Excerpt from The Selective Character of American Secondary Education For two generations the public high school in the United States has grown at such a rapid rate as to give it a unique place in the history of educational institutions. Appearing late in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, it at once entered into a struggle for survival with the dominant secondary school of the time, the private academy. For a half-century the high school maintained itself with more or less success, and was well established by 1870. During the fifty years that have elapsed in the meantime it has expanded in a manner quite without precedent. From 1890 to 1918 the number of high Schools reporting to the Bureau at Washington increased from 2, 526 to the number of pupils in attendance from to and the number of teachers from to At the same time the population of the United States increased from to approximately Thus while the high-school enrolment increased 711 per cent the total population increased but 68 per cent. From year to year this institution has constantly attracted a larger and larger proportion of the children of high-school age in the nation. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.