Passage 3

Questions 11 to 15 are based on the following passage.

    The public schools of the United States—elementary, secondary, and higher—have a history, and it is the social history of the United States: the decades before the Civil War, in which the elementary or “common schools” were reformed; the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century, in which the secondary schools “welcomed” the “children of the plain people”; and the post-World War II decades, which found the public colleges and universities flooded non-traditional students—those traditionally excluded from higher education by sex, race, and class.

    In each of these periods, the quantitative expansion of the student population was matched by a qualitative transformation of the enlarged institutions. The common schools of the mid-1800s were charged with reforming the moral character of the children of failed artisans (工匠) and farmers; the expanded high schools at the turn of the century with preparing their poor, working-class, and immigrant teenagers for future lives in city and factory; the “open-access” public institutions in the postwar period with moving their students off the unemployment lines and into lower-level white-collar positions.

    The common schools, the high schools, the colleges and universities—all in their own times—were expanded and transformed so that they might better maintain social order and increase material productivity. But no matter how enlarged or reformed, they could not do the jobs expected of them: they could not solve the economic, social, and human problems brought about by uncontrolled urbanization and industrialization within the context of the private property system. The schooling reforms succeeded only in shifting the discussion and action from the social and productive system to the people who were now held responsible for not fitting into it.