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.

Throughout the twentieth century, and even earlier, adults have attempted to publicly control, and even censor, teenagers' access to various artifacts of mass culture—including magazines, music, comic books, movies, television and radio programs, and books. The motivation has been twofold: to shield the young from certain perceived pernicious influences and to encourage a national cultural uniformity/conformity heavily motivated by Christian morality and the dread of racial (and class) mixing. Fears of youthful extremism, sparked by corrupting influences, have waxed and waned, depending on various social, political, economic, cultural, technological, and other configurations. But attempts at censorship have generally continued, earmarking even newer forms of mass communication, most recently cable television and the computer Internet. Any understanding of this development must take into consideration both the fears and motivations of the adult majority, as well as the complexities of modern youth culture, all within a larger national matrix. Adults' fear of youthful rebellion and their urge to control youth became particularly glaring during the 1950s, when the winds of change seemed particularly brisk.

Some time before 1830, girls in New England began to attend town schools more or less on par with boys, and women's mastery of basic literacy in the region rose to levels comparable to those of men. Women also came to assume increasingly important teaching roles. Each of these changes had some bearing on the other two and establishing the timing of the changes with some precision is important. First, the timing of the changes in levels of female literacy, school attendance, and teaching matter for their own sake. More especially, these changes are important because historians, insofar as they have attended to these changes, have seen them as reflections of wider cultural shifts—changes in views of women and women's roles.

On February 3, 1803, the brand new building that was to revivify both student and academic life at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, burned to the ground. It was a devastating loss felt by the whole community. Yet Charles Nisbet, the college's principal for seventeen years, reported the event to a friend in sardonic fashion. The trustees had urged that Dickinson emulate Princeton, the more successful Presbyterian-backed enterprise in New Jersey. “We have now attained a pretty near conformity to it,” he wrote, “by having our Building burnt down to the ground [the same fate having overtaken Princeton's newly rebuilt college some months before] …. But it could not stand, as it was founded on Fraud & Knavery. The Trustees, in order to procure money for finishing this Building, sold the Certificates that furnished the salaries of the masters…. This awful Visitation of Divine Providence has taken more from them than all they have taken from me, tho' I do not think it will awaken them to do more justice.” While money was a constant source of contention between Nisbet and the trustees of Dickinson, they had taken much more than that from the Scottish cleric. Their knavery had included thwarting his godly mission to educate part of the post-Revolutionary generation of Americans. And it was not just the trustees; the students themselves, and their parents as well, had done their part to frustrate him. In fact, all of American culture, or so Nisbet thought, had prevented him from enlightening the wilderness.

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.

The common school movement has long constituted one of the defining themes and primary focal points of scholarship in the history of American education. Although this push toward a tax-supported, universal public education was a national movement, no state has been as closely identified with it as Massachusetts, and no individual recognized as taking a more important lead in the dissemination of common school ideology than Horace Mann. The region and the person, so closely linked with each other, were both crucial in advancing the common school cause throughout the nation and in stamping it into the American historical and cultural fabric.

The last decade has seen an explosion in educational reform initiatives to improve educational quality, including programs in which colleges and universities join together with public schools to support local education. The work of Boston University in supervising the Chelsea Public Schools is among the best known. These cooperative efforts are not new, however, and have a long history in the Boston area. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Harvard and its faculty played an important role in founding, supporting, and supervising the Cambridge grammar school. Like many cooperative activities today, the two institutions were brought together through philanthropy. In 1726, the executors of the Edward Hopkins legacy entrusted Harvard with funds to support both divinity scholars at the college and Latin students at the grammar school. As administrator for the funds, the Harvard Corporation sat as de facto overseers for the school, designating the Hopkins scholars at the school, conducting annual visitations, and providing partial financial support for the schoolmaster.

During the middle decades of the nineteenth century, publicly controlled common school systems took root in many parts of North America; the province of Ontario was no exception. Although antecedents in that province stretched back to 1816, during the 1840s, in particular, a series of school acts was passed to provide for the establishment and maintenance of common schools in rural and urban communities alike. These schools were financed by a combination of government grants and local taxation and managed by locally elected school trustees, while a fledgling provincial bureaucracy provided guidelines for the certification of teachers, the approval of texts, and the distribution of government grants. Within that framework, local people established public, state-funded schools, which gradually replaced earlier, more ad hoc forms of educational provision and which by 1850 provided most children with all the education they would ever receive. In most rural communities, the new state educational apparatus produced only a one-room school offering little more than the rudiments. On the other hand, many urban communities across Ontario constructed much more sophisticated systems, including graded primary schools, and central or union schools, which sometimes offered instruction in what would now be considered secondary education.

In his 1857 manual The American Citizen: His Rights and Duties According to the Spirit of the Constitution of the United States, John Henry Hopkins described the citizen as” ‘a partner in the republic,’ “who had the right “to express his honest convictions, in word or writing, concerning every candidate for office, and every political measure contemplated or adopted by those who are in possession of the legislative or executive function.” In this passage, Hopkins expressed the common nineteenth-century assumption that citizenship entailed political activism. Hopkins and his contemporaries might have disagreed about what kinds of political activity were appropriate or effective, but they did not question that citizenship was essentially a political status, involving active participation in the public sphere.

The dramatic success of Jesuit schools since the Society admitted the first lay, or extern, students to its college in Gandìa, Spain, in 1546 is unparalleled in the history of education. By the time Ignatius of Loyola died in 1556, the Society had thirty-one schools, with more than ten times that number, 373, at the death of the fifth Father General, Claudio Aquaviva, in 1615. During Aquaviva's tenure, in response to this educational explosion, a comprehensive set of school regulations, the Ratio atque Institutio Studiorum Societatis Iesu, was drafted, debated, and finally promulgated in 1599 after fifteen years of preparation. The letter of transmission included Aquaviva's injunction that “this plan of studies … ought to be observed in the future by all of ours, setting aside all other plans.”

In the mid-eighteenth century, the American colonies could boast of only six colleges—Harvard and Yale in New England; William and Mary in Virginia; and the three fledgling institutions in the middle colonies, King's College (Columbia), the College of New Jersey (Princeton), and the College of Philadelphia (University of Pennsylvania). With the exception of William and Mary, these institutions were located on the northeastern seacoast, enrolled mostly local students, followed a scholastic course of study within a regentship system, and had few graduates. The number of college-educated males in the colonial population in the early 1760s is estimated at only one per thousand.

Scholars have long recognized the Great Awakening (circa 1735–45) as an important moment in the history of American higher education. As increasing numbers of young men experienced conversion and entered the ministry, leaders seized the opportunity to establish educational institutions that furthered the aims of the revival. Within a generation after the Awakening, prorevivalist groups founded four new colleges: the College of New Jersey at Princeton by Presbyterians in 1746, Rhode Island College (renamed Brown University) by Baptists in 1764, Queen's College (renamed Rutgers) by Dutch Reformed in 1766, and Dartmouth College by the Congregationalist Eleazar Wheelock in 1769.