The traditional high school education, by unfitting its graduates “for work with their hands,” encouraging them instead to look beyond the factory for their future employment, had become more of a problem than a solution. Still, despite its faults, it remained the only viable institutional solution to the “youth” and “worker” problems. To eject working-class youth from the institutions best situated to ease them through the perils of adolescence into the responsibilities of adulthood would serve no good purpose. The task confronting the business community and the critics of the high schools was a complex one: they wanted to bring as many “plain people” as possible into the high schools and keep them there through their teens, but in such a way that their expectations for life after graduation would not be inappropriately raised. Industrial schooling appeared to be the solution. Not only would such programs direct students towards realistic and realizable futures, but they would also attract many working class students who, the experts claimed, had been frightened away by the traditional secondary school curriculum. The masses, it was said, were not entering or remaining in the high schools because the high school curriculum had not been adjusted to their special needs. The muckrakers took great delight in calling attention to what they considered the failure of the high schools to move out of the dark ages. The secondary schools' exclusive emphasis on “culture,” it was argued, might have been appropriate to an earlier era, but was most definitely not appropriate to the modern age. “Our medieval high schools: shall we educate children for the 12th or the 20th century?” asked a Saturday Evening Post article somewhat ingenuously in 1912, the conclusion having already been reached that the schools were at least eight centuries behind the times. The critics of the public high schools, especially those from the business world, accepted without question the inability of the “masses” to proceed at the same academic rate as the “classes.” The working-class children were failing because they could not keep up with their middle-class counterparts and, in fact, were totally incapable of learning the same kinds of things.
Improving Urban Students’ College Readiness as a Driver of High School Curriculum Enhancement
