Kyle P. Steele
Published: 2017
Total Pages: 0
Get eBook
This dissertation traces the impressive expansion of the public high schools in Indianapolis, Indiana from 1890 to 1971, where enrollments among adolescents, as in most cities, jumped from a mere six percent to roughly ninety percent. To tell this story, it employs a three-tier analytical approach, one that presents the high school from multiple angles of vision. It explores national educational trends, to understand the high school as a distinctly American invention, guided from above by policy elites; the character of Indianapolis and its people, to recognize high schools as the creation of local government, politics, and contending interests; and student life, to remember that young people, and their youth culture, shaped the nature of secondary schools in powerful, and sometimes subtle, ways. Through this analysis, this dissertation makes two unique contributions to the field. First, it outlines the means by which one American city created a fundamentally unjust system of public high schools. As with most cities, Indianapolis began the century with a singular, decidedly academic high school, but ended the 1960s with multiple, expansive high schools and offered numerous paths to graduation, some of which were academic, others vocational, and others still for "life adjustment." It was a system, furthermore, that mirrored the other forces of mass society that surrounded it, as it became more bureaucratic, more focused on sorting students based on perceived abilities (derived from ideas about race, class, and gender), and more anxious about teaching conformity to middle-class values. Second, this dissertation calls attention to the experiences of the students themselves, and the formation of a distinct youth culture, which hitherto have remained peripheral to historical inquiry. Elevating the student perspective, in concert with the more conventional, curriculum-focused narrative, adds an essential depth of understanding to the lived experience of the high school. Ultimately, the high school, as it evolved into a mass institution, was never fully the domain of policy elites, school boards and administrators, or students, but a complicated and ever-changing combination of all three.