The Future of the Secondary School: A Viewpoint

The future of the secondary school is a widely debated topic in education today. In the United States, four major panel reports on the subject appeared in 1973 alone: The Greening of the High School, American Youth in the Mid-Seventies, Youth: Transition to Adulthood, and The Reform of Secondary Education. Why the upsurge of interest? Is it because students are expressing increasing levels of dissatisfaction with secondary schools? Is it because the curriculum reform movement of the sixties has slowed down and we now need a new movement to command our interest? Is it because we have become sensitized to some of the educationally deleterious effects of schooling? Is it because educational consumerism has forced us to reexamine our purposes, and has demanded that we become accountable for what we do? If these are not the motivating forces behind the new upsurge of interest in secondary education, perhaps it is because we have discovered a new mode of secondary schooling, one so compelling that we seek to remake secondary education in its image. Or, if that is not the reason, perhaps it is because we have a decreasing secondary school enrollment for the first time in decades. (In the United States the drop in enrollment is predicted to be 9.4 percent by 1980. With a reduced enrollment, the pressures for new buildings and new staff are diminishing so that we can now devote our energies to the substantive aspects of education.) Whatever the reason, and I'm inclined to believe the reasons are multiple, the profession seems ready to consider the future.