A great deal of water spilled over the dam in the 25 years that separated the NEA Committee of Tens Report from the report issued by the NEA Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education in 1918. The reasons for this seat change were many and varied, yet they were also interconnected. You will recall that about 18.2 million immigrants from southern and eastern Europe entered the US between 1890 and 1920. Hailing predominantly from agricultural regions, they were accustomed to rasing large families, as a source of agrarian and artisan labor. Large families among immigrant groups remained the norm in the US, in the decades before World War I. Quite simply the immigrants were extraordinarily fakened. >> Assimilation advocates wanted the immigrants children, hundreds of thousands of them and millions over time, in the public schools. Get them into the schools to devest them of the old country culture, to teach them English literacy and the American way. To inculcate habits of hygiene and sanitation, and to treat their medical problems. Settlement workers for humanitarian reasons worked successfully to keep immigrant children out of the factory, off the streets, and in the public schools. They helped mobilize visiting teachers who mediated between the home and the school. The settlers and other humanitarian reformers brought school nurses and medical inspection into the schools. Muckraking journalists exposed huge weaknesses in turn-of-the-century urban schools, not the least of which was their irrelevance to the demands of a now urbanized, corporate industrial society. And they were also rigid, stupendously boring, anti-immigrant institutions. An army of reformers of different social and political persuasions took to heart these reports and advocated mechanical training in the elementary school and vocational education in the high school. All in the effort to appeal to the interests of young people labeled dull, or hand-minded, or laggard. In combination, all of this multi-faceted reform activity gave the administrative progressives of the World War I era a warrant for a watered-down, practical curriculum for the large majority of students who are entering the high school in growing numbers. For most, it was not the intellectually demanding program advocated by the Committee of Ten. >> The Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education was the manifest [INAUDIBLE] for the American Comprehensive High School. The institution that would be labeled the quote, shopping mall high school >> Hm. >> By researchers in the 1980s. Membership of the NEA Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education, which produced the cardinal principles, was of an entirely different ilk than the Committee of Ten. As for university presidents, there was only one, and not a particularly distinguished one at that. The majority of the 26 members were education professors, joining several school practitioners and state level administrators on the list. The cardinal principles are significant for two major reasons. First, the report enumerated seven principles as aims of the American high school. Note that only one principal spoke to the schools academic program, and vaguely at that. The principals were one, health. Two, command of fundamental processes. Three, worthy home-membership. Four, vocation. Five, civic education. Six, worthy use of leisure. Seven, ethical character. Of the seven aims, command of fundamental processes, presumably basic academic skills, was given the shortest shrift. These principals marked a seat change in the high school's mission for mental discipline, the training of the intellect. To social efficiency, preparing young people for productive work in the corporate industrial economy and rapidly changing society. All these principles were not literally translated into courses, the social efficiency ideology that produced them would be pervasive in the comprehensive high school. Which received it's mandate from the cardinal report. As it's second major purpose the report called for a six year period of secondary education. One or more of which could be attained in a junior high school. The rest in a comprehensive high school. >> Vocational courses in urban high schools dated to the turn of the 20th century. With commercial courses appearing in the academic high schools. The cardinal principals gave impetus to a proliferation of commercial, industrial arts, agriculture, and home economics courses in the high schools of the 1920s. Yet for all these vocational add ons, the majority of urban high schools maintained their academic emphasis. Offering vocational courses as elective credits. As a supplement to academic requirements. By the end of the 1920s urban secondary schools were being transformed into comprehensive high schools. High school enrollments increased dramatically from 630,000 in 1900 to more than 4.8 million in 1930. Compulsory school laws, child labor laws, and the increasing automation of low skilled and factory jobs, among other factors, account for the huge surge in high school enrollments. The Great Depression would provide the catalytic spark for the transformation of the American high school into what historians David Angus and Jeffrey Mural called quote unquote a custodial institution. Further, by 1940 as a general trend, courses of study would be differentiated along lines of race, class, gender. Tracking would be de rigueur. High school would be totally comprehensive, sorting everyone into their appropriate slot. >> In the progressive era, blacks in the south continue to face enormous obstacles in their pursuit of education. Northern white philanthropists, sometimes with good intentions, assisted white supremacists in maintaining the South's Jim Crow system of racial apartheid. In our next episode, we take up the Southern Education Movement.
