ABSTRACT
During the last two decades of the century the growth of industry in the bourgeois societies on both sides of the Atlantic brought rising pressures to bear on the systems of secondary education. In the United States the high school had become the favorite instrument of the middle classes for their children’s social and economic advance. This was true as much for artisans and small entrepreneurs in the cities, who relied on the people’s colleges, as for businessmen and professionals in rural areas, who looked toward the connecting-link high schools.
