History of the US school system

[Feirefiz]

I get the impression that secondary education in the modern US school system is largely geared towards preparing students for a high school diploma or equivalent. Some people drop out, but that isn't really an intended outcome.
Of course there are real or perceived differences in quality between schools. Personal grades and test results and subjects taken make a difference.
Yet all in all the general outlines of people's school careers are pretty similar.

Today, that makes a lot of sense. What I'm wondering is how this worked in the past.

I assume that in, say, the late 19th or early 20th century children from rural or urban working class backgrounds did not typically receive a twelve-year education preparing them for college.

What kind of baseline could you expect? What about skilled non-academic careers?

[Feirefiz]

I don't believe that nobody knows this. I'm not looking for anything overly detailed.
Let me rephrase the question:

What kind of school did your totally average (great) grandparents attend and for how long?

[Zuul]

My grandparents were going to school during the '30s and '40s, so their experiences wouldn't really touch on the era you're asking about here, unfortunately, but I can try to dredge up what I remember from reading about it and what I was told by my friend who was studying the history of the education system in the US.

Private and religious schools were established early on in America, but there was no real public education system until around 1840. It started in Massachusetts and was based off of the Prussian model for a common education that everyone was entitled to. From there, it began to spread, though didn't become common in the South until after the Civil War and Reconstruction. I believe by the turn of the century all states had a free elementary education system in place.

If you were wealthy, you might go on to get an education to prepare you for university, but for most it was just going to be that basic elementary education. The author of the Little House on the Prairie books was the teacher of a one room school house at sixteen, which would have been in 1883.

In the early 20th century, there was a movement for a free higher education. Instead of just teaching people the basics of literacy and math, they wanted to give people--all people--the opportunity for a practical education. The shift was away from a classical system and more towards an education system that would be useful economically. At the time, achieving a high school diploma was viewed as the preparation most people needed for taking on white collar positions (and some blue collar ones as well) after graduation. The ideal was to make it available to everyone, to be gender neutral, and to have it operated at the state level.

Even if someone had no intentions of going to college, it was considered an end in and of itself to complete those twelve years of school. High school wasn't following the apprentice or trade school formula, but was instead meant to be a general education that anyone could make use of. Not everyone stuck it out, but those who did would have far better standing in society, even without any further education.

[Feirefiz]

Thanks for your answer!

[Zuul]

You're welcome! It's a good thing you bumped it. I'd completely missed this one the first time around.