The twentieth century has witnessed a major transformation of secondary schools from exclusive institutions serving the elite to inclusive institutions serving the general population. This transformation has been marked by radical changes in entrance and graduation requirements, increasing quantity and different quality of students, expansion and dilution of curriculum and a radically new role for the high school and the high school teacher. The rise of technological and urban society within the context of American middle-class ideology has been a fundamental cause of this transformation.

“It is said,” reported a very knowledgeable observer, that in 1880 when Francis Parker left Quincy after working a minor revolution in its schools, “he received this advice from Charles Francis Adams: get a new suit of clothes, a tall hat, and keep your mouth shut, if you wish to succeed.” The advice was excellent, for Parker was walking with his customary nonchalance into the hottest and most confused educational hassle that Boston had known since Horace Mann and the grammar school masters had engaged in a vitriolic clash in the 1840's. At first glance the sides looked similar; lay reformers were openly attacking grammar school masters and striving to reorganize the school system. However, unlike the situation in the forties there was now a superintendent, or rather three superintendents before the fight was over, and the roles of these varied successively from champion of the masters to ally of the reformers to seeker of compromise and truce. But this was not the only difference. In the earlier struggle it was the lay reformers who were championing a highly centralized, super-efficient model of educational administration while the beleaguered masters struggled to retain their traditional autonomy and freedom from supervision. By the 1870's, however, reformers had become disenchanted with the effects of a centralized educational system and championed an ideal that confusedly tried to combine bureaucracy and charisma. By this time, on the other hand, the schoolmen, more than they themselves knew, had accepted bureaucratic structure to which they now looked, ironically, for autonomy and protection; thus the grammar school masters and their supporters vigorously defended the concept of rational, professionally directed, hierarchical organization.

During a period of several decades before and after the American Revolution, France played an influential if not formative role in numerous attempts to create a new American higher learning. After independence, the English college model, dominant for well over a century, no longer inspired or satisfied a small but influential group who demanded republican form and content in higher education as in government. It was to France, the protector of the revolution, that these leading Americans looked for a continuation of inspiration and example in their attempts to found institutions of higher education befitting, to use Seymour Lipset's term, the first new nation.