"The College Has No Monopoly on General Education": Secondary Education and the General Education Movement

• In Event: The Curriculum as Contested Space

Abstract

This presentation seeks to re-center the importance and omnipresence of general education as a mission of the modern high school in the hopes of providing a corrective to the widespread view that general education is solely the purview of institutions of higher learning. The presentation focuses on the general education movement of 1930-1960 and explores the role of the high school within the movement; thereby portraying it as a concurrent project between secondary and higher education. The presentation specifically explores the Eight-Year Study and argues that as the first cooperative study focused on general education reform, it laid the theoretical precepts and practical methods that informed the multiple future cooperative studies responsible for consequential reform during the general education movement.

Author

• Kevin S. Zayed, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign