ABSTRACT
By the second half of the nineteenth century the high school’s purpose had everywhere become a subject of vigorous dispute. As we saw in chapter 5, in western New York and Michigan academies had been replaced by high school departments of union schools and were eventually transformed into public high schools. In the trans-Appalachian areas of the country, schoolmen and parents fought hard to gain public tax support for the high school as connecting link to the colleges and universities, even though the great majority of the schools’ students did not go to college. In the eastern cities where most high schools functioned as people’s colleges it was the influx of female students that brought to the fore a concern with the collegepreparatory function of the school. Though more and more high schools had come into being through a gradual extension upward of the common schools, throughout the decades from 1850 to 1880 they still remained “uncommon” schools for the nations’ select youngsters. By 1890 they enrolled only 6.7 percent of the country’s fourteen-to seventeen-year-olds.
