Source Document
School District of Kansas City. Forty-Fifth Annual Report.
(1916): 28-29.
Commentary
This section of the 1916 board report for the Kansas City (MO) school
district provides one of the clearest and most direct rationale for the organization
of an urban junior college in the early years of the two-year college
“movement.” The basic themes reflected in this document were
repeated in several hundred other communities, but rarely with such clarity and
comprehensiveness. The first is that the city lacked a college of its own, and
so any young person who earned a high school diploma (and Kansas
City’s graduation rate of 18% was a remarkably
high percentage by national standards) was forced to leave home to further his
or her education. From the perspective of the city’s many conservative,
middle class parents, this prospect was bad enough for their sons, but
intolerable when it came to their daughters. Egged on by the presidents of the regions
many small, denominational colleges, both state and private universities were
frequently characterized as havens of sin (where one could learn to smoke,
drink and even dance, spurred on by Greek societies.)
The second, and now generally overlooked theme, is that the established
postgraduate system, adopted by the Kansas City
school district, like a number of others, to provide aspiring students with
some degree of access to collegiate coursework, was breaking down. Kansas
City was far from alone in permitting students to
enroll for a fifth and even sixth year of high school work, even if they had
earned a diploma after the conventional four years of study, just as it
followed the normal practice of the time and concurrently enrolled its
postgraduates in courses with high school students. In the 1880s and 1890s,
state universities generally did not have a problem with granting college
credit for such work (this is apparent from an accreditation report prepared by
the University of Michigan's
Professor Palmer for Joliet's
Central High Schools postgraduate courses in 1895.) But by the second decade of
this century, with "standardization" the mantra of the day, such lax
practices were no longer tolerated by university registrars, and especially the
University of Missouri's
nationally-prominent registrar, Jesse H. Coursault.
Rather than risk the wrath of parents, whose children found their postgraduate
credits rejected, Kansas City, like
Joliet and other larger, urban
school districts (eg., Newark, Detroit,
and Chicago), formally reorganized
their large postgraduate programs into junior colleges. The "problem"
of some high school students electing to put off taking the high school diploma
after four years of study, so as to remain eligible for high school
extracurricular activities while they enrolled in postgraduate courses, appears
to have been unique to Kansas City, but it is likely that this practice only
hastened the demise of the city's postgraduate program in favor of a junior
college.
Document
p. 28 BOARD OF EDUCATION.
The Junior College.
Few cities of the United States
give more cordial and loyal support to their public schools than does Kansas
City. Our latest reports show that fifty-five percent
of the students complete the elementary schools and eighteen percent the high
schools. Statistics are not available concerning the number of high school
graduates who attend college. The number, however, is large and the question of
extending education beyond the high school is a vital one for our city.
As there is no institution of college or university rank within the city, it
is necessary, therefore, for our boys and girls who wish a college education to
leave home for this purpose. As the elementary and high school period is
covered in eleven years instead of twelve, the usual number, many of these high
school graduates are of an age when parents dislike to have
them leave the home. The result has been that Kansas City
high schools have offered many courses of semi-collegiate nature and students
have remained after graduating for additional work in the home school. Last
year one hundred fifty students were enrolled in our schools who had graduated
the preceding year. Because of the fact that post-graduates were barred from
participating in many of the student activities of the school, many students
with sufficient credits for graduation, deliberately postponed taking their
diplomas in order to avail themselves of the privileges of the under-graduates.
The Kansas City high schools,
therefore, contain many fifth year pupils. Many students who expected later to
take a college course used this fifth year to do work for which credit should
be asked in college. As fifth year students were in classes with
under-graduates it was impossible to place the work on the same plane as
college work. Our universities were obliged, therefore, to discount the work
given to our fifth year pupils because of the conditions under which it was
given.
In cooperation with our State University
it was proposed to segregate our fifth year pupils into separate classes and
organize a new institution, a Junior College where work of the same character
and covering the same subjects as that which is given
in the first two years of college, should be given. No movement in the public
schools has received more enthusiastic endorsement.
p. 29
SUPERINTENDENT'S REPORT.
On May 20, 1915, in
establishing a policy for the high school, the idea of the Junior College was
approved by the Board of Education and plans were made for the opening of the
school in September, 1915. The following bulletin in addition to containing the
courses offered in the Polytechnic Institute, explains in some detail the plans
for the inauguration of the Junior College.
Contributor: R. Pedersen
Last Updated: December
15, 1999
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