The evolution of the high school has emerged as a key issue in the history of American education. Between about 1890 and 1940, the American high school was transformed from an academically oriented privilege for the few to a near-requirement for the many. As student ranks swelled and high school became an increasingly common experience, the meaning and impact of the schools themselves underwent fundamental changes.

Most of the postmortem examinations of the Canadian Rebellion of 1837–38 identified one of its leading causes as faulty political education, but competing interpretations of “education” existed. The British Whigs and Radicals charged with reorganizing Canadian government after the Rebellion argued that the colonial population needed to be placed under far more extensive relations of tutelage than those implied by attendance at school as an antidote to revolution. Their analysis connected reform of governmental institutions, inspection and investigation of local conditions, and common schooling with a host of other attempts to reconfigure social solidarities in the colony and to reconstruct the colonial state. An alliance of imperial officials, anglophone capitalists and reformers, and, often grudgingly and ambivalently, sections of the francophone petite bourgeoisie attempted to translate this analysis into practice in the decade of the 1840s.