In this article we explore the ways in which the work of counseling departments in two different school environments shape students’ STEM participation in high school, with important potential consequences for STEM in college and beyond.

This study explores youths’ perspectives on school-based emotional expression, emotional suppression, and emotion coaching in urban high schools.

Drawing on four case studies, the author considers the activities of mentors that help the students they guide become more prepared for schooling and careers.

In 1972 the Board of Directors of the National Society for the Study of Education sought the advice of several educators with respect to the nature of a possible yearbook on secondary education in the United States. A large majority of the respondents urged that such a yearbook should focus on central issues.

In the United States, public secondary education is being vigorously examined today. The criticism has been sharp during the past decade. Some critics have concluded that there is no hope whatever for public secondary education as currently conceived, organized, and practiced. Others have called for reform through new educational partnerships between the school and community.

In the history of education all issues with which the writer is familiar have originated in what people have thought desirable for education. Thus, the history of issues in American secondary education involves perceptions of, and sometimes debates on, what is desirable. In this discussion, we shall deal with a few crucial issues, which we shall call core issues, plus a very few conjoint issues. Both will be discussed in terms of their respective social and cultural milieus, and within broad periods of time.

Whatever is done to improve high school education must be related to some conception of the nature of learners and of the learning process. For several generations our thinking about high school education has been based primarily upon behavioristic views of what people are like and how they behave. Those concepts may have been useful guides when high school goals were simpler, curricula were limited, and the pace of societal change was slower. Secondary education of today and tomorrow must be much more complex and geared to the satisfaction of quite different student and societal needs.To meet these demands, new theoretical concepts are required to orient our thinking and to point the way to new techniques and processes designed to meet current needs. Fortunately, such concepts are available in modern humanistic psychology.

Behind any theory of learning is to be found an image of humankind. The image that responds blindly to external influence is not the only one available.

The paramount social reality is that the technologically advanced nations of the world are approaching one of the great transformations of human history. Even a few years ago it would have been necessary to hedge that statement with tentativeness and qualification. At this point few would question it. In this chapter we undertake the delineation of this transformation—its salient characteristics and the choice of responses—and the identification of the most important implications for education.

In this chapter, we shall examine the ways man's experience is made available to the young, with special attention to the fact that the official version of what is most meaningful in man's experience is offered in school. In systematic school instruction, knowledge is offered in three forms. The confusion of these forms with one another explains in some degree the feeling of meaninglessness many high school students associate with formal school learning. They take what they can, but many of them consider nonformal experience to be more meaningful than school experience. From our consideration of this situation, certain recommendations pertaining to formal school instruction will emerge.

Where should learning take place? On an airstrip? At an aquarium? In an artist's studio? In a computer center? At a drug crisis center? In a hospital? In a hotel? At a medical center? In a museum? In a national monument? In an office building? At a Playboy Club? In a railroad station? On a showboat? In a storefront? In a TV studio? At a theater? In a Victorian mansion? In a warehouse? On wheels? At a zoo? These are a few of the settings for alternative schools and action-learning programs currently in operation.

The question to which this chapter is addressed can be phrased in many ways. Herbert Spencer expressed it as "What knowledge is of most worth?" To Robert S. Lynd, it was "Knowledge for what?" To the contributors to a yearbook of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development it was "What shall the high schools teach?" and to the authors of a later ASCD pamphlet, "What are the sources of the curriculum?''

A cartoon prominently displayed in countless school administrators' offices shows two recumbent figures, one of whom says, "One of these days we've got to get organized." The message of this chapter is that organization--the fitting together of all the elements necessary for an institution to achieve its purposes--is truly a major factor in the success of any program of secondary education. We will especially consider the domain of secondary education and, in particular, curriculum organization, staff organization, other structural elements, and patterns to enhance motivation.

Study compared subject requirements for college admission with those for ongoing study in the corresponding subjects reflected in the college liberal arts program''; author concludes that colleges have arbitrarily determined high school curriculum, and urges reform.

In 1965, the Department of Education and Science eliminated the Tripartite System where the grammar school was favored, the secondary modern school ignored and technical schools never materialized. The system was reorganized so that individuals were not penalized because of social background and everyone's potential could be fully developed.

The author's ambivalence toward the school and "the system" is not uncharacteristic of the conflict experienced by so many of today's students; and our purpose in presenting her piece here is to underscore the warnings that the teaching process must be changed.

The author is concerned about the fundamental irrelevance of the high school curriculum for young people needing to know how to make sense of the real world, how to find their way through its labyrinths, how to effect controls. Acknowledging the value of traditional studies for those who are interested, he proposes a series of elective courses aimed at relating the school to out-of-school interests.

In addition to providing a "lush" and "benign" environment, it is necessary to guide individuals in the use of this environment and to help them, when possible, to take the initiative in making the environment more favorable to adolescent growth and development. This is the individualized aspect of education which we call guidance.

THE following quotation from the writer's Administration and JL Supervision of the High School sets forth his conception of the scope and function of the library in the modern high school: "The complete lack or the meagerness of space suitable for library purposes in the great majority of our high school buildings reveals a striking failure to appreciate the important part which the school library should have in high school education.

This commentary examines the failings of American high schools.