ABSTRACT
My life as a sociologist concerned with education began one evening at the dinner table. I was near the end of my graduate studies at Columbia University and my wife and I had invited to dinner my fellow student and co-researcher, Martin Trow, and his wife. The talk turned to our high school days. As we described our experiences, it was clear that each of us had lived in a somewhat different kind of cocoon during that period of our lives. My wife had gone to high school in Shelbyville, Indiana, a school that when she was a junior had won the state basketball championship. Basketball was the focus of adolescent attention, rivalled only by the social escapades of the leading clique in school. Trow's wife had attended a private girl's school in Atlanta, a school designed to produce young ladies for the next generation of Atlanta social elite, but also a school in which scholastic pursuits were taken with serious interest. Trow had gone to Townsend Harris High School in New York City, a public high school (no longer in existence) that was highly selective on academic grounds. Graduates who returned to speak in assemblies or at commencement were Nobel prize winners or others who had distinguished themselves in intellectual pursuits; and the focus of current students was upon similar goals.
