At various moments in American history, Black writers and activists have concluded that being instructed by white teachers in white-run institutions is essentially an untenable situation. “What the Negro needs, therefore, of the world and civilization, he must largely teach himself,” W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in 1910, calling for a “college-bred community” of Black Americans. Almost sixty years later, Black students at the University of California, Berkeley, reached a similar conclusion, demanding that the university create a Black studies program to ease their racial isolation. “We can no longer prostitute our minds to the vain and irrelevant intellectual pursuits of Western society while our community lies in ruin,” the students’ proposal declared. “This would amount to intellectual shuffling, and we are determined to shuffle no more.” At the time, Black students made up a tiny minority on Berkeley’s campus; an official survey found that “American Negroes” made up only 1 percent of the student population in 1966. Fifty-six years later, that figure has barely budged. Black students now make up 2 percent of Berkeley’s undergraduate population. History not only echoes; it sometimes repeats.
As these debates about identity and representation in American education were raging throughout the twentieth century, a second major shift was taking place. The central belief of Horace Mann and Catharine Beecher—that the point of education was to purify young souls—gradually gave way to a more utilitarian calculation that schools, first and foremost, were places to gain the skills that were valued in an increasingly competitive labor market. By 1972, when Gallup asked American parents why they wanted their children to be educated, the most frequent response was “to get better jobs”; “to make more money” was the third.
This shift began early in the twentieth century, at a moment of great turmoil for American workers. Agriculture still employed about a third of all working Americans, but that fraction was shrinking quickly, while the service sector was rapidly expanding. Technological innovation was transforming every job, from farming to bookkeeping. Manufacturing was becoming increasingly automated, which meant that employers needed workers who could perform basic calculations and read blueprints and instruction manuals. Offices were introducing new technologies as well, including typewriters and adding machines, all of which required significant cognitive skill to master. At the close of the nineteenth century, the typical American worker had only a sixth-grade education, and for most jobs, that was enough; for the jobs of the new century, however, it quickly became clear that more schooling would be required.
That dawning understanding led to the rapid expansion of public education in the first four decades of the twentieth century in what is known as the high school movement. Unlike the common schools movement of the nineteenth century, which was the top-down brainchild of dedicated reformers, the high school movement was a decentralized, grassroots undertaking. In small towns and big cities across the country, neighbors came together to build and operate free public high schools, voluntarily taxing themselves to do so. In contrast to the era of Beecher and Mann, these communities were motivated not by religious altruism but by enlightened self-interest. Without a well-educated workforce, citizens concluded, the new engines of progress might bypass their towns and leave their families behind.