At
last evening’s (Tuesday, 25 June 2019) Minneapolis Public Schools Board of
Education meeting of the Committee of the Whole, District Four Member Bob
Walser made another of his outrageously erroneous statements, intoning that the
first schools specifically provided for the middle grades did not appear until
the 1950s. Apparently, Walser had run
across a reference to the advent of the middle school (as contrasted to the
junior high) during the 1950s. Walser leapt
to the conclusion that until the 1950s, schools had been organized into
elementary and high school institutions only, leading him to ask, “Why do we
have middle schools anyway?”
Here
for the edification of Walser and for the additional information base of my
readers, is the answer to that question:
A
Review of How the “Junior High” School Concept Came into Being
Through the 19th century and
into the early years of the 20th century, schools for students
between elementary or “grammar” schools and those in high school were
rare. There was not a pressing need for
any such schools, since the grammar school that in the 19th century
typically encompassed grades one through six (1-6) accounted for the
educational experience of most students, who did not even continue schooling
beyond grade 6.
Then, as an increasing number of students
did proceed into the years of grade 7 and grade 8 in the course of the first
decade of the 20th century, many commentators expressed concern that
there was not enough new content presented for students at these two grade
levels in the grammar school curriculum.
Thus was born the idea of creating a “junior high” that would be offered
at grades 7-8, with grammar school now encompassing just grades 1-6. These junior highs were in fact modeled on
the senior highs for which they were similarly named and to which they sent
students directly from grade 8 into grade 9.
At both junior high schools and senior high schools, curricula focused
on the subjects of mathematics, English, history, government, geography,
natural science, art, music, physical education, industrial arts, and home
economics.
But well into the 20th century,
graduation from high school was not the expectation of most students, many of
whom truncated their education somewhere in the midst of the grade 8 to grade
10 years. Children of immigrant families
from Ireland, Italy, and Eastern Europe were thought by many educators to be
ill-suited for continuing education. If
they did reach high school, they were tracked into industrial arts courses,
away from the classical liberal arts, and as soon as these students felt ready
to take and extend what they knew into the workaday world, they did so.
As a consequence, “high” school really did
function for much of the first half of the 20th century with a
“high” level of academic instruction that in our current institutions as of the
year 2019 would more nearly parallel community colleges (effectively grades
13-14, not the 9-12 of “high” school).
Accordingly, the “junior” “high” schools that were modeled on “high”
schools tended to offer a challenging curriculum, and educators at this level
also stereotypically thought of students as falling into categories within which
many would drop out as unsuited to a challenging liberal arts curriculum.
At the turn of the 19th century
into the 20th century, the educational expectations of the public
differed dramatically from what they are in the context of life at year 2019. I maintain a large personal library, with
volumes that are relatively old in age (published over a century ago or more),
of very recent publication, and in between.
A relatively old volume that I have is a Heath English Classics volume of The Tragedy of Hamlet : Prince
of Denmark, published out of Boston by D. C. Heath and Company in 1899,
under the editorship of E. K. Chambers, B. A.
It is especially that latter titular designation that is of interest
here.
At the turn of those centuries, to have
graduated from high school and gone on to college placed a person in the very
highest educational levels of the American populace. Obtaining a bachelor’s degree was regarded as
an accomplishment approaching the kind of status that having a Ph. D. would
bring today. Today, it is not very
likely that an editor of such a volume would even shout about her or his
holding a master’s degree. The
expectation would be that a person with the right to comment authoritatively on
works of Shakespeare would be a scholar holding a Ph. D.
By extension, we would say that at the turn
of the 19th century into the 20th century, those people
who graduated from high school commanded the status of someone graduating with
a bachelor’s degree today. “High” school
really meant “high” school, and junior high students were treated as high
school students in training, expected to master a curriculum much broader and
deeper than middle school curriculum in the year 2019 at which I now write.
So how did we go from “junior high school”
to “middle school,” anyway?
The
Advent of the “Middle School”
This transition began in the middle reaches
of the 20th century and accelerated during the 1960s and 1970s. As the student population grew, and as Grade
K (kindergarten) became more of an exercised option, decision-makers in many
school districts across the nation moved Grade 6 into the junior high with
Grade 7 and Grade 8. Either by changing
the name, or putting the designation on a new building, those making decisions
increasingly opted for the appellation of “middle school,” rather than “junior
high school.”
And these changes coincided with an
ideological movement among educators and those who took some sort of elevated
interest in public education. By that
time, there was a burgeoning “Middle School Movement” that was an offshoot of the
so-called “progressive” approach to education that envisions many purposes of
education aside from the impartation of knowledge from teacher to student. The progressive creed that had taken hold at
departments, colleges, and schools of education values process of delivery and
the manner of information acquisition over the systematic dispensation of
knowledge from teacher to student; the
constructivist approach, which is a subset of the progressive creed, eventually
came into particular favor among professors of education.
Thus it was that standards had already been
lowered by the 1970s, when the Middle School Movement took off. People who belonged to the National Middle
School Association took the lead in this movement, the adherents of which
argued that the main task of educators in the middle school context was to
assist students in developing socialization skills and negotiating the emotions
and physical changes of early adolescence.
By the early 1980s, this movement was taking hold among decision-makers
in locally centralized school districts, and by the early 1990s the notion of
middle school purpose as socialization dominated the thought of middle school
public educators.
The rise of the middle school was
accompanied by an increasingly popular theory holding that human brain development
plateaus during ages 12-14, and that the brain at this point should not be
overburdened with a lot of new information.
By the early to middle 1990s this theory had been thoroughly debunked by
the preponderance of neuroscientific evidence, but its popularity did not abate
among middle school educators. Thus, for
two decades, students had undergone a boring and unchallenging middle school
education, impelling many parents to move students into suburban, private, and
charter schools in search of more rigor (rarely finding it in charter schools).
The standards movement that inspired No
Child Left Behind legislation undercut the socialization-as-purpose premise,
but middle school education has not recovered from the errant curricular
approach of the Middle School Movement.
Taking
Middle School Curriculum to Unprecedented Heights
The curriculum for grades 6-8 that I present
in Part Three: Philosophy of Understanding the Minneapolis Public
Schools: Current Condition, Future
Prospect far eclipses in rigor the sort of unchallenging drivel that has
passed for middle school education during the decades since the advent of the
Middle School Movement; it goes far
beyond any content level that has ever been widely available at public middle
schools. It ensues upon the challenging
curriculum that I present for grades K-5 and continues in direct sequence from
grade 5. By the time a grade 8 student would
graduate from a middle school of my devising, she or he would have more
knowledge than a current high school graduate has at the time that the knowledge-deprived
student walks across the stage to snag a piece of paper that is a diploma in
name only.
There would be a good case for
reinstituting the old moniker of “junior high” to connote connection to high
school and the suggestion of rigor that “high” school should have. But making major effort to make the name
change might require more energy than a mere change in appellation would
justify. So I’ll stick with the name
“middle school’ and put energy into advancing high quality curriculum. Putting this curriculum in place takes the
K-12 experience to unprecedented heights of knowledge that makes possible the
recreation of true “high” schools providing curriculum at grades 9-12 that now
typify the first and second collegiate years, with subject matter from the
technological, vocational, and liberal arts.
