1st Edition

The Once and Future School Three Hundred and Fifty Years of American Secondary Education

By Jurgen Herbst Copyright 1996
    280 Pages
    by Routledge

    Jurgen Herbst traces the debates, discussions, pronouncements and reports through which Americans have sought to clarify their conceptions of the goals and purposes of education beyond the common school.

    The Once and Future School argues that to make sense of the current trials of secondary educational system and to maintain any sense of direction and vision for its future, we need a clear understanding of its path in the past and of its setting in a multi-national world. From their beginnings in colonial America to the present day, Jurgen Herbst traces the debates, discussions, pronouncements and reports through which Americans have sought to hammer out and clarify their conceptions of the goals and purposes of education beyond the common school.

    Acknowledgments, Preface, 1 The Origins of Secondary Education, 2 Grammar Schools, Colleges, and Academies in Early America, The Nineteenth-Century Liberal Arts College, 4 The People’s College, 5 State Systems of Secondary Education, 6 Midwestern Democracy, 7 Between Town and Gown: The High School in Wisconsin, 8 Growing Pains, 9 The Committee of Ten, 10 From Manual to Vocational Education, 11 The Legacy of Vocational Education, 12 Toward the Comprehensive High School, 13 The High School Under Siege, 14 The High School in Search of Itself, 15 End of an Era, 16 From the Twentieth to the Twenty-First Century, Notes, Index

    Biography

    Jurgen Herbst is Professor Emeritus of Educational Policy Studies and of History at University of Wisconsin, Madison. He has served as president of the American History of Education Society and of the International Standing Conference for the History of Education. His most recent book is And Sadly Teach, a history of teacher education in the United States.

    "...The Once and Future School is a valuable and important book. Herbst has produced the single best volume on the history of the American high school that we have to date, and, in the process, he raises some provocative questions about what secondary education in this country should look like in the twenty-first century American Journal of Education."
    "Far more than a history of secondary education, this volume is a thoughtful perspective on how and what schooling can become in a restructured education system that provides lifelong "careers in education." -- Choice