Patricia Stovey
9 “Fight for Your Land”: Southern High School

Activism and the Struggle for Youth Autonomy
During and After the Second World War 205
Jon Hale
10 The Hidden Politics of High School Violence 237
Walter C. Stern
11 Shifting Public Perceptions of Wichita’s Southeast

High School, 1957–2000 277
Lauren Elizabeth Coleman-Tempel
12 Funding the “High School of Tomorrow”: Inequity
in Facility Construction and Renovation in Rural
North Carolina, 1964–1997 311
Esther Cyna
13 Epilogue 347
Kyle P. Steele
Index 357
List of Contributors
Caitlin Cieslik-Miskimen University of Idaho, Moscow, ID, USA

Lauren Elizabeth Coleman-Tempel University of Kansas, Lawrence,
KS, USA
Esther Cyna Université Sorbonne-Nouvelle, Paris, France
Barry M. Goldenberg Teachers College, Columbia University, New
York, NY, USA
Jon Hale University of Illinois, Champaign, IL, USA
Robert L. Hampel University of Delaware, Newark, DE, USA
Erika M. Kitzmiller Barnard College, New York, NY, USA
David F. Labaree Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA
John P. Spencer Ursinus College, Collegeville, PA, USA
Kyle P. Steele University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, Oshkosh, WI, USA
Walter C. Stern University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA
Patricia Stovey University of Wisconsin, La Crosse, WI, USA
xi
List of Figures
Fig. 6.1 Philadelphia’s High School Enrollment by Ward, 1909 124

Fig. 8.1 Hubert Nelson’s Drawing, or “Plat,” of Minerva Hall,
Harris High School, Petersburg, Illinois, 1921 174
Fig. 11.1 Projected Population Growth in Wichita, 1945–1980 281
Fig. 11.2 Increase in Suspensions in Wichita Public Schools,
1987–1990 298
Fig. 11.3 College Completion in Adults Twenty-Five Years
and Older, 1980 302
Fig. 11.4 College Completion in Adults Twenty-Five Years
and Older, 1990 303
Fig. 12.1 Representation of School Funding for Facilities in North
Carolina 314
Fig. 12.2 Percentage of School District Budgets Dedicated
to Repair (National Average), 1982 (Source American
Association of School Administrators, “The Maintenance
Gap: Deferred Repair and Renovation in the Nation’s
Elementary and Secondary Schools,” 1983, 10–11) 315
Fig. 12.3 Pinecrest High School, Moore County, 1969 (Source The
Pilot, September 7, 2013) 318
Fig. 12.4 Perquimans High School Demolition, Perquimans
County, 1986 (Source Harris, “School Demolition Nears
Completion”) 322
xiii
xiv LIST OF FIGURES
Fig. 12.5 North Carolina State Funding for Capital Outlay,

1958–2014 (Source North Carolina Association
of County Commissioners, “The North Carolina
Public School Partnership,” August 2016 Conference
Presentation, 20) 327
Fig. 12.6 Enka High School, Buncombe County, 1986 (Source
Moore, “New Enka High: A Dream Come True”) 333
Fig. 12.7 Trailers Outside Owen High School, Buncombe County,
1987 (Source Ewart Ball, Asheville Citizen-Times, August
30, 1987, 9A) 334
CHAPTER 1
What Is the Twentieth-Century American

High School? An Introduction
Kyle P. Steele
A couple of years ago, a colleague who is also interested in the history of

the American high school suggested I read Jennifer Senior’s 2013 essay,
“Why You Truly Never Leave High School.”1 In it, Senior intersperses
snapshots from an actual twenty-fifth high school reunion with interviews
from filmmakers, artists, scientists, friends, and academics, among others.
The evidence hops quickly from topic to the next, but Senior’s argu-
ment is crystal clear: for those who spend time in high schools, there
something inescapable about the experience. Senior’s hunch, it turns out,
is supported by the work of developmental neuroscientists and psychol-
ogists, many of whom suggest that humans tend to remember events
between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five with far more clarity than
in other periods of life, a phenomenon called the “reminiscence bump.”
For better or worse, they argue, we can retrieve with more ease the
K. P. Steele (B)
University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, Oshkosh, WI, USA
e-mail: steelek@uwosh.edu
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2021
K. P. Steele, New Perspectives on the History
of the Twentieth-Century American High School,
Historical Studies in Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79922-9_1
2 K. P. STEELE
sights and sounds from those years: the music, the fashion, the friend-
ships, the triumphs, the blunders, and, above all, how it made us feel. As
Temple University psychologist Laurence Steinberg put it, “There’s no
reason why, at the age of sixty, I should still be listening to the Allman
Brothers.”2
Unsurprisingly, elements of our popular culture—television, music, and
film, in particular—regularly tap into (or cash in on) the “reminiscence
bump.” Scores of television shows, from Dobie Gillis (1959–1963), to
What’s Happening!! (1976–1979), to Saved by the Bell (1989–1993), to
Glee (2009–2015), have placed high schoolers and their social worlds
at the center of the story, and we should expect even more of them
to materialize next pilot season. Musicians have similarly rhapsodized
about the high school experience. Before and since Chuck Berry’s album
“After School Sessions” (1957), The Beach Boys, Alice Cooper, Bruce
Springsteen, Nirvana, and Taylor Swift, to name a few, have all found
inspiration for lyrics, not to mention hit songs, by mining the rites of
passage surrounding the institution. Recently even, in January of 2021,
seventeen-year-old Olivia Rodrigo’s song “Drivers License” debuted at
the top of the Billboard 100, breaking records for the number of streams
it accumulated on Spotify and Apple Music in the weeks that followed.
As with many pop songs before it, “Drivers License” describes a love lost,
which Rodrigo muses about while driving alone “through the suburbs.”
And where did Rodrigo and her special person purportedly meet? As
actors on the set of the television show “High School Musical: The
Musical: The Series.” 3
Movies, of course, have also explored the social worlds of high
schoolers. Compared to other media, films have had a tendency to present
those worlds, as well as the high school as an institution, in more hyper-
bolic and dangerous terms, as overrun by unscrupulous and degenerate
teenagers, ineptly corralled by the adults who struggle to understand
them. This point is made apparent not only by the plot lines of the
most beloved and successful high school movies of the last seventy years—
including Blackboard Jungle (1955), Carrie (1976), House Party (1990),
and Booksmart (2019)—but also, of late, by historians of education. Sevan
Terzian and Patrick Ryan’s edited volume American Education in Popular
Media (2015), for example, features several terrific essays that explain how
films about high schools have shaped our view of them, however distorted
that view might be.4
1 WHAT IS THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN HIGH … 3
With disproportionate attention devoted to the point of view of young

people and their communities in cultural artifacts and the popular imag-
ination, I was surprised as a graduate student to find how much the
historical literature on high schools had sidestepped it. I was also struck
by how much attention, by contrast, historians paid to the people who ran
high schools, and to the national leaders who endeavored to shape them
with policy. The historiography of the high school, I found, attended to
the institution’s view of the community as opposed to the community’s
view of the institution. Books and articles from this perspective, many of
them expertly crafted and utterly absorbing, left me curious about the rest
of the story.
As I attempted to capture in my first book, this more top-down
approach is still vitally important, and it has been necessary in moving
the field forward for a couple of reasons.5 First, this literature explains
how both the high school and high school enrollment changed remark-
ably over the twentieth century. Put simply, at the start of the century,
going to high school was still somewhat rare, typically reserved for the
white and middle or upper classes.6 But by the end of the century, high
school attendance was the normative experience for teenagers, regardless
of one’s background. In 1890, as several of the chapters in this volume
point out, only six percent of the nation’s fourteen-seventeen-year-olds
were educated beyond eighth grade. By 1930, that figure had risen to
fifty-one percent, prompting, as William Reese explains, local commu-
nities to build “one high school per day between 1890 and 1920, not
all of them palaces, but an indication of impressive demand.”7 By 1960,
roughly ninety percent were enrolled, and graduation rates, which help
us track how long people stayed in the high school, passed sixty percent
for the first time.8 By 1985 and through the end of the millennium, the
percentage of Americans who completed high school hovered between
eighty-five and eighty-seven percent.9 High schools, in short, became
mass institutions.
Second, these more top-down narratives explain how the high school
curriculum grew almost as rapidly as the student population over the
course of the century. Historians have tended to portray the curricular
expansion as the ongoing triumph of the ideas presented in Cardinal
Principles of Secondary Education report (1918) over the ideas presented
in Report of the Committee of Ten (1892). Both of these widely read
statements on the high school were expansive in scope and circulation,
completed as part of the work of the National Education Association.
4 K. P. STEELE
In brief, the Committee of Ten, which a president of Harvard led,

argued that all high schoolers should receive a standardized, academic
curriculum, regardless of their background or plans for the future.
Conversely, the authors of the Cardinal Principles, whom a former high
school principal led, argued that course offerings needed to expand
substantially to meet the interests and varied abilities of the growing
number of students. Implicit in their argument was a conviction that many
of the era’s new high school students—who were somewhat less likely to
be well-to-do, native-born, or white—were incapable of benefitting from
an academic curriculum.10
As the late Jeffrey Mirel aptly noted, it “is not hard to see where the
battle lines would have been drawn” between these two perspectives, but,
“as we know now, the Cardinal Principles team won.”11 For the rest of
the century, that is, high schools expanded what they offered their pupils,
adding vocational classes (to prepare young people for specific jobs) ,
even more extracurricular activities (to fill more of the high schooler’s
day), health and physical education (to teach young people how to be
healthy and prepare them for military service), watered-down academic
classes (“Household Science” over chemistry, for example), and a “life
adjustment” education (to teach young people to drive cars, balance their
checkbooks, and live independently). In many cases, historians explain,
high schools regularly offered all of this training and more under one
roof, in so-called “comprehensive” institutions. This means that students
were “tracked” to receive demonstrably different educations—exacer-
bating race-, class-, and gender-based inequities—even as they ultimately
received the same credential: a high school diploma.12 Over the years,
Americans have changed some of the names and content offered in the
high school’s various tracks, but the arrangement of the institution has
been markedly stable.13
Despite all this important and complex scholarship, there has always
been, and continues to be, more room to explore what the field has
done less fully: to round out our stories about high schools with the
perspectives of the people who attended them and with a considera-
tion for the idiosyncrasies of the communities that surrounded them. For
example, what did communities make of high schools during this century
of incredible change? If a community had more than one high school,
how did people make sense of the differences between them? How did all
of this matter to the young people who were required to attend? What
about those who were denied access, who never attended, or who left
before graduation? And, if we “truly never leave high school,” and are
constantly reminded of its social and cultural import, then how does this
near-ubiquitous institution live on in our memories, refracted by time and
age? If we are truly searching to understand “education in the broadest
sense,” as Lawrence Cremin and Bernard Bailyn put it sixty years ago,
then our narratives about high schools would need more points of view.14
Without question, there are many models of scholarship that address
questions like these, including books by David Labaree and Robert
Hampel, both contributors to this volume. Additionally, Gerald Grant
takes us inside the halls of Hamilton High in his “sociologically informed
history” of a school in transition from the 1950s through the 1980s.
James Anderson describes how Black students accessed high schools in the
Jim Crow South, despite virulently racist laws and policies that attempted
to impede them. Paula Fass utilizes yearbooks to help us understand
how New York high schools in the 1930s and 1940s acted to Ameri-
canize immigrant youth. Stephen Lassonde shows how high schools in
New Haven pulled the children of Italian immigrants spatially and cultur-
ally away from their neighborhoods. Sherman Dorn traces the arrival
and institutional response to the dreaded “high school dropout” in the
1960s. Beth Bailey brings to life the dimensions of high school dating in
her single-volume history of courtship. Pamela Grundy uses high school
basketball to show how North Carolinians grappled with the politics of
race, class, and gender throughout the twentieth century. Carlos Kevin
Blanton uncovers the damaging English-only policies put in place in Texas
high schools. Yoon K. Pak captures the lived experience of Japanese Amer-
ican high schoolers in Seattle during World War II.15 And more recently,
a wave of books and articles by John Rury and Shirley Hill, Michelle
Purdy, Jon Hale, Dionne Danns, and V. P. Franklin, among others, take
great care to uncover the perspectives of Black teenagers as they fought to
access secondary education, desegregated private schools, engaged in local
activism, and furthered the aims of the long Civil Rights Movement.16
The chapters that follow expand on this scholarship in service of four
distinct but related ends: as an introduction to the history of the Amer-
ican high school in the twentieth century; as a reevaluation of the power
of narratives that privilege the perspective of school leaders, administra-
tors, and the curriculum; as a glimpse into the worlds created by the
students themselves; and, most critically, as a means of sparking conver-
sations about where the field may look next for stories worth telling.
6 K. P. STEELE
Indeed, the chapters that follow prove that the question this introduc-
tion poses—“What is the twentieth-century American high school?”—is
far from fully answered. The question’s ultimate un-answerability, in fact,
is what makes the field exciting. To borrow a phrase from Eric Foner
in his book The Story of American Freedom, “[t]he title…as is perhaps
obvious, is meant to be ambiguous or ironic (one might even call is
postmodern).”17
In terms of style, I encouraged the contributing authors to address
the topic at hand from their varied perspectives, training, and interests, as
well as in their unique style and voice. As a result, some of the chapters
approximate journal articles in the history of education, while others are
slightly less formal (a couple even include autobiography). Some contain
elements that are more sociological than historical, and others connect
their arguments to ongoing debates regarding education policy and the
American high school. The fact that the chapters are wide-ranging not
only reflects a strength inherent to edited collections, but, in this case, it
also reflects the important tendency toward interdisciplinary thinking and
writing in the field.18
In terms of organization, each of the chapters present standalone
arguments that can be read and interpreted on their own. That said, I
have arranged them to suggest that the authors are regularly engaged in
overlapping or complimentary themes, either in their guiding questions,
historiographical interventions, chronologies, or research methods. What
follows, therefore, may also be read as: a pair (Chapters 2 and 3), followed
by a pair (Chapters 4 and 5), followed by trio (Chapters 6–8), followed
by a pair (Chapters 9 and 10), followed by a pair (Chapters 11 and 12).
For clarity, the spacing of the table of contents indicates this arrangement.
Chapters 2 and 3, for example, present scholars reflecting on their
books on American high schools over thirty years after they were written.
First, David Labaree considers his conclusions from The Making of an
American High School (1988), suggesting that, over the course of his
career, he has come to understand the high school as an ideal model for
examining the conflict at the center of education writ large. On the one
hand, that is, the high school has claimed to be egalitarian and demo-
cratic (and therefore inclusive), yet, on the other hand, it has promised
to be elite and to confer status (and is therefore stratified). The system,
Labaree proposes, is at odds with itself. In Chapter 3, RobertHampel
revisits his book The Last Little Citadel (1986), which was completed
as part of three books from A Study of High Schools, alongside Horace’s
Compromise (1984) and The Shopping Mall High School (1985). Hampel’s
chapter not only explores his path to joining the Study and completing
Citadel, but also how, with the benefit of decades in the field and experi-
ence in on-the-ground school reform, he would approach the book with
additional questions and sources today.
Chapters 4 and 5 offer stories that center around the high school
curriculum, utilizing it as a vehicle to examine anew central questions
in the field, including: What is an ideal high school curriculum? Should
it be standardized for all high schoolers? And can the right curriculum,
if taught correctly, lead to more engaged students and equitable schools?
In Chapter 4, John Spencer brings to life Theodore “Ted” Sizer’s time
as headmaster of the elite boarding school Phillips Academy, Andover
in the 1970s. The Andover years, Spencer argues, are key to under-
standing Sizer’s future work as head of the Coalition of Essential Schools,
a group that pushed secondary schools nationwide to focus on critical
thinking, interdisciplinarity, depth over coverage, and student-led inquiry
over lecture. As Spencer shows, the Coalition’s ideas hold continued
relevance in light of the movement for testing and accountability that
No Child Left Behind (2002) enshrined. At roughly the same time that
Sizer was at Andover, Black school leaders at Harlem Prep, just over 200
miles away, were implementing a curriculum aimed at meeting the needs
of the school’s mostly Black student population, which Barry Golden-
berg captures in Chapter 5. Before 1974, Goldenberg explains, Harlem
Prep operated as an independent, community-based school. Its multicul-
tural, student-first curriculum and pedagogy—with hallmarks that would
now be called “culturally relevant”—proved successful and, Goldenberg
contends, contain lessons for equity-minded school leaders, teachers, and
citizens today.
The next three chapters (Chapters 6, 7, and 8) use unique source
material and methods to take us inside high schools. In Chapter 6,
ErikaKitzmiller chronicles the gendered anxieties that fueled the campaign
to open Philadelphia’s Germantown High School at the turn of the
century. While Germantown, and many secondary schools like it nation-
ally, were celebrated for being co-educational, Kitzmiller uses local plan-
ning documents, school records, and Census data to show that male
and female students were systematically separated inside Germantown
(physically and in educational opportunity), an arrangement that limited
the long-term prospects of the young women who attended or even
8 K. P. STEELE
graduated. In Chapter 7, Caitlin Cieslik-Miskimen considers the prolif-

eration of high school student newspapers in the early twentieth century.
Pairing a fine-grained analysis of student newspapers in Wisconsin with
national trends, Cieslik-Miskimen shows that early student experimenta-
tion in the medium was curtailed in the 1920s by more adult control, a
change that led to professional looking papers and an editorial perspective
that was distinctly pro-school. In Chapter 8, PatriciaStovey complements
traditional school records with student diaries and memoirs to describe
the rhythms of small-town, midwestern high schools between 1900 and
1930. Borrowing a framework for describing youth culture from Paula
Fass, Stovey provides intimate and rarely explored details from the worlds
students created in assembly halls, within school clubs and sports, and in
their lives beyond adult supervision.
Chapters 9 and 10 focus on the experiences of Black students and
communities during periods of high school segregation and desegrega-
tion. In Chapter 9, Jon Hale examines student activism at historically
Black high schools in the South before and after the World War II.
Given that Black secondary schools were often important hubs of culture
and education, Hale suggests, they became critical sites for students—
in concert with their teachers, the NAACP, and the Southern Negro
Youth Congress (SNYC) —to build a foundation for the freedom strug-
gles that would dominate the 1950s and beyond. In Chapter 10, Walter
Stern discusses the often hidden politics of race-based violence in high
schools in the 1960s and 1970s. As Stern makes clear, violence in schools
nationally was usually the result of anti-Black discrimination, but it was
almost always reframed by school leaders as a matter of “school safety”
and compliance as opposed to racial justice. Lawmakers and administra-
tors used the moment to institutionalize practices that disproportionally
surveilled and disciplined Black students, effectively binding the high
school to the growing carceral state in what scholars now often call the
“school-prison-nexus.”
Chapters 11 and 12 use oral history and school finance law, respec-
tively, to investigate how the placement and construction of high schools
created durably inequitable school systems in the final decades of the
century. In Chapter 11, Lauren Coleman-Tempel explains how local
perceptions of Wichita’s Southeast High School changed significantly
between 1957 and 2000, a process shaped by racist housing and educa-
tion policies, the efforts of civil rights groups, and the introduction of
test-in magnet and International Baccalaureate high schools. By layering
this timeline with oral histories, Coleman-Tempel shows that commu-

nity members routinely disagreed about who or what was responsible
for Southeast’s educational problems and, by extension, what should be
done to address them. In Chapter 12, Esther Cyna investigates funding
for the construction and improvement of high school buildings in North
Carolina from the 1960s through the 1990s. Given, as Cyna proves, that
high school buildings are typically the most expensive investments districts
make, carefully untangling the processes by which they are funded reveals
inequities that are legal, fiscal, educational, and even symbolic.
Finally, in a short Epilogue, I offer some brief thoughts, based on
the scholarship here and elsewhere, on what the field might consider
in capturing future histories of the American high school in the twen-
tieth century. For now, though, as you begin reading and considering
the chapters that follow, I will leave you with a quote from the author
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., one that I included in my first book’s introduction,
but that bears repeating here. In a 1970 interview in Esquire, Vonnegut
declared that “the high school is closer to the core of the American expe-
rience than anything else I can think of. We have all been there... [and
while] there, we saw nearly every sign of justice and injustice, kindness
and meanness, [and] intelligence and stupidity, which we are all likely to
encounter later in life.”19 Since I included the quote in my book, I have
had the chance to teach an undergraduate senior capstone in which—
aided by research, media, and art—my students try to decide if Vonnegut
is right. There has yet to be much consensus, and I suspect the readers of
these chapters may be divided similarly. All the same, I hope this volume
can add context to Vonnegut’s claim, perhaps revealing what else we
ought to know about such an institution along the way.
Notes
1. I was fortunate to have Daniel Perlstein chair a panel I was on at the
History of Education Society’s Annual Meeting in 2018. At the time, I
was preparing to teach an undergraduate Honors capstone on the Amer-
ican high school, and he shared the syllabus for his course at UC Berkeley
titled, “High School, The Movie.” Among many fascinating texts and
films, the syllabus included Senior’s essay.
2. Jennifer Senior, “Why You Truly Never Leave High School,” New York
Magazine, January 18, 2013, 20–21.
10 K. P. STEELE
3. Anna Grace Lee, “Olivia Rodrigo’s ‘Drivers License’ Is the No. 1 Song in
the World Right Now. But There’s More to the Story,” Esquire, January
21, 2021.
4. Sevan Terzian and Patrick Ryan, eds., American Education in Popular
Media: From the Blackboard to the Silver Screen (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2015). See chapters by Daniel Perlstein and Leah Faw (seven)
and Andrew L. Grunzke (eight), in particular. Also, see Robert Bulman,
Hollywood Goes to High School: Cinema, Schools, and American Culture
(New York: Worth Publishers, 2005); Joel Spring, Images of American
Life: A History of Ideological Management in Schools, Movies, Radio, and
Television (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992).
5. See, for example, Edward Krug, The Shaping of the American High School:
1880–1920, Vol. 1 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969) and The
Shaping of the American High School: 1920–1941, Vol. 2 (Madison: Univer-
sity of Wisconsin Press, 1972); Herbert Kliebard, The Struggle for the
American Curriculum, 1835–1958, Second Edition (New York: Routledge,
1995); Schooled to Work: Vocationalism and the American Curriculum,
1876–1946 (New York: Teachers College Press, 1999).
6. For more on nineteenth-century public high schools, see William Reese,
The Origins of the American High School (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1995).
7. William Reese, America’s Public Schools: From the Common School to “No
Child Left Behind” (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011),
181.
8. I outline these enrollment figures, which have been covered widely by the
field, in Making a Mass Institution: Indianapolis and the American High
School (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 1–2.
9. In this case, the “completion rate” captures “the proportion of 18-
through 24-year-olds who have left high school and earned a high school
diploma or the equivalent, including a General Educational Development
credential.” See Phillip Kaufman and Martha Naomi Alt, Dropout Rates in
the United States: 2000 (Washington, DC: National Center for Education
Statistics, 2001), 17–18.
10. For an excellent and concise overview of this tension, see Jeffrey Mirel,
“The Traditional High School: Historical Debates over Its Nature and
Function,” Education Next (Winter 2006): 14–21.
11. Mirel, “The Traditional High School,” 15, 17.
12. For overviews of these trends, see Reese, America’s Public Schools, notably
chapter six; John Rury, Education and Social Change: Contours in the
History of American Schooling (New York: Routledge, 2012), notably
chapters four and five; and, though about a K12 system, Jeffrey Mirel,
The Rise and Fall of an Urban System: Detroit, 1907–1981 (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1993); On the drive for vocationalism,
see Harvey Kantor and David Tyack, eds., Work, Youth, and Schooling:
Historical Perspectives on Vocationalism in American Education (Palo Alto:
Stanford University Press, 1982) and Harvey Kantor, Learning to Earn:
Work, School, and Vocational Reform in California, 1880–1930 (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1988 ).
13. For more on how tracked high schools meet demands for both “social
efficiency” and “social mobility” through education, see David Labaree,
“Public Goods, Private Goods: The American Struggle over Education,”
American Educational Research Journal 34, No. 1 (Spring 1997): 39–81.
14. This point is made explicit by Stephen Lassonde in the opening to
Learning to Forget: Schooling and Family Life in New Haven’s Working
Class, 1870–1940 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 10. See
Bernard Bailyn, Education and the Forming of American Society (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960) and Lawrence Cremin,
The Wonderful World of Ellwood Patterson Cubberley: An Essay on the
Historiography of American Education (New York: Teachers College Press,
1965).
15. David F. Labaree, The Making of an American High School: The Creden-
tials Market and the Central High School of Philadelphia, 1838–1939
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988); Hampel, Robert L. The Last
Little Citadel: American High Schools Since 1940 (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1986); Gerald Grant, The World We Created at Hamilton High
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988); James D. Anderson, The
Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935 (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 1988); Paula Fass, Outside In: Minorities and
the Transformation of American Education (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1991); Sherman Dorn, Creating the Dropout: An Institutional and
Social History of School Failure (Westport: Praeger, 1997); Beth L. Bailey,
From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989); Pamela Grundy,
Learning to Win: Sports, Education, and Social Change in Twentieth-
Century North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2003); Carlos Kevin Blanton, The Strange Career of Bilingual Educa-
tion in Texas, 1836–1981 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press,
2007); Lassonde, Learning to Forget; Yoon K. Pak, Wherever I Go, I
Will Always Be a Loyal American: Schooling Seattle’s Japanese Americans
During World War II (New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2002).
16. Michelle A. Purdy, Transforming the Elite: Black Students and the Deseg-
regation of Private Schools (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2018); Jon Hale, “Future Foot Soldiers or Budding Criminals?
The Dynamics of High School Student Activism in the Southern Black
Freedom Struggle,” Journal of Southern History 64, No. 3 (August 2018):
615–652; Dionne Danns, Crossing Segregated Boundaries: Remembering
12 K. P. STEELE
Chicago School Desegregation (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press,

2020); Vincent P. Franklin, The Young Crusaders: The Untold Story of the
Children and Teenagers Who Galvanized the Civil Rights Movement (New
York: Beacon Press, 2021). Also, see Pamela Grundy, Color and Char-
acter: West Charlotte High and the American Struggle over Educational
Equality (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017); John
L. Rury and Shirley A. Hill, The African American Struggle for Secondary
Schooling, 1940–1980: Closing the Graduation Gap (New York: Teachers
College Press, 2015); Heather Andrea Williams, Self-Taught: African
American Education in Slavery and Freedom (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2005).
17. Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom (New York: W. W. Norton,
1999), xxi.
18. Among others, the work of Jonathan Zimmerman is emblematic of
this trend. See Whose America?: Culture Wars in the Public Schools
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), and Too Hot to Handle:
A Global History of Sex Education (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2016). Also, though not a historian of education in name, Gloria Ladson-
Billings has produced some of the most lucid and meaningful essays in
the last thirty years of the field. See “Landing on the Wrong Note: The
Price We Paid for Brown,” Educational Researcher 33, No. 7 (2004): 3–
13; “From the Achievement Gap to the Education Debt: Understanding
Achievement in US Schools,” Educational Researcher 35, No. 7 (2006):
3–12.
19. Steele, Making a Mass Institution, 7. As I note, I first read the quote in
Reese, America’s Public Schools, 286–287.
CHAPTER 2
Politics and Markets: The Enduring Dynamics

of the US System of Schooling
David F. Labaree
Sometimes, when you’re writing a book, someone else needs to tell you
what it’s truly about. That is what happened to me as I was writing my
first book, published in 1988: The Making of an American High School:
The Credentials Market and the Central High School of Philadelphia,
1838–1939. I had just completed the manuscript when David Cohen, my
colleague at the Michigan State University College of Education, gener-
ously offered to read the full draft and give me comments on it. As we sat
together for two hours in my office, he explained to me the point I was
trying to make in the text but had failed to make explicit. Although the
This chapter is dedicated to my friend and former colleague, David Cohen, who
died in 2020.
D. F. Labaree (B)
Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA
e-mail: dlabaree@stanford.edu

Switzerland AG 2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79922-9_2
14 D. F. LABAREE
pieces of the story I presented were interesting in themselves, he said, they

fell short of forming a larger interpretive scheme. The elements of this
larger story were already there, but they were just below the surface. Our
conversation showed me that the heart of the story my book told about
this high school revolved around an ongoing tension between politics and
markets, a tension that shaped its evolution.
Central High was created as an expression of democratic politics. In
this role, it was an effort to create informed citizens for the new republic.
But once it was launched, it took on a new role, as a vehicle for conferring
social status on the highly select group of students who attended. Its
subsequent history was a struggle between these two visions of the school,
as political pressures mounted to give future students greater access to
the high school credential, while the families of current students sought
to preserve the exclusivity that provided them with social advantage.
At the same time that David told me what my book was about, he
also told me what it was not about. As I saw it, the empirical core of the
book was a quantitative dataset I had compiled of 1,834 students who
attended the school during census years between 1840 and 1920. I had
coded the information from school records, linked it to family data from
the census, punched it into IBM cards (remember those?), and analyzed
it at length with statistical software. What the data showed was that—
unlike the contemporary high school, where social origins best explain
who graduates and who drops out—the determining factor at Central
was grades. This was my big reveal. But that day in my office, David
pointed out to me that all this data—recorded in no fewer than thirty-six
tables—added up to a footnote to the statement, “Central High School
was a meritocracy.” In total, this part of the study took two years of my
still short life. Two years for one footnote.
Needless to say, at the time I struggled to accept either of David’s
comments with the gratitude they deserved. He was right, but I was
devastated. First, the book I thought was finished would now require a
complete rewrite, so I could weave the book’s central theme back into the
text. And second, this revision would mean confining the hard-won quan-
titative analysis to a single chapter, because the most interesting material
turned out to be elsewhere. In the rush to display all my hard-won data,
I had ended up stepping on my punchline.
In this essay, I explore how the tension between politics and markets,
which David Cohen uncovered in my first book, helps us understand the
central dynamics of the American system of schooling over its 200-year
2 POLITICS AND MARKETS: THE ENDURING DYNAMICS OF THE US … 15
history. The primary insight is that the system, as with Central High,
is at odds with itself. It’s a system without a plan. No one constructed
a coherent design for the system or assigned it a clear and consis-
tent mission. Instead, the system evolved through the dynamic interplay
of competing actors seeking to accomplish contradictory social goals
through a single organizational machinery.
By focusing on this tension, we can begin to understand some of
the more puzzling and even troubling characteristics of the American
system of schooling. It’s a radically decentralized organizational struc-
ture, dispersed across 50 states and 15,000 school districts, and no one is
in charge. Yet somehow schools all over the country look and act in ways
that are remarkably similar. It’s a system that has a life of its own, fends
off concerted efforts by political reformers to change the core grammar of
schooling, and evolves at its own pace in response to the demands of the
market. Its structure is complex, incoherent, and fraught with internal
contradictions, but it nonetheless seems to thrive under these circum-
stances. And it is somehow able to accommodate the demands placed
on it by a disparate array of educational consumers, who all seem to get
something valuable out of it, even though these demands pull the system
in conflicting directions. It has something for everyone, it seems, except
for fans of organizational coherence and efficiency. In fact, one lesson that
emerges from this focus on tensions within the system is that coherence
and efficiency are vastly overrated. Conflict can be constructive.
This essay starts with the tension between politics and markets that I
explored in my first book and then builds on it with analyses I carried
out over the next thirty years in which I sought to unpack this tension.
These findings were published in three later books: How to Succeed in
School Without Really Learning: The Credentials Race in American Educa-
tion (1997); Someone Has to Fail: The Zero-Sum Game of Public Schooling
(2010); and A Perfect Mess: The Unlikely Ascendancy of American Higher
Education (2017). The aim of this review is to explore the core dynamics
of the US educational system as it emerges in these works. It is a story
about a balancing act among competing forces, one that began with a
conversation about Central High with my friend David Cohen.
The insight that came to me as I was working on these later books
was that the form and function of the American high school served as the
model for the educational system. The nineteenth-century high school
established the mix of common schooling at one level and elite schooling
at the next level that came to characterize the system as a whole. And the
16 D. F. LABAREE
tracked comprehensive high school that emerged in the early twentieth

century provided the template for the structure of US higher education,
which, like Central in 1920, is both highly stratified and broadly inclusive.
Overall, it is a system that embraces its own contradictions by providing
something for everyone—at the same time providing social access and
preserving social advantage.
Politics and Markets

and the Founding of Central High
To understand the tension in the American educational system you first
need to consider the core tension that lies at the heart of the American
political system. Liberal democracy is an effort to balance two competing
goals. One is political equality, which puts emphasis on the need for rule
by the majority, grounded in political consensus, and aiming toward the
ideal of equality for all. This is the democratic side of liberal democracy.
The other goal is individual liberty, which puts emphasis on preserving
the rights of the minority from the tyranny of the majority, open compe-
tition among individual actors, and a high tolerance for any resulting
social inequality. This is the liberal side of the system, which frees persons,
property, and markets from undue political constraint. These are the two
tendencies I have labeled politics and markets. Balancing the two is both
essential and difficult. It offers equal opportunity for unequal outcomes,
majority rule, and minority rights.
School is at the center of this because it reflects and serves both
elements. It offers everyone access to school and the opportunity to
show what individuals can achieve there. And it also creates hierarchies
of merit, winners and losers, as it sorts people into different levels of the
social structure. In short, it provides social access and also upholds social
advantage.
So what happened when Central High School appeared upon the
scene? It was founded for political and moral reasons, in support of the
common-school ideal of preparing citizens of the new American republic
by instilling in them the skills and civic virtues they would need in to
establish and preserve republican community. But in order to accomplish
this goal, the founders needed to get past a major barrier. Prior to the
founding of common schools in Philadelphia in the 1830s, a form of
public schooling was already in effect, but it was limited to people who
couldn’t afford to pay for their own schooling. To qualify, you had to go
down to city hall and declare yourself, in person, as a pauper. Middle- and
upper-class families paid for private schooling for their children. Common
schools would not work in creating civic community unless they could
draw everyone into the mix. But the existing public system was freighted
with the label “pauper schools.” Why would a respectable middle-class
family want to send their children to such a stigmatized institution?
The answer to this question was ingenious. Induce the better-off to
enroll in the public schools by making such enrollment the prerequisite
for gaining access to an institution that was better than anything they
could find in the private education market. In Philadelphia, that institu-
tion was Central High School. The founders deliberately created it as an
irresistible lure for the wealthy. It was located in the most fashionable
section of town. It had a classical marble façade, a high-end German tele-
scope mounted in an observatory on its roof, and a curriculum that was
comparable to what students could find at the University of Pennsylvania.
Modeled more on a college than a private academy, the school’s principal
was called president, its teachers were called professors (listed in the front
of the city directory along with judges and city council members), and
the state authorized the school to award college degrees to its graduates.
Its students were the same age-range as those at Penn; you could go to
one or the other, but there was no reason to attend both. And unlike
Penn, Central was free. It also offered students a meritocratic achieve-
ment structure, with a rigorous entrance exam screening those coming in
and a tough grading policy that screened those who made it all the way
to the end. This meant that graduates of Central were considered more
than socially elite; they were certified as smart.
The result was a cultural commodity that became extraordinarily attrac-
tive to the middle and upper classes in the city: an elite college education
at public expense. But there was a catch. Only students who had attended
the public grammar schools could apply for admission to Central; initially
they had to spend at least one year in the grammar schools and then
the requirement rose to two years. This approach was wildly successful.
From day one, the competition to pass the entrance exam and gain access
to Central High School was intense. This was true not just for prospec-
tive students but also for the city’s grammar school masters, who were
engaged in a zero-sum game to see who could get the most students into
central and win themselves a prime post as a professor.
Note that the classic liberal democratic tension between political
equality and market inequality was already present at the very birth of
18 D. F. LABAREE
the common school. In order to create common schools, you needed

an uncommon school. Only the selective inducement of the high school
could guarantee full community participation in the lower schools. Thus,
from the very start, public schooling in the US was both a public good
and a private good. As a public good, its benefits accrued to everyone
in the city, by creating citizens who were capable of maintaining a
democratic polity. But it was also a private good, which provided social
advantage to an elite population that could afford the opportunity cost
to attain a scarce and valuable high school diploma.
Increased Access Leads to a Tracked

and Socially Reproductive Central High
For fifty years, Central High School (and its female counterpart Girls
High School) remained the only public secondary schools in Philadel-
phia, which at the time was the second largest city in the country. High
school attendance was a scarce commodity there and in the rest of the
country, where in 1880 it accounted for only 1.1% of public school
enrollments.1 At the same time that high school enrollments were small
and stable, enrollments in grammar schools were expanding rapidly. By
1900, the average American over twenty-five had completed eight years
of schooling.2 If most students were to continue their education, the
number of high schools needed to expand rapidly. As a result, the end
of the nineteenth century was a dynamic period in the development of
the American system of schooling.
The pressures on the high school were coming from two sources. The
first was working-class families, who were eager to have their children gain
access to a valuable credential that had long been restricted to a privileged
few. It’s a time-tested rule of thumb that, in a liberal democracy, you can’t
limit access to an attractive public institution like the high school for very
long when demand is high. Sheer numbers eventually make themselves
felt through the political arena.
In Philadelphia you could see this play out in the political tensions over
access to the two high schools. By the 1870s, the school board started
imposing quotas on students from the various grammar schools in the
city in order to spread access more evenly across the city. By the 1880s,
the city began to open manual training schools in parallel with the high
schools, and by the 1890s the flood gates opened. A series of new regional
high schools were established, allowing a sharp increase in enrollments. At
the same time, the board abolished the high school entrance examination,
which meant that students now qualified for admission to high school
solely by presenting a grammar-school diploma. By 1920, Central had
lost its position as the exclusive citadel at the top of the system, where it
drew the best students city-wide, now demoted to the status of just one
among the many available regional high schools.
Everything suddenly changed in Central High’s form and function.
The vision of being a college disappeared, as Central was placed securely
between grammar school and college in the new educational hierarchy.
Its longstanding core curriculum, which was required for all students,
by 1920 became a tracked curriculum pitched toward different academic
trajectories: an academic track for those going to college, a mechanical
track for future engineers, a commercial track for clerical workers, and an
industrial track for machine operators. And whereas the old Central had
a proud tradition of school-wide meritocracy, students in the four tracks
were distributed in a pattern familiar in high schools today, according to
social class, with 72% of the academic-track students from the middle class
and only 28% from the working class.3 Its professors, who had won a posi-
tion at Central after proving their mettle as grammar school masters, now
became ordinary teachers, who were much younger, with no teaching
experience, and no qualification but a college diploma. (The professors
hadn’t needed a college degree; a Central diploma had been sufficient.)
Political pressure for greater access explains the rapid expansion of high
school enrollments during this period, but it doesn’t explain why the
entire structure of the high school was transformed at the same time.
While working-class families wanted to have their children gain access to
the high school, in order to enhance their social opportunities, middle-
class families wanted to preserve for their children the exclusivity that
granted them social advantage. They were the second factor that shaped
the school.
In part, this was a simple response to the value of high school as a
private good. In political terms, equal access is a valuable public good; but
in market terms, it’s a disaster. The value of schooling as a private good
is measured by its scarcity. When high school became abundant, it lost
its value for middle-class families. The new structure helped to preserve
a degree of exclusivity, with middle-class students largely segregated in
the academic track and the lower classes dispersed across the lower tracks.
In addition, the middle-class students were positioned to move on to
college, which had become the new zone of advantage after the high
20 D. F. LABAREE
school lost its cachet. This is a pattern we see emerging again after the
Second World War, when high school filled up and college enrollments
sharply expanded.
For middle-class families at the turn of the twentieth century, this
combination of high school tracking and college enrollment was more
than just a numbers game, trying to keep one step ahead of the Joneses.
Class survival was at stake. For centuries before this period, being middle
class had largely meant owning your own small business. For town
dwellers, either you were a master craftsman, owning a shop where you
supervised journeymen and apprentices in plying the trade of cordwainer
or cooper or carpenter, or you ran a retail store serving the public. The
way you passed social position to your male children was by setting them
up in an apprenticeship or willing them the store.
By the late nineteenth century, this model of status transmission had
fallen apart. With the emergence of the factory and machine produc-
tion, apprenticeship had largely disappeared, as apprentices became simple
laborers who no longer had the opportunity to move up to master. And
with the emergence of the department store, small retail businesses were
in severe jeopardy. No longer able to simply inherit the family business,
children in middle-class families faced the daunting prospect of proletari-
anization. The factory floor was beckoning. These families needed a new
way to secure the status of their children, and that solution was education,
first in high school and then in college. Through the medium of exclusive
schooling, they hoped to position their children to embrace what Burton
Bledstein calls “the culture of professionalism.”4 By this, he is not refer-
ring simply to the traditional high professions (law, medicine, clergy) but
to any occupational position that is buffered from market pressures.
The iron law of markets is that no one wants to function on a level
playing field in open competition with everyone else. So, a business forti-
fies itself as a corporation, which acts as a conspiracy against the market.
And middle-class workers seek an occupation that offers protection from
open competition in the job market. Higher level educational credentials
can do that. If a high school or college degree is needed to qualify for
a position, then this sharply reduces the number of job seekers in the
pool. And once on the job, you are less likely to be displaced by someone
else because of shifting supply and demand. The ideal is the sinecure, and
a diploma is the ticket to secure one. By the twentieth century, college
became Sinecures “R” Us.
The job market accommodated this change through the increase in

scale of both corporations and government agencies, which created a
large array of managerial and clerical positions. These positions were safer,
cleaner, and more secure than wage labor. They were protected by educa-
tional credentials, annual salaries, chances for promotion, formal dress,
and civil service regulations. And, because they were awarded according
to educational merit rather than social inheritance, they also granted the
salary man a degree of social legitimacy that was not available to the
owner’s son. Here’s how Bledstein explains it:
Far more than other types of societies, democratic ones required persuasive
symbols of the credibility of authority, symbols the majority of people could
reliably believe just and warranted. It became the function of the schools
in America to legitimize the authority of the middle class by appealing to
the universality and objectivity of “science.”5
Evolving in search of this symbolic credibility, the model of the high

school that emerged in the early twentieth century looks very familiar
to us today. It drew students from the community around the school,
who were enrolled in a single comprehensive institution, and who were
then distributed into curriculum tracks according to a judicious mix of
individual academic merit and inherited social position, with each track
aligned with a different occupational trajectory. The school as a whole
was as heterogeneous as the surrounding population, but the experience
students had there was relatively homogeneous by track and social origin.
In one educational setting, you had both democratic equality and market-
based inequality, commonality, and hierarchy. An exemplary institution for
a liberal democracy.
A lovely essay by David Cohen and Barbara Neufeld, “The Failure of
High Schools and the Progress of Education,” captures the distinctive
tension built into this institution.6 On the one hand, the comprehen-
sive high school was one of the great educational success stories of all
time. Starting as a tiny sliver of the educational system in the nine-
teenth century, it became a mammoth in the twentieth—with population
doubling every ten years between 1890 and 1940—and by the end of
this period it incorporated the large majority of the teenagers in the
country. The elite school for the privileged few evolved rapidly into a
comprehensive school for the masses.
22 D. F. LABAREE
But on the other hand, this success turned quickly into failure. Instead
of celebrating the accomplishment of the students who managed to grad-
uate from the high school, we began to bemoan those who didn’t,
thus creating a new social problem: the high school dropout. Also, as
the high school shifted from being seen as a place for students of the
highest academic accomplishment to one for students of all abilities, it
became the object of handwringing about declining academic standards.
As a public good, it was a political success, offering opportunity for all;
but as a private good, it was an educational failure, characterized by
a watered-down curriculum and low expectations for achievement. The
result was that the high school became the object of most educational
reform movements in the twentieth century. Once the answer, it was now
the problem.
The Lessons of Central High Applied

to the American Educational System
At this point, having followed the trajectory of the high school, we are in
a position to examine more fully the core dynamic that shaped the devel-
opment of the American educational system as a whole. Here’s how it
works. Start with mass schooling at one level of the system and exclusive
schooling at the level above. Then, in response to popular demand from
working-class families for educational opportunity at the top level, the
system expands access to this level, thus making it more inclusive. Next,
in response to demand by middle-class families to preserve their educa-
tional advantage, the system tracks schooling in the zone of expansion,
with their children occupying the upper tracks and newcomers entering
in the lower tracks. Finally, the system ushers the previously advantaged
educational consumers into the next higher level of the system, where
schooling remains exclusive, the new zone of advantage.
In the second quarter of the nineteenth century, for example, we saw
the formation of the common school system in the US, with universal
enrollment at the elementary level, partial enrollment in grammar schools,
and scarce enrollment in high schools. By the end of the century, grammar
schools had filled up and pressure rose for greater access to high schools.
As a result, high schools shifted toward a tracked structure, with middle-
class students in the top tracks and the working-class students in the tracks
below. Then in the middle of the twentieth century, the same pattern
played out in the system’s expansion at the college level.
By 1940, high school enrollment had become the norm for all Amer-
ican families, which meant that the new zone of educational opportunity
was now the previously exclusive domain of higher education. As was the
case with high school in the late nineteenth century, political demand
arose for working-class access to college, which had previously been the
preserve of the middle class. Despite the much higher per-capita cost
of college compared to high school, political will converged to deliver
this access. The twin spurs were a hot war and a cold war. The need to
acknowledge the shared sacrifice of Second World War led to the 1944
GI Bill, which paid for veterans to go to college. And the need during the
Cold War to mobilize research, enhance human capital, and demonstrate
the superiority of liberal democracy over communism led to the 1965
Higher Education Opportunity Act. The result was an enormous expan-
sion of higher education in the 1950s and 1960s. Enrollments grew from
2.4 million in 1949 to 3.6 million in 1959; but then came the 1960s,
when enrollments more than doubled, reaching 8 million in 1969 and
then 11.6 million in 1979.7
The result was to revolutionize the structure of American higher
education. Here’s how I described it in A Perfect Mess:
Until the 1940s, American colleges had admitted students with little
concern for academic merit or selectivity, and this was true not only for
state universities but also for the private universities now considered as the
pinnacle of the system. If you met certain minimal academic requirements
and could pay the tuition, you were admitted. But in the postwar years,
a sharp divide emerged in the system between the established colleges
and universities, which dragged their feet about expanding enrollments
and instead became increasingly selective, and the new institutions, which
expanded rapidly by admitting nearly everyone who applied.
What were these new institutions that welcomed the newcomers? Often
existing public universities would set up branch campuses in other regions
of the state, which eventually became independent institutions. Former
normal schools, set up in the nineteenth century as high-school level insti-
tutions for preparing teachers had evolved into teachers colleges in the early
twentieth century; and by the middle of the century they had evolved into
full-service state colleges and universities serving regional populations. A
number of new urban college campuses also emerged during this period,
aimed at students who would commute from home to pursue programs
that would prepare them for mid-level white collar jobs. And the biggest
24 D. F. LABAREE
players in the new lower tier of American higher education were commu-
nity colleges, which provided 2-year programs allowing students to enter
low-level white-collar jobs or transfer to the university. Community colleges
quickly became the largest provider of college instruction in the country.
By 1980, they accounted for nearly 40 percent of all college enrollments
in the U.S.8
These new colleges and universities had several characteristics in
common. Compared to their predecessors: they focused on undergraduate
education; they prepared students for immediate entry into the workforce;
they drew students from nearby; they cost little; and they admitted almost
anyone. For all these reasons, especially the last one, they also occupied a
position in the college hierarchy that was markedly lower. Just as secondary
education expanded only by allowing the newcomers access to the lower
tiers of the new comprehensive high school, so higher education expanded
only by allowing newcomers access to the lower tiers of the newly stratified
structure of the tertiary system.
As a result, the newly expanded and stratified system of higher education
protected upper-middle-class students attending the older selective institu-
tions from the lower-middle-class students attending regional and urban
universities and the working-class students attending community colleges.
At the same time, these upper-middle-class students started pouring into
graduate programs in law, medicine, business, and engineering, which
quickly became the new zone of educational advantage.9
So, at fifty-year intervals across the history of American education, the

same pattern kept repeating. Every effort to increase access brought about
a counter effort to preserve advantage. Every time the floor of the educa-
tional system rose, so did the ceiling. The result is an elevator effect,
in which the system gamely provides both access and advantage, thus
increasing the upward expansion of educational attainment for all while
at the same time preserving social differences. Plus ça change.
What’s Next in the Struggle

Between Politics and Markets?
So where does that leave us today? I see three problems that have
emerged from the tension that has propelled the evolution of the Amer-
ican system of schooling: a time problem, a cost problem, and a public
goods problem. Let’s consider each in turn.
The time problem arises from the relentless upward expansion of the
system, which is sucking up an increasing share of the American life span.
Life expectancy has been growing slowly over the years, but time in
school has been growing at a much more rapid rate. In the mid nine-
teenth century, the modal American spent four years in school. By 1900
it had risen to eight years. By 2000 it was thirteen years. And by 2015, for
Americans over twenty-five, fifty-nine percent had some college, forty-two
percent an associate’s degree, thirty-three percent a bachelor’s degree, and
twelve percent an advanced degree.10
In my own case, I spent a grand total of twenty-six years in school: two
years of preschool, twelve years of elementary and secondary school, five
years of college, and seven years of graduate school (I’m a slow study).
I didn’t finish my doctorate until the ripe old age of 36, which left only
thirty years to ply my profession before the social-security retirement age
for my cohort. As I used to ask my graduate students—most of whom had
also deferred the start of graduate study until a few years after college—
when do we finish preparing for life and start living it? When do we finally
grow up?
Not only does the rapid expansion of schooling eat up an increasing
share of people’s lives, but it also costs them a lot of money. First, there’s
the opportunity cost, as people keep deferring to the future their chances
of earning a living. Then there’s the direct cost for students to pay
tuition and to support themselves as adult learners. And finally, there’s the
expense to the state of providing public education across all these years.
As schooling expands upward, the direct costs of education to student
and state grow geometrically. High school is much more expensive per
student than elementary school, college much more than high school,
and graduate school much more than college.
At some point in this progression, the costs start hitting a ceiling,
when students are less willing to defer earning and pay the increasing
cost of advanced schooling and when taxpayers are less willing to support
advanced schooling for all. In the US, we started to see this happening in
the 1970s, when the sharp rise in college enrollments spurred a taxpayer
revolt, which emerged in California (which had America’s largest higher
education system and charged no tuition) and started to spread across
the country. People began to ask whether they were willing to pay for the
higher education of other people’s children on top of the direct cost for
themselves. The result was a sharp increase in college tuition (which until
26 D. F. LABAREE
then was free or relatively cheap) and the shift in government support
away from scholarships and toward loans.
In combination, these increases in time and money began to under-
mine support for higher education as a public good. If education is seen
as providing broad benefits to the community as a whole, then it makes
sense to support it with public funds, which had been the case for elemen-
tary school in the nineteenth century and for high school in the early
twentieth century. For thirty years after 1945, higher education found
itself in the same position. The huge public effort in the Second World
War justified the provision of college at public expense for returning
soldiers, as established by the GI Bill. In addition, the emerging Cold War
assigned higher education a major role in countering the existential threat
of communism. University research played a crucial role in supplying the
technologies for the arms race and space race with the Soviet Union, and
broadening access to college for the working class and racial minorities
helped demonstrate the moral credibility of liberal democracy in relation
to communism.
But when fiscal costs of this effort mounted in the 1970s and then the
Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the rationale for public subsidy of the
extraordinarily high costs of higher education collapsed as well. Under
these circumstances, college began to look a lot more like a private good
than a public good, whose primary beneficiaries appeared to be its 20
million students. A college degree had become the ticket of admission to
the good middle-class life, with its high costs yielding even higher returns
in lifelong earnings. If graduates were reaping the bulk of the benefits,
then they should bear the costs. Why provide a public subsidy for private
gain?
This takes us back to our starting point in this analysis of the American
system of schooling: the ongoing tension between politics and markets.
As we have seen, that tension was there from day one—with the estab-
lishment of the uncommon Central High School at the same time as
the common elementary school—and it has persisted over the years.
Elite schooling was stacked on top of open-access schooling, with one
treating education as a private good and the other as a public good. As
demand grew for access to the zone of educational advantage, the system
responded by stratifying that zone and expanding enrollment at the next
higher level. And the result we’re dealing with now is the triple threat
of a system that that has devoured our time, overloaded our costs, and
diminished our commitment to education as a public good.
As I write now, in the midst of a pandemic and in the waning

weeks of the Trump administration, these issues are driving the debates
about education policy. We hear demands for greater access to elite
levels of higher education, eliminating tuition at community colleges, and
forgiving student debt. And, countering these demands, we hear concerns
about the feasibility of paying for these reforms, the public burden of
subsidizing students who can afford to pay their way, and the need to
preserve elite universities that are the envy of the world. Who knows how
these debates will play out. But one thing for sure is that the tensions—
between politics and markets and public goods and private goods—will
continue.
Notes
1. National Center for Educational Statistics, 120 Years of American Educa-
tion (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1993), Table 8.
2. NCES, 120 Years of American Education, Table 5.
3. Labaree, David F., The Making of an American High School: The Creden-
tials Market and the Central High School of Philadelphia, 1838–1939 (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), Table 6.4.
4. Burton J. Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class
and the Development of Higher Education in America (New York: W.
W. Norton, 1978).
5. Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism, 123.
6. Cohen, David. K., and Barbara Neufeld, “The Failure of High Schools
and the Progress of Education,” Daedelus 110 (Summer 1981): 69–89.
7. Susan B. Carter et al., eds., Historical Statistics of the United States
(millennial edition online) (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2006), Table Bc523. National Center for Educational Statistics, Digest of
Education Statistics 2013 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office,
2014), Table 303.10.
8. NCES, 120 Years of American Education, Table 24.
9. Labaree, David F., A Perfect Mess: The Unlikely Ascendancy of American
Higher Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 106–
108.
10. United Nations Development Programme Human Development Reports,
“Mean Years of Schooling (Males, aged 25 years and above),” accessed
December 1, 2020, http://hdr.undp.org/en/content/mean-years-sch
ooling-males-aged-25-years-and-above-years. Camille L. Ryan and Kurt
Bauman, “Educational Attainment in the United States: 2015,” Current
Population Reports, United States Census Bureau (March 2016), Table
1, accessed December 1, 2020, http://hdr.undp.org/en/content/mean-
years-schooling-males-aged-25-years-and-above-years.
CHAPTER 3
Renovations in the Citadel
Robert L. Hampel
In 1986, I finished The Last Little Citadel , a history of American high

schools since 1940. It was the third of three books from A Study of
High Schools, the formal name of a four-year appraisal of American
secondary education past and present. The informal name, “the Sizer
study,” reflected the stature of the project’s chairman, Theodore “Ted”
Sizer, who at thirty-one became Dean of the Harvard Graduate School
of Education and at thirty-nine began nine years (1972–1981) as head-
master of Phillips Academy, Andover, a period described in detail in John
Spencer’s chapter in this volume.
Sizer’s sterling career did not guarantee the success of Horace’s
Compromise in 1984, which was his widely read contribution to A Study
of High Schools. His observations and recommendations could have been
dismissed as the unrealistic musings of an Ivy League, boarding school
outsider. Fortunately, readers appreciated his well-written descriptions of
individual teachers and students. Sizer had obviously been inside schools.
R. L. Hampel (B)
University of Delaware, Newark, DE, USA
e-mail: hampel@udel.edu

Switzerland AG 2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79922-9_3
30 R. L. HAMPEL
He understood and respected the craft—yes, the teacher Horace had to

compromise, but it was not his fault. The system should be overhauled
to reduce the need to cut corners. For Sizer, requiring more academic
course credits, more homework, longer school years, stiffer college admis-
sions requirements, and other get-tough proposals would not do the
job, although an influential 1983 federal report, A Nation At Risk,
said it would. In the wake of that report, Horace’s Compromise seemed
more ambitious—restructure rather than tinker—and thus won praise for
boldness and imagination, especially the proposal to tie graduation to a
culminating “exhibition of mastery.” A Nation At Risk quickly increased
the visibility of education reform designed to improve academic achieve-
ment. Our timing was good—the same book five years earlier might have
sunk from sight.1
The second book in “A Study of High Schools,” The Shopping Mall
High School by Arthur Powell, Eleanor Farrar, and David Cohen, relied
on extensive study of eleven public and four private high schools across
the country. Nine research associates spent three different weeks in those
sites during the 1981–1982 school year. Based on nearly 20,000 pages
of field notes, The Shopping Mall High School is a long but tightly
argued analysis of how public high schools accommodated diversity by
offering unprecedented variety and choice in courses, ability levels within
those courses, extracurricular activities, and social services. The students
admitted to five “specialty shops” in the mall (Advanced Placement and
Honors, special education, sports and clubs, vocational programs, and
even the truants and troublemakers) had a significantly better educa-
tion, on balance, than the so-called “unspecial” students who lacked
the distinctive abilities or disabilities that would trigger individual atten-
tion, clear expectations, and extra resources. Private schools minimized
anonymity thanks to the push, purposefulness, and personal attention
similar to what specialty shop students received. As with Horace, this book
went far beyond the scope of most blue-ribbon panel reports, the standard
American way to diagnosis educational problems and offer solutions.
My book, shorter in length, explored what had changed in American
high schools since 1940. I tried to write a readable overview, draw on
previously untapped sources, shed light on my colleagues’ arguments, and
compress forty-five years within 200 pages. I was especially interested in
this question: Why did life inside high school classrooms become more
relaxed and informal as life among education policymakers became more
tense and adversarial?
3 RENOVATIONS IN THE CITADEL 31
I will say more about that puzzle after I sketch the evolution of my
association with A Study of High Schools. How I redefined myself in the
early 1980s may be instructive for young historians who want to shift
gears after they finish their dissertations. Next, I turn to what I wrote
in 1986, summarizing the key Citadel arguments and then, in detail,
explaining how and why I changed my mind in light of what I experi-
enced and what I read in the decades after it was published. At the end, I
briefly discuss the future of my field in regard to teaching, not researching,
the history of education.
∗ ∗ ∗
The dismal job market for historians in the 1970s was still bleak when I
defended my dissertation in October, 1979. But as a second year visiting
instructor at Franklin and Marshall College, I thought my time had come.
I would succeed where others failed. Search committees would see a Yale
B.A. and Cornell Ph.D. on my vita, admire my good teaching evaluations,
and request a copy of the definitive study of temperance and prohibition
in Massachusetts, 1813 to 1852. I worked all the time and I would move
anywhere: wasn’t I bound to be a tenure-track professor? A 1979 disco
hit became my anthem for 1980: “I’m makin’ it. I’ve got the chance, I’m
takin’ it. Listen everyone here: This coming year’s gonna BE MY YEAR!”
David Naughton and his band had my number. “The top of the ladder is
waiting for me.”
By June I had nothing. No tenure-track job at Fordham, no one-year
appointment at Dartmouth or New York University, and no more pinch-
hitting at Franklin and Marshall. “You’re male and pale,” a conservative
friend said, sure that those facts explained my failures. “All I know for
sure,” I told him, “is that six plus two equals 160”—my calculation that
six years at Cornell and two years at Franklin and Marshall resulted in
$160 weekly unemployment checks. A grim equation, but, fortunately, I
had several twelve percent bank CDs, no children to feed, and enough
ambition to try my luck elsewhere.
Pennsylvania’s unemployment benefits transferred across state lines,
so I moved to suburban Boston, a not-yet-unaffordable area I knew
from a year of dissertation research. Massachusetts required semi-monthly
reports of where the recipient applied for work. To list at least three
jobs, I began reading the “Help Wanted” columns in The Boston Globe,
reluctantly willing to consider a life outside the classroom. Thanks to my
32 R. L. HAMPEL
economist-father, I grew up following the stock market, helping draw by

hand the price and volume charts now available online for free. Perhaps
an historian’s skills, especially the evaluation of long-term trends, might
transfer to Wall Street. The transfer would be easier, I realized, if I had an
M.B.A. degree. So rather than devote every sunny day to writing journal
articles on antebellum temperance and prohibition, I began to take Grad-
uate Management Admission Test advice books to the nearby Wollaston
beach.
After four months of fruitless job applications, I had several papers
under review, a respectable GMAT score, and a tan. In October I saw
a small Sunday Globe advertisement for a research associate on a study
of American high schools since 1940. I knew very little about twentieth-
century secondary education. Pre-Civil War education I understood, but
for the years after 1865 I only had notes on books by Lawrence Cremin,
Richard Hofstadter, and David Tyack. With nothing to lose, I sent my
vita and a cover letter asserting my interest in all aspects of the history of
reform. I also applied to the Sloan School of Management at M.I.T.
Six weeks later, I signed an offer to join A Study of High Schools.
I had nine months to analyze the major changes in high schools since
1940, with another twelve months promised if the project raised more
money. $750,000 for a former Harvard Dean might seem certain, but
in the 1980–81 recession there was no guarantee that even Ted Sizer
could convince Carnegie and three other foundations. The grants did
come through by April, 1981, and so did an acceptance letter from M.I.T.
My best friend held it up and shouted, “This is a license to print money.”
In April, I deferred my M.I.T. enrollment for one year. By the spring
of 1982, I reasoned, I would know whether or not I should start a new
career. In the meantime, I was becoming hooked on the history of educa-
tion. The scope of the field captivated me—to understand high schools, I
could explore teachers and students, politicians and judges, gender roles
and racial bias, and much more. The job felt like a post-doctoral fellow-
ship in twentieth-century history for a nineteenth-century historian who,
after years of narrowly focused case studies, was now free to roam.
My far-flung reading was encouraged by Ted Sizer, who loved to
explore many topics. Not only was he fascinated by the recent history,
present conditions, and future prospects of secondary education (public
and private), he also thought about schooling in context. What were the
social, economic, and political trends that shaped high schools yesterday,
today, and tomorrow? For instance, he often referred to what he called
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
PRESERVATION OF FOODS
All food for preservation should be kept in a clean, cool, dry, dark
place. Reduction in temperature to near freezing, and removal of
moisture and air stop bacterial development.
Drying, cooking, and sealing from the air will preserve some meats
and fruits, while others require such preservatives as sugar, vinegar
and salt. The preservative in vinegar is acetic acid.
All preservatives which are actual foods, such as sugar, salt and
vinegar, are to be recommended, but the use of antiseptic
preservatives, such as salicylic acid, formaldehyd, boracic acid,
alum, sulphur and benzonate of soda, all of which have been used
by many canning merchants, is frought with danger. The United
States Department of Agriculture holds, that by the use of such
preservatives, unscrupulous dealers may use fruits and vegetables
not in good condition.
There can be no doubt that, wherever possible, the best method
for the housewife to preserve food is to do her own drying, canning,
preserving and pickling of fruits and vegetables, which she knows
are fresh, putting up her own preserves, jams, jellies, pickles, syrups,
grape juice, etc.
Since economy in food lies in the least amount of money for the
greatest amount of nutriment, the preparation of simple foods in the
home, with a care that no more is furnished for consumption than the
system requires, is the truest economy in health and in doctor’s bills.
It is not more brands of prepared food which are needed, but
purity of elements in their natural state. A dish of wholesome, clean
oat meal has more nourishment and more fuel value than the
average prepared food.
In the effort to emphasize the importance of pure food in
amount and quality, pure air and pure water must not be
overlooked. Much infection is carried by these two
elements. Pure air, containing a normal amount of oxygen,
is absolutely necessary that the system may digest and
assimilate the foods consumed.
COOKING
The cooking of food is as important as its selection, because the
manner of cooking makes it easier or more difficult of digestion. The
question of the proper selection and cooking of food is so vital to the
health and resultant happiness of every family, and to the strength
and well being of a nation, that every woman, to whom the cooking
for a family is entrusted, should have special preparation for her
work, and every girl should be given practical and theoretical training
in Dietetics in our public schools. The study is as dignified as the
study of music and art. Indeed it can be made an art in the highest
conception of the term. Surely the education of every girl in the
vocation, in which she sooner or later must engage, either actively or
by directing others, means more than education in music and
drawing. We must all eat two and three times every day; there are
few things which we do so regularly and which are so vital; yet in the
past we have given this subject less study than any common branch
in our schools. When the dignity of the profession of dietetics is
realized, the servant problem will be largely solved.
In cooking any food, heat and moisture are necessary, the time
varying from thirty minutes to several hours, according to different
foods. Baked beans and meats containing much connective tissue,
as boiling and roasting cuts, require the longest time.
The purposes in the cooking of foods are: the development of the
flavor, which makes the food appetizing, thus encouraging the flow of
gastric juice; the sterilization, thereby killing all parasites and micro-
organisms, such as the tape worm in beef, pork, and mutton, and the
trichinae in pork; the conversion of the nutrients into a more
digestible form, by partially or wholly converting the connective
tissue into gelatin.
The fundamental principle to be observed in the
cooking of meat concerns the retention of the
Cooking of
Meats
juices, since these contain a large part of the
nutrition. The heat develops the flavor, and the
moisture, together with the heat, dissolves the connective tissue and
makes it tender.
A choice piece of meat may be toughened and made difficult of
digestion, or a tough piece may be made tender and easy to digest,
by the manner of cooking.
Soups. To make meat soups, the connective tissue, bone and

muscle should be put into cold water, brought slowly to the boiling
point and allowed to simmer for hours. It must be remembered that
the gelatin from this connective tissue does not contain the tissue
building elements of the albuminoids. These are retained in what
meat may be about the bones of the boiling piece and in the blood.
The albumin of meat is largely in the blood and it is the coagulated
blood which forms the scum on soup, if heated above a certain point;
the cook should boil the soup slowly, or much of the nutrition is lost
in the coagulated blood, or skum.
Roasting. The flavor and juice of the meat is best retained by

roasting. If it is put into a hot oven, with a little suet over the top, so
as to sear the meat with hot fat, and no water is put in the pan, it will
retain the juice and the flavor. Water draws out the extractives.
It is important to remember that the smaller the cut to be roasted,
the hotter should be the fire. An intensely hot fire coagulates the
exterior and prevents the drying up of the meat juice. After the
surface is coagulated and seared it should cook slowly.
Unless the oven is sufficiently hot to sear the surface, the
moisture, or juice, will escape into the roasting pan and the
connective tissue will be toughened. A roast should be cooked in a
covered roaster to retain the moisture.
The roast should be turned as soon as one side is seared and just
sufficient water put into the pan to keep it from burning.
Frequent basting of a roast, with the fat, juice, and water in the
roasting pan, still further sears the surface, so that the juices do not
seep through and keeps the air in the pan moist; the heated moisture
materially assists in gelatinizing the connective tissue,—roasting
pans are now made which are self-basting.
Broiling. The same principle applies to broiling as to roasting. The

meat is put over a very hot flame and turned so as to quickly sear
both sides, to prevent the juice from oozing out. In fact, the best
broiled steaks are turned just as soon as the juice begins to drip, so
as to retain all juice in the meat.
Meat containing much connective tissue is not adapted to broiling,
because it takes too long for this tissue to become gelatinized.
Steak broiled in a skillet, especially round steak which has been
pounded to assist in breaking the connective tissue, is often first
dipped in seasoned flour, which is rubbed well into it. The flour
absorbs the meat juices so that none of them are lost. All meats
broiled in skillets should be put into a very hot skillet and one surface
seared, then should be turned so as to sear the other side. The
skillet should be kept covered so as to retain the moisture.
Boiling. In boiling meat, where the object is to eat the tissue itself,
it should be put into hot water, that the albumin on the surface may
be immediately coagulated and prevent the escape of the nutrients
into the water. It is impossible to make a rich broth and to have a
juicy, highly flavored piece of boiled meat at the same time. Meat is
best roasted or broiled when the meat tissue is to be eaten.
The boiling cuts contain more connective tissue, therefore they
require a much longer time to cook in order to gelatinize this tissue.
They are not as rich in protein as the steaks.
Meat soups, bouillons and broths contain very little nutriment, but
they do contain the extractives, and the flavors increase the flow of
digestive juices and stimulate the appetite. It is for this reason that
soups are served before a meal rather than for a dessert; they insure
a copious flow of gastric juice and saliva to act upon the crackers or
toast eaten with the soup. Many mistake the extractives and flavor
for nourishment, feeling that the soups are an easy method of taking
food, but the best part of the nutriment remains in the meat or
vegetables making the soup.
Pot Roasts. In the case of a pot roast, or roast in a kettle, where it

is desirable to use both the fibre of the meat and the juice, or gravy,
it should be put into a little cold water and raised to about 180
degrees F., where it should be kept for some hours. The juices of the
meat seep out in the gravy. The extractives are simmered down and
are again poured over the meat in the rich gravy.
Frying. This is the least desirable method of cooking. Food

cooked by putting a little grease into a frying pan, such as fried
potatoes, mush, eggs, french toast, and griddle cakes, are more
difficult of digestion than foods cooked by any other means,
particularly where the fat is allowed to smoke. The fat is
superheated; if a lighted match is placed near the smoke it will catch
fire, showing that it is volatilizing, or being reduced to a vapor.
The extreme heat liberates fatty acids. This acrid fat soaks into the
food and renders it difficult of digestion. It is wise not to employ this
method of cooking.
The objection to frying does not hold so strongly in the case of
vegetables, such as potatoes, if fried slowly in fat, that is not over
heated, or to griddle cakes cooked slowly without smoke, or to foods
immersed in grease (such as saratoga chips, doughnuts, french fried
potatoes, etc.), as the large amount of fat does not permit it to get so
heated. It does apply, however, if the fat is sufficiently heated to
smoke.
The coating of vegetables and cereals with the hot fat prevents the
necessary action of saliva upon the starch globules. As previously
stated, most of the starches are digested in the mouth and the
stomach, while the fats are not emulsified until they reach the
intestines.
The starch globules in cereals and vegetables are in the form of
cells, the covering of these cells being composed largely of
nitrogenous matter. The protein is not acted upon by the saliva, and
the nitrogenous matter is largely digested in the stomach. It is more
easily dissolved if it is broken or softened by cooking, so that the
carbohydrates can come in contact with the saliva, but if encased in
fried fat, the gastric juices cannot digest the protein covering and the
saliva cannot reach the starch until the fat is emulsified in the
intestines. This means that wherever starch globules are surrounded
with fat, the digestive ferments reach these globules with difficulty
and fried foods must be digested mostly in the intestines.
Fats are readily absorbed in their natural condition, but when
subject to extreme heat, as in frying, they are irritants. For this
reason, eggs, poached, boiled or baked are more easily digested
than fried.
Boiling, broiling and roasting are preferable to foods cooked in
fats.
One safe rule for the cook is, that it is better to
Cooking of cook most foods too much than too little;
Cereals overcooking is uncommon and harmless, while
undercooked foods are common and difficult of
digestion.
In partially cooked cereals, one does not know how much of the
cooking has been done, but it is safe to cook all such foods at least
as long as specified in the directions.
One reason why breakfast foods, such as rolled oats, are partially
cooked, is because they keep longer.
As has been stated, the nutrients of the grain are found inside the
starch-bearing and other cells, and the walls of these cells are made
of crude fiber, on which the digestive juices have little effect. Unless
the cell walls are broken down, the nutrients can not come under the
influence of the digestive juices until the digestive organs have
expended material and energy in trying to get at them. Crushing the
grain in mills, and making it still finer by thorough mastication breaks
many of the cell walls, and the action of the saliva and other
digestive juices also disintegrates them more or less, but the heat of
cooking accomplishes the object much more thoroughly. The
invisible moisture in the cells expands under the action of heat, and
the cell walls burst. The water added in cooking also plays an
important part in softening and rupturing them. Then, too, the
cellulose itself may be changed by heat to more soluble form. Heat
also makes the starch in the cells at least partially soluble, especially
when water is present. The solubility of the protein is probably, as a
rule, somewhat lessened by cooking, especially at higher
temperatures. Long, slow cooking is therefore better, as it breaks
down the crude fiber and changes the starch to soluble form without
materially decreasing the solubility of the protein.
“In experiments made with rolled oats at the Minnesota
Experiment Station, it appeared that cooking (four hours) did not
make the starch much more soluble. However, it so changed the
physical structure of the grains that a given amount of digestive
ferment could render much more of it soluble in a given time than
when it was cooked for only half an hour.
“On the basis of the results obtained, the difficulty commonly
experienced in digesting imperfectly cooked oatmeal was attributed
to the large amounts of glutinous material which surrounds the
starch grains and prevent their disintegration. When thoroughly
cooked the protecting action of the mucilaginous protein is
overcome, and the compound starch granules are sufficiently
disintegrated to allow the digestive juices to act. In other words, the
increased digestibility of the thoroughly cooked cereal is supposed to
be largely due to a physical change in the carbohydrates, which
renders them more susceptible to the action of digestive juices.”
Pastry. Pastry owes its harmful character to the interference of fat

as shown on page 198, with the proper solution of the starch,—at
least such pastry as requires the mixing of flour with fat; the coating
of these granules with fat prevents them from coming in contact with
liquids; the cells cannot absorb water, swell and burst so that they
may dissolve. The fat does not furnish sufficient water for this and so
coats the starch granules as to prevent the absorption of water in
mixing, or of the saliva in mastication. This coating of fat is not
relieved until late in the process of digestion, or until the food
reaches the intestines. This same objection applies to rich gravies,
unless the flour be dissolved in water and heated before being mixed
with the fats. The objection, therefore, is to such pastry as is made
by mixing flour with fat, as in pie crust; it does not apply to most
puddings.
Heat, in cooking, causes a combustion of the carbonic acid gas
and the effort of this gas to escape, as well as the steam occasioned
by the water in the food, causes the bubbles. When beaten eggs are
used, the albuminoids in the bubbles expand the walls, which stiffen
with the heat and cause the substances containing eggs to be
porous.
Since the root vegetables contain a large
Cooking of proportion of carbohydrates, they should be well
Vegetables cooked, in order that the cells may be fully
dissolved, and the crude fibre broken.
Vegetables are best cooked in soft water, as lime or magnesia, the
chemical ingredients which make water “hard”, make the vegetables
less soluble.
Vegetables and fruits become contaminated with the eggs of
numerous parasites from the fertilizers used; hence they should be
thoroughly washed.
The objection to frying meats are equally strong in regard to
vegetables. The coating of vegetables with the hot fat retards
digestion, as shown on page 198.
“In different countries opinions differ markedly

Cooking of Fruit regarding the relative wholesomeness of raw and
cooked fruit. The Germans use comparatively little
raw fruit and consider it far less wholesome than cooked fruit. On the
other hand, in the United States raw fruit of good quality is
considered extremely wholesome, and is used in very large
quantities, being as much relished as cooked fruit, if indeed it is not
preferred to it. It has been suggested that the European prejudice
against raw fruit may be an unconscious protest against unsanitary
methods of marketing or handling and the recognition of cooking as
a practical method of preventing the spread of disease by fruit,
accidentally soiled with fertilizers in the fields or with street dust.
“As in the case with all vegetable foods, the heat of cooking
breaks down the carbohydrate walls of the cells which make up the
fruit flesh, either because the moisture or other cell contents expand
and rupture the walls or because the cell wall is itself softened or
dissolved. Texture, appearance, and flavor of fruit are materially
modified by cooking, and, if thorough, it insures sterilization, as in the
case of all other foods. The change in texture often has a practical
advantage, since it implies the softening of the fruit flesh so that it is
more palatable and may be more readily acted upon by the digestive
juices. This is obviously of more importance with the fruits like the
quince, which is so hard that it is unpalatable raw, than it is with soft
fruits like strawberries. When fruits are cooked without the addition of
water or other material, as is often the case in baking apples, there is
a loss of weight, owing to the evaporation of water, and the juice as it
runs out carries some carbohydrates and other soluble constituents
with it, but under ordinary household conditions this does not imply
waste, as the juice which cooks out from fruits is usually eaten as
well as the pulp. Cooking in water extracts so little of the nutritive
material present that such removal of nutrition is of no practical
importance.
“The idea is quite generally held that cooking fruit changes its acid
content, acid being sometimes increased and sometimes decreased
by the cooking process. Kelhofer showed that when gooseberries
were cooked with sugar, the acid content was not materially
changed, these results being in accord with his conclusions reached
in earlier studies with other fruits. The sweeter taste of the cooked
product he believed to be simply due to the fact that sugar masks the
flavor of the acid.
“It is often noted that cooked fruits, such as plums, seem much
sourer than the raw fruit, and it has been suggested that either the
acid was increased or the sugar was decreased by the cooking
process. This problem was studied by Sutherst, and, in his opinion,
the increased acid flavor is due to the fact that cooked fruit
(gooseberries, currants, plums, etc.) usually contains the skin, which
is commonly rejected if the fruit is eaten raw. The skin is more acid
than the simpler carbohydrates united to form a complex
carbohydrate. In some fruits, like the apple, where the jelly-yielding
material must be extracted with hot water, the pectin is apparently
united with cellulose as a part of the solid pulp. As shown by the
investigations of Bigelow and Gore at the Bureau of Chemistry, 40
per cent of the solid material of apple pulp may be thus extracted
with hot water, and consists of two carbohydrates, one of which is
closely related to gum arabic. That such carbohydrates as these
should yield a jelly is not surprising when we remember that they are
similar to starch in their chemical nature, and, as every one knows,
starch, though insoluble in cold water, yields when cooked with hot
water a large proportion of paste, which jellies on cooling.
“When fruits are used for making pies, puddings, etc., the nutritive
value of the dish is, of course, increased by the addition of flour,
sugar, etc., and the dish as a whole may constitute a better balanced
food than the fruit alone.”[8]
FOOTNOTES:
[8] C. F. Langworthy, Ph. D.—In charge of Nutritive
Investigations of the United States Experiment Station.
DIETS
As previously stated, the object of foods is to supply the needs of
the body in building new tissue in the growing child; in repairing
tissue which the catabolic activity of the body is constantly tearing
down and eliminating; and in supplying heat and energy. This heat
and energy is not alone for muscular activity in exercise or
movement; it must be borne in mind that the body is a busy work-
shop, or chemical laboratory, and heat and energy are needed in the
constant metabolism of tearing down and rebuilding tissue and in the
work of digestion and elimination.
In this chapter, a few points given in the preceding pages are
repeated for emphasis. The proteins, represented in purest form in
lean meat, build tissue and the carbonaceous foods, starches,
sugars and fats, supply the heat and energy. An excess of proteins,
that is more than is needed for building and repair, is also used for
heat and energy; the waste products of the nitrogenous foods are
broken down into carbon dioxid, sulphates, phosphates, and other
nitrogenous compounds and excreted through the kidneys, skin, and
the bile, while the waste product of carbonaceous foods is carbon
dioxid alone and is excreted mostly through the lungs.
Since the foods richest in protein are the most expensive, those
who wish to keep down the cost of living, should provide, at most, no
more protein than the system requires. The expensive meat may be
eliminated and proteins be supplied by eggs, milk, legumes, nuts
and cereals.
The most fundamental thing is to decide upon the amount of
protein—two to four ounces, nearly a quarter of a pound a day—and
then select a dietary which shall provide this and also supply heat
and energy sufficient for the day. If the diet is to include meat, a
goodly proportion of protein will be furnished in the lean meat. This
will vary greatly with the different cuts of meat as shown on Table IV,
page 128. If, as often happens, one does not care for fats, then the
starches and sugars must provide the heat. If one craves sweets,
less starches and fats are needed.
The normally healthy individual is more liable to supply too much
protein than too little, even though he abstain from meat. Yet, as will
be shown later, our strongest races, who have lent most to the
progress of the world, live upon a mixed diet.
If the diet is to include meat, it will consist of less bulk, because
the protein is more condensed; for the same reason, if it includes
animal products of eggs and milk and a fair proportion of legumes, it
will be less bulky than a vegetable diet. This point is important for
busy people, who eat their meals in a hurry and proceed at once to
active, mental work. Those who engage in physical labor are much
more likely to take a complete rest for a half hour, to an hour, after
eating. The thinkers seldom rest, at least after a midday meal, and
those who worry seldom relax the mental force during any waking
hours.
Where the system shows an excess of uric acid, the chances are
that the individual has not been living on a diet with too large a
proportion of protein, but that he has been eating more than he
requires of all kinds of foodstuffs. His system thus becomes
weakened and he does not breathe deeply nor exercise sufficiently
to oxidize and throw off the waste. Let it be recalled here that the
theory that rheumatism is caused by an excess of uric acid is
disputed by the highest authorities. It is accompanied by uric acid,
but not supposed to be caused by it.
Every housewife, to intelligently select the daily menus for her
family, needs a thorough knowledge of dietetics. She must
understand the chemistry of food that she may know food values.
The difficulty which confronts the housewife, is to provide one meal
suited to the needs, tastes, or idiosyncracies of various members of
her household. Peculiarities of taste, unless these peculiarities have
been intelligently acquired, may result in digestive disturbances. As
an illustration: one may cultivate a dislike for meat, milk, or eggs, as
is often the case, and the proteins for the family being largely
supplied by these, the individual is eating too much of starches and
sugars and not sufficient protein,—legumes, nuts, etc., not being
provided for one member. Such an one’s blood becomes
impoverished and she becomes anaemic.
The relief lies in cultivating a taste for blood building foods. Foods
which are forced down, with a mind arrayed against them, do not
digest as readily, because the displeasure does not incite the flow of
gastric juices. One fortunate provision of nature lies in the ability to
cultivate a taste for any food. Likes and dislikes are largely mental.
There are certain foods which continuously disagree and they should
be avoided; but many abstain from wholesome food because it has
disagreed a few times. It may be that it was not the particular food
but the weakness of the stomach at this time. Any food fails of
prompt digestion when the nerves controlling the stomach are weak.
Many foods disagree at certain times because of the particular
conditions regulating the secretion of digestive juices. Where this
condition has continued for some time it becomes chronic and a
special diet is required, together with special exercises to bring a
better blood supply to stomach and intestines and to regulate the
nerves controlling them.
Dr. W. S. Hall estimates that the average man at light work
requires, each day,
106.8 grams of protein[9]
57.97 grams of fat
398.84 grams of carbohydrates
These elements, in proper proportions, may be gained through
many food combinations. He gives the following:
Bread 1 lb.
Lean Meat ½ lb.
Oysters ½ lb.
Cocoa 1 oz.
Milk 4 oz.
Sugar 1 oz.
Butter ½ oz.
A medium sized man at out of door work, fully oxidizes all waste of
the system and he requires a higher protein diet,—125 grams. In
such event he does not require so much starch and sugar. If on the
other hand he were to take but 106.8 grams of protein, as above, he
would require more carbohydrates. One working, or exercising in the
fresh air, breathes more deeply and oxidizes and eliminates more
waste, hence he has a better appetite, which is simply the call of
nature for a re-supply of the waste.
In active work, one also liberates more heat, thus more fat,
starches, and sugar are required for the re-supply. If one has an
excess of starch (glycogen) stored in the liver, or an excess of fat
about the tissues, this excess is called upon to supply the heat and
energy when the fats and carbohydrates daily consumed are not
sufficient for the day’s demand. This is the principle of reduction of
flesh.
It is interesting to note that habits of combining foods are
unconsciously based upon dietetic principles. Meats rich in protein
are served with potatoes, or with rice, both of which are rich in
starch. Bread, containing little fat, is served with butter. Beans,
containing little fat, are cooked with pork. Starchy foods of all kinds
are served with butter or cream. Macaroni, which is rich in starch,
makes a well balanced food cooked with cheese.
Pork and beans,
bread and butter,
bread and milk,
chicken and rice,
macaroni and cheese,
poached eggs on toast, and
custards, form balanced dishes.
A knowledge of such combinations is important when one must
eat a hasty luncheon and wishes to supply the demands of the body
in the least time, giving the least thought to the selection; but hasty
luncheons, with the mind concentrated upon other things, are to be
strongly condemned. The mind must be relaxed and directed to
pleasant themes during a meal or the nerves to the vital organs will
be held too tense to permit a free secretion of digestive juices.
Chronic indigestion is sure to result from this practice. Dinner, or the
hearty meal at night, rather than at noon, is preferable for the
business or professional man or woman, because the cares of the
day are over and the brain force relaxes. The vital forces are not
detracted from the work of digestion.
Experiments in the quantity of food actually required for body
needs, made by Prof. R. H. Chittenden of the Sheffield Scientific
School, Yale University, have established, beyond doubt, the fact
that the average individual consumes very much more food than the
system requires. In fact, most tables of food requirements, in
previous books on dietetics, have been heavy.
Prof. Chittenden especially established the fact that the average
person consumes more protein than is necessary to maintain a
nitrogenous balance. It was formerly held that the average daily
metabolism and excretion of nitrogen through the kidneys was 16
grams, or about 100 grams of protein or albuminoid food. Prof.
Chittenden’s tests, covering a period of six months, show an average
daily excretion of 5.86 grams of nitrogen, or a little less than one-
third of that formerly accepted as necessary; 5.86 grams of nitrogen
corresponds to 36.62 grams of protein or albuminoid food.
Prof. Chittenden’s experiments of the foodstuffs actually required
by three groups of men, one group of United States soldiers, a group
from the Yale College athletic team, and a group of college
professors, all showed that the men retained full strength, with a
higher degree of physical and mental efficiency, when the body was
not supplied with more protein than was liberated by metabolic
activity, and when the quantity of carbonaceous food was regulated
to the actual requirement to retain body heat and furnish energy.
It may be well to call attention here to the fact that the food
elements, called upon for work, are not from those foods just
consumed or digested, but from those eaten a day or two previous,
which have been assimilated in the muscular tissues.
In selecting a diet, the individual must be considered as to age,
sex and physical condition, also whether active in indoor or outdoor
work, and whether he or she breathes deeply, so as to take plenty of
fresh air into the lungs.
The following tables, published through the courtesy of Dr. W. S.
Hall, give the rations for different conditions.
TABLE XI.
Rations for Different Conditions.
Proteins Carbohydrates
Energy in
Conditions Low High Fats Low High
Calories
Man at light indoor work 60 100 60 390 450 2764
Man at light outdoor work 60 100 100 400 460 2940
Man at moderate outdoor work 75 125 125 450 500 3475
Man at hard outdoor work 100 150 150 500 550 4000
Man at very hard outdoor winter
125 180 200 600 650 4592
work
U. S. Army rations 64 106 280 460 540 4896-5032
U. S. Navy rations 143 292 557 5545
Football team (old regime) 181 292 557 5697
College football team (new) 125 125 125 500 3675
TABLE XII.
Rations Varied for Sex and Age.
Proteins Carbohydrates
Variations of Sex and Age Low High Fats Low High Energy in Calories
Children, two to six 36 70 40 250 325 1520-1956
Children, six to fifteen 50 75 45 325 350 1923-2123
Women, with light exercise 50 80 80 300 330 2272
Women, at moderate work 60 92 80 400 432 2720
Aged women 50 80 50 270 300 1870
Aged men 50 100 400 300 350 2258
The unit of measurement for the calories of energy is the amount

of heat required to raise the temperature of one kilogram of energy
to 1° centigrade.
In estimating the number of calories of energy given off by the
different foods, Dr. Hall represents
1 gram of carbohydrates as 4.0 calories
” ” ” fats ” 9.4 ”
” ” ” proteins ” 4.0 ”
To determine the relative energy which a food represents, it is only
necessary to multiply the number of grams of protein in that food by
4, the fat by 9.4 and the carbohydrates by 4, and add the results.
Thus according to the food required for the average man at light
work given on page 211.
106.8 grams of proteins × 4 = 427.20 calories of energy
57.97 ” ” fat × 9.4 = 544.94 ” ” ”
398.84 ” ” carbohydrates × 4 = 1595.36 ” ” ”
= the calories of energy required
2567.51
for the average man at light work.
Dr. Chittenden’s experiments show that a man leading a very

active life, and above the average in body weight, can maintain his
body in equilibrium indefinitely with a daily intake of 36 to 40 grams
of protein, or albuminoid food, and with a total fuel value of 1600
calories. Authorities, however differ upon the amount of food
required.
Dr. Hall suggests 106 grams of protein
Ranke suggests 100 grams of protein
Hultgren and Landergren suggests 134 grams of protein
Schmidt suggests 105 grams of protein
Forster and Moleschott suggests 130 grams of protein
Atwater suggests 125 grams of protein
In order to bring oneself to as limited a diet as Prof. Chittenden’s

men followed, however, it would be necessary to have all food
weighed so as to be sure of the correct proportions; otherwise the
actual needs would not be supplied and the body would suffer. A
wise provision of nature enables the body to throw off an excess of
food above the body needs without injury, within limitations; but, as
stated, there is no doubt that the average person exceeds these
limits, exhausting the digestive organs and loading the system with
more than it can eliminate; the capacity for mental work is restricted,
and the whole system suffers.
Prof. Chittenden’s experiments have been a wonderful revelation
to dietitians and scientists. They have demonstrated beyond doubt
that the average person eats much more than the system requires
and thus overworks the digestive organs.
From the fact that only from two to four ounces
Mixed Diet of nitrogenous food is required to rebuild daily
versus a tissue waste, it is apparent that this amount can
Vegetable Diet readily be supplied from the vegetable kingdom,
since nuts, legumes, and cereals are rich in
proteins; yet there is a question whether a purely vegetable diet is
productive of the highest physical and mental development. Natives
of tropical climates live upon vegetables, fruits, and nuts, and it may
be purely accidental or be due to climatic or other conditions, that
these nations have not been those who have made the greatest
progress in the world. Neither have the Eskimos, who live almost
entirely upon meat, attained the highest development. The greatest
progress and development, both as nations and as individuals, have
been made by inhabitants of temperate climates, who have lived
upon a mixed diet of meat, eggs, milk, grains, vegetables, fruits, and
nuts. They have shown more creative force, which means reserve
strength.
The Eskimo has demonstrated, however, that an entire meat diet
supplies all physical needs; the meat tissue providing growth and
repair and the fat supplying all of the carbonaceous elements. The
fat, as previously stated, yields more heat than starches and sugars,
and Nature provides this heat for climates where most warmth is
required. It may be the natural reason why natives of warm climates
have formed the habit of using vegetables and grains for their heat
and energy rather than meat. It is also a natural reason why man, in
temperate climates, eats more meat in winter than in summer.
An unperverted, natural instinct will always be found to have a
sound physiological basis. For example,—if, by reason of some
digestive disturbance, one has become emaciated, all of the fat
having been consumed, and the cause of the disturbance is
removed by an operation or otherwise, one is seized with an almost
insatiable desire for fat, often eating large chunks of the fat of meat

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New Perspectives on the History of the

Twentieth-Century American High

More information about this series at

Historical Studies in Education

schools. The result is a rich and rewarding collection of viewpoints on the

1 What Is the Twentieth-Century American High

2 Politics and Markets: The Enduring Dynamics

4 “Intellectual Power” for All: Theodore Sizer

6 Gendered Anxieties Pave the Way for a Separate

7 A Window into the World of Students: An Analysis

9 “Fight for Your Land”: Southern High School

11 Shifting Public Perceptions of Wichita’s Southeast

Caitlin Cieslik-Miskimen University of Idaho, Moscow, ID, USA

Fig. 6.1 Philadelphia’s High School Enrollment by Ward, 1909 124

Fig. 12.5 North Carolina State Funding for Capital Outlay,

What Is the Twentieth-Century American

A couple of years ago, a colleague who is also interested in the history of

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

With disproportionate attention devoted to the point of view of young

In brief, the Committee of Ten, which a president of Harvard led,

graduated. In Chapter 7, Caitlin Cieslik-Miskimen considers the prolif-

this timeline with oral histories, Coleman-Tempel shows that commu-

Chicago School Desegregation (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press,

Politics and Markets: The Enduring Dynamics

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 13

pieces of the story I presented were interesting in themselves, he said, they

tracked comprehensive high school that emerged in the early twentieth

Politics and Markets

the common school. In order to create common schools, you needed

Increased Access Leads to a Tracked

The job market accommodated this change through the increase in

Evolving in search of this symbolic credibility, the model of the high

The Lessons of Central High Applied

So, at fifty-year intervals across the history of American education, the

What’s Next in the Struggle

As I write now, in the midst of a pandemic and in the waning

Renovations in the Citadel

In 1986, I finished The Last Little Citadel , a history of American high

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 29

He understood and respected the craft—yes, the teacher Horace had to

economist-father, I grew up following the stock market, helping draw by

Soups. To make meat soups, the connective tissue, bone and

Roasting. The flavor and juice of the meat is best retained by

Broiling. The same principle applies to broiling as to roasting. The

Pot Roasts. In the case of a pot roast, or roast in a kettle, where it

Frying. This is the least desirable method of cooking. Food

Pastry. Pastry owes its harmful character to the interference of fat

“In different countries opinions differ markedly

The unit of measurement for the calories of energy is the amount

Dr. Chittenden’s experiments show that a man leading a very

In order to bring oneself to as limited a diet as Prof. Chittenden’s

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