More Is More | Emanuele Corso

[Igel]

4. He's a shameless romantic.

There wasn't universal education for much of that time. Drop out rates were fairly high. Standards were uneven--and often quite high, which accounted for the drop-out rates.

Even the idea of "public education" is a bit late. My county got its first elementary school in 1888. Its first high school came a couple of decades later, in 1908, with one teacher who also provided janitorial services. If you grew up in my neck of the woods, you'd have to wait a couple of decades after that for a high school or you'd have to travel > 10 miles to get to one. "My" high school was the fifth established in the county, mostly because it was a working class area ... with a lot of immigrants. I grew up surrounded by Polish- and Italian-Americans.

"Compulsory education" was a nice law, but after it was enacted in Maryland something like 30% of the kids still didn't have easy grammar school access. High school? Much less.

Up in the city the public schools were established a bit earlier. But the private schools beat them by many decades. The city public schools still had a fairly high drop out rate, except for the prestigious flag-ship campus (which pulled the best and brightest from all the other schools). High school wasn't for everybody, but the mythos that all immigrants wanted to have their kids go to college is an alluring one, but often a fantasy. High school graduation rates for the general population finally topped 50% around 1940. That's decades after this author's assumption that rates were uniformly high before that. Yes, the more prosperous families had high high-school graduation rates. Where do you think that left immigrant kids? Yup: Average would have been less than 50% for a short while after 1940.

This varied depending on where you lived. Large cities in the NE were ahead of much of the country, since their Puritan heritage pushed education more than the old immigrant stock in other parts of the country. Cities had earlier, better schools--but also larger poor populations.

Industrialization was pushing more education in the 1920s and 30s. That's the real incentive juicing more schooling. And high school graduation rates increased with prosperity ("kids don't need to work", "school is the kid's job&quot throughout the '40s and '50s and '60s, esp. after 12 years became the legal requirement instead of just grammar school.

Education figured prominently in many family narratives. But not even all my father's older siblings graduated from high school, and he graduated in '44. Those in which high school and college didn't figure tend to be fairly invisible, unless there's some injustice lurking there; and families tend to remember and recount the tales from those antecedent nuclear families (grandparents, great-grandparents) that were more successful, not the losers.

The reason teachers are under fire is because for the first time there's such a steep $ amount attached to college and no real way for mere high school grads to do well, in general. All those kids who would have been drop outs or content with HS now need to be pre-college or CTE trained, and given demographics there's a higher percentage of them now than at any time in the last 80 years. The ed system in the 1920s didn't care about the drop outs as much, and the parents viewed it not as society's problem but their own. Nowadays we externalize our responsibilities: Somebody else is responsible for any problem we have, not us. Our kids fail school? Don't do homework. Would rather work at McDonald's than focus on their senior or even junior years in high school? Not my fault. And it can't be the kids' fault. So it's somebody else's.