High School and Youth in America

In I929, in A Preface to Morals, Walter Lippmann wrote that the modern world was haunted by the realization 'that it is impossible to reconstruct an enduring orthodoxy, and impossible to live well without the satisfactions which an orthodoxy would provide... Multitudes are compelled to make radical and original adjustments... Though they have lost the ancient certainties, [they] have not outgrown the needs to which they ministered... They need support, and there is none. Their situation is adult, but their dispositions are not.' What Lippmann said about the modern world and its citizens can be said with equal appropriateness of the modern American high school and its students. Society, having lost faith in inherited certainties yet clinging to them nonetheless, sent ever larger numbers of adolescents into the high school, and the school accepted them willingly and asked for more, although, doubting its traditional educational philosophy, it could no longer supply them with a clear and consistent sense of educational and social direction and purpose. Thrown on their own resources, educators relied on nineteenth-century concepts of schooling and teaching, virtually ignoring the changing nature of modern life and youth. Their failure, and the failure of society as a whole in this respect, amounted to a denial of the twentieth-century adolescent's place in American life. The problem of youth thus became one of the key issues of American social history in the twentieth century, aggravated as it was by the disruptive and unsettling effects of urbanization, industrialization, and specialization. The high school succumbed to the ideal of professional specialization, clung to outmoded conceptions of education and teaching, and refused to acknowledge and welcome the adolescent on other than the school's traditional terms. The adolescent who appeared at the school door was no longer the youngster eager for academic training; nor

Political science · Diverse Education Studies and Reforms · Education Methods and Practices · History · Indigenous and Place-Based Education