The Business Community and the Public Schools on the Eve of the Great Depression

After 1900 demands for a more functional education in the secondary schools were argued with growing fervor as efforts to extend and perfect the ideal of universal educational opportunity were intensified. In pamphlets, at association meetings, and through a variety of other media, one proponent after another reiterated the traditional arguments: universal education would minimize social cleavage and keep equality of opportunity open; it would bring enlightenment to the republic; it would reduce crime; and it would serve to induct an increasingly heterogeneous and growing immigrant population into American society. These arguments reflected an increasing effort to expand the common school ideal to meet the changing needs of American life

Depression (economics · Economics · Great Depression · Political science · Sociology · Diverse Education Studies and Reforms · Higher Education Research Studies · Law · School Choice and Performance