Democracy’s High School? Social Change and American Secondary Education in the Post-Conant Era

Abstract

In this article I discuss James Conant’s ideas about the democratic role of the comprehensive high school and address just how those ideas have been treated by history. I consider the historical context of the post–World War II United States, focusing on several issues: (a) race and the growth of school segregation, (b) the rise of a youth culture and the movement for students’ rights, and (c) the changing national economy, especially with respect to rising educational expectations. Drawing on the work of Amy Gutmann and other treatments of democratic education, I assess how these factors changed the prospects for democracy in American high schools. I also examine major policy statements and commission reports concerning secondary education from the 1970s and 1980s. Altogether, it appears that these major historical events converged in the postwar period to make Conant’s vision of the democratic high school problematic, at least in the nation’s large metropolitan areas. Thus the future of democratic education is an open question for the great variety of U.S. youth to be educated in the coming century.

True Grit? Making a Scientific Object and Pedagogical Tool

“…Consider, as just one example, the writings of prominent U.S. intellectual, James Bryant Conant. A scientist who served for decades as president of Harvard University, Conant spent his later years writing extensively on education reform and the democratic potential of schooling (see Rury, 2002). In writing about the postwar high school, Conant (1959) drew on the frontier thesis to explain the exceptional character of American democracy, contrasting the ideal American school system with those of Europe:The American frontier has in fact shaped our institutions.…”