Foreword HIGH school graduation requirements, representing as they do the general education area of a high school's offerings, are of significance in reflecting our educational objectives. The general education area of the curriculum is designed to provide for the common needs of all boys and girls in our society, in contrast to the special interests area represented by the elective subjects, which serves the individual needs of pupils. Through its required subjects a school can ensure for every pupil the basic instruction which it believes will best develop the knowledge, understandings, and attitudes he needs to function as an effective citizen. This document reports the subjects that State and city school people have designated as those which best fulfill this important need. The Office of Education's first report of Requirements for High School Graduation was published as Bulletin 1928, No. 21. Included in that study were the 48 States, 12 large cities, and a random sample of 464 individual schools from each of the States. In the past decade the Office has made available through its circular series four reports on the requirements of State departments of education and one on those of large city school systems. The present report brings under one cover in the bulletin series information from the latest of the State (1960-61) and city studies (1958-59). While it does not include data for individual schools as did the 1928 study, it does reveal changes in States and cities and should prove useful to students of secondary education. The Office of Education is grateful for the assistance of officials in State departments of education and city school systems who so generously helped in the interpretation and verification of data. E. GLENN FEATHERSTON Assistant Commissioner and Director Division of State and Local School Systems J. DAN HULL Director, Instruction, Organization, and Services Branch I. Introduction: The Elective System and Graduation Requirements UNIVE TNIVERSAL acceptance of the elective system in the public high schools is very generally a 20th century phenomenon. The 19th century witnessed its evolution. The first public high school, established in Boston in 1821, was designed to prepare youth for life. It provided a curriculum which, while noncollege-preparatory in nature, was completely prescribed. In the ensuing 40 years as the public high school movement spread, there was differentiation of the curriculum to take care both of those who were going to college and of those who were not. In some cities, separate schools were maintained for the teaching of an English or general course and the classical or college preparatory course. In other cities, separate departments for the classical and English courses were maintained in the same school. In general the subjects in the two courses were completely prescribed, although here and there schools were permitting students some choices. The constantly increasing number of offerings in each of the two departments-classical and English-had, by the sixties, begun to make it a practical impossibility as well as an undesirability for everyone to take everything. This fact led to the widespread adoption of a variety of parallel courses, each of which, like the classical and English courses, was generally fixed and definite. The pupil had the right to choose the course, but not the subjects within the course. The disadvantage to the pupil was that the choice had to be made in his freshman year before he had had an opportunity to learn what interests and abilities he might have in subjects restricted to other courses. As in the earlier years, electives were permitted in a few schools. As the years passed, the number of different courses multiplied. There was also the tendency for schools to add subjects, some of which were to be taken for brief periods. Some means of providing greater flexibility was conceded to be necessary. Beginning in the nineties, |