Adolescence and Guidance in the Early Comprehensive High School:
An Analysis of the Works of Milo H. Stuart, 1917-1931

Kyle Steele Joshua Garrison
University of Wisconsin - Oshkosh

Abstract
Milo Stuart rose to national prominence as a
high school principal, lecturer, and author. In
1916, he was chosen to serve on the NEA
committee that produced the influential
Cardinal Principles report (1918). His
subsequent works were firmly rooted in his
position as a practitioner-author and reveal his
ideas about adolescence and guidance, as well
as his commitment to developing schools that
prepared all young people for their roles in
increasingly complex, urban-industrial
communities.

Background and Stuart’s Influence
The child of Quakers, Milo H. Stuart

was born in 1871 in Hamilton County, Indiana,
just outside of Sheridan and forty miles north of
Indianapolis. Tall and slender (one friend
referred to him as the “Hoosier sycamore”) he
was a precocious and hardworking student,
known for his public speaking ability and, in the
words of a memorial booklet published upon his
death, an “insatiable desire to learn.” Stuart
began his career as an educator when he was
just a teenager. He worked for schools in and
around Sheridan while a high school student and,
too, as an undergraduate at the University of
Indiana. Following his years in Bloomington,
where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1898, he
studied botany for a year at the University of
Chicago (Arsenal 1940, 11-12).

Stuart then embarked on his remarkable
thirty-year career in administration, which has
been largely unexamined by historians of
education. He took over as principal of Sheridan
High School in 1899 and was chosen
superintendent of all Sheridan public schools the
same year—just shy of his thirtieth birthday. In
1900, having caught the attention of school
leaders in Indianapolis, he was hired to teach

botany at the Manual Training High School,
which had opened as the city’s second high
school in 1895. Stuart left for two short years to
serve as principal of the Cleveland Grade and
High School in St. Paul, Minnesota, but returned
to Manual as an assistant principal in 1909 and
was promoted to principal in 1910 (Faculty and
Students 1940, 14-15).

While at Manual, Stuart presided over a
nationally renowned program in manual and
industrial education, which, in the words of the
school’s motto, offered its pupils an “Education
of Mind, Hand, and Heart” (Griffin 1969, 6).
Situated on Indianapolis’ more working-class
South Side, Manual initially stood in contrast to
Shortridge High School, Indianapolis’ first high
school (founded in 1864), which was located on
the more affluent North Side. At Shortridge,
pupils engaged with a decidedly narrower and
more academic curriculum (Gaus 1985, 25-30).
Historians such as Kliebard (1999) and Engs
(1999) have documented well the national rise
of manual education in this period, making clear
that it was often framed by its proponents as
more suitable for the children of the working
class, as well as Black and Indigenous students.
In this regard, Indianapolis, with its clear North-
South curricular division, was more similar than
different.

Owing to sheer demand, the Indianapolis
school board decided to open a third public high
school in 1912, and they chose Stuart to lead it.
The new school, eventually named Arsenal
Technical High School, or Tech for short, was
notable for two reasons, both of which made it
novel in Indianapolis but emblematic of
prevailing national trends regarding the urban
public high school. First, Tech was massive. It
was situated on a former United States arsenal
(operational from 1863 to 1902), and had also
been used as the Winona Technical Institute



26

from 1903 to 1911 (Faculty and Students 1940,
26). As such, the beautifully wooded, seventy-
six-acre campus was already outfitted with
multiple classroom buildings, a quadrangle, a
library, and a cafeteria. In a few years’ time,
Tech was the largest high school in the city and,
by 1925, educated over 5,000 students per year
(Stuart 1926, 4).

Second, Tech was comprehensive in
organization. As was the case with a growing
number of large urban high schools, Stuart and
his staff offered more paths to graduation than
ever before. Some, for the college bound, were
academic; others, for those who planned to
immediately enter the workforce whether they
graduated or not, were vocational. By the mid
1920s, this meant that Tech, on a single campus,
provided training for higher education and jobs
in the areas of “automobile construction,
machine shop work, sheet metal work, foundry,
plumbing, pattern making, cabinet making,
carpentry, electrical construction, agriculture,
home economics, printing, drafting, and
commercial art” (Stuart 1926, vi-vii). No matter
a student’s likely path or interests, Stuart and
Tech provided options.

Even early in his tenure as head of Tech,
Stuart spoke and wrote often about his work
leading a cutting-edge comprehensive high
school. As a marker of his standing
professionally, he was chosen in 1916 to serve
as a member on the committee of the National
Education Association (NEA) that would
produce the Cardinal Principles of Secondary
Education report, released in 1918. Historians
have aptly characterized the influential Cardinal
Principles report as a direct repudiation of the
NEA’s 1892 Report of the Committee of Ten
(Reese 2011; Kliebard 1995). The latter, led by
then-president of Harvard Charles Eliot, argued
that high schools should provide a college
preparatory curriculum for all students, no
matter their plans after high school. The former,
led by Clarence Kingsley, a retired high school
educator, claimed that “college prep for all” was
elitist, undemocratic, and, all told, a waste of
time and money (Mirel, 2006). Instead, the
report argued, America needed more high

schools like Tech and more high school leaders
like Stuart. Students needed a training in service
of the seven objectives it listed: “health,”
“command of fundamental processes,” “worthy
home membership,” “vocation,” “citizenship,”
“worthy use of leisure,” and “ethical character”
(Commission 1918, 10-11).

During and after his work on the
Cardinal Principles report, Stuart continued to
lead Tech and to write extensively about high
school leadership and organization. For the
purposes of this essay, two of his books and two
essays, written in a fourteen-year span, provide
the opportunity for an analysis of his ideas about
adolescence and guidance in the comprehensive
high school, as well as the school’s role in an
urban, industrial community: “The Manual-
Training High School” (1917), The
Organization of a Comprehensive High School
(1926), “The Problem of the Ninth Year” (1927),
and Guidance at Work (1931). These texts
demonstrate the import of the Cardinal
Principles report on Stuart’s career, but each is
tinged with the urgency and pragmatism of a
school leader rooted in a community and in the
throes of day-to-day operations and decision-
making. They offer, therefore, a unique window
into the ways in which national curricular
trends—watersheds like the Cardinal Principles
report—were developed over time, and how
they found life in the minds of school leaders
and in the halls of American public high schools,
an enduring challenge for historians of
education (Cuban 1984; Cohen 1990; Tyack and
Cuban 1995).

While Stuart was an active school
administrator during this period of publishing, it
is worth noting, too, that his influence extended
well beyond these texts and his control over
Arsenal Technical High School. Like many
other administrators of his time, he found
regular opportunity to discuss and disseminate
his ideas. He was, among many roles in
professional organizations, the president of the
North Central Association of High Schools and
Colleges (1922-1923), president of the
Secondary School Principals in the NEA (1929-
1930), and president of the Indiana State



27

Teachers’ Association (1930-1931). In his time
away from Tech during the summers, Stuart
taught courses for the University of California,
the University of Michigan, and Columbia
University. Shortly before his death in 1933,
moreover, he served at the request of President
Hoover on a White House committee on
vocational education (Faculty and Students
1940, 8-9). In an era of remarkable growth of
the comprehensive high school, Stuart was
among its leading voices and staunchest
champions.

A Note on Race
While Stuart’s ideas about the

comprehensive high school merit investigation,
his reticence on race is notable, especially
because the secondary schools in Indianapolis
were subject to a segregation order during the
period under study. As Jackson (2000), Pierce
(2005) and Thornbrough (1993) have explained,
the high schools in Indianapolis had been
integrated since their beginnings in the
nineteenth century. As the number of Black
students interested in pursuing secondary
education rose in the early twentieth century,
however, several civic groups—the Chamber of
Commerce and Federation of Civic Clubs, of
note—began pressuring the school board to
segregate the system. In 1922, with hundreds of
Black students enrolled in the city’s high
schools, the board acquiesced. It took several
years before the new segregated school was
built, but in 1927 (under the direction of a
school board backed publicly by the Ku Klux
Klan) the all-Black Crispus Attucks High
School welcomed its first students.

For Stuart, this remarkable change in
service of a segregated and racist school system
meant, in practical terms, that Black students he
led as principal were moved from Tech to
Crispus Attucks under his watch. As this
process played out, a period in which Stuart
published regularly, he wrote next to nothing
about the role of race in the high school. In line
with his administrative peers nationally, he
conceded on occasion that the comprehensive
high school had to take account of all students.

In one illustrative example, he wrote that “a
public secondary school has no choice but to
meet the interests, the abilities, and the
economic necessities of its every individual
student, be he dull, normal, or brilliant, and
irrespective of his social position, wealth, creed,
or race” (Stuart 1926, 3). Stuart’s thoughts and
actions as a school leader and reformer, then,
reflected the maintenance of the existing racial
order of his time, both in Indianapolis and much
of the nation. His stated position on race, or lack
thereof, reflects Tyack’s (1974) observation that
“[u]rban schools did not create the injustices of
American urban life, although they had a
systematic part in perpetuating them” (12).

“Occupational Civics” and the New
Industrial Order

Chief among the Cardinal Principles’
concerns was how to reorganize the secondary
school and its curriculum in order to prepare
youth to be responsible and productive members
of a new urban-industrial order. The factory and
its machines required a new sort of specialized
worker, while the city and its temptations
threatened to upend traditional American
systems of social control. “These changes in
American life call for extensive modifications in
secondary education,” wrote Stuart and his
fellow members of the Commission, and, as
noted, they provided seven objectives to guide
that work (Commission 1918, 8-11). Stuart’s
writings never strayed from these principles,
and his professional mission was to
operationalize the ideas found in the
Commission’s report, which had been in
development in high schools across the country
well before its 1918 release. As Kliebard (1995)
explained, the Cardinal Principles report was
less of a trailblazing document than a concise
reflection of “the winds of change that had
swept the educational world in the previous
quarter-century” (99). For Stuart, Tech was the
site of that operation, an urban laboratory deeply
connected to the city of Indianapolis and its
industries, where he and his staff conducted
organizational, curricular, and pedagogical
experiments in their efforts to realize the



28

promises of “industrial democracy”
(Commission 1918, 8).

First-year students at Tech were
introduced to the complex and changing world
in which they lived. From there, they were
carefully guided in their efforts to find a place in
it. This process—from introduction to
placement—occurred during the freshman year,
in an exploratory course on “occupational
civics.” The first year of high school was an
especially important one, as it was the age at
which Indiana’s compulsory education laws
provided “the legal right of a child to break his
training” (Stuart 1927, 127). Quitting school
was “socially dangerous” (Stuart 1931, 79) and
would consign the dropout to “that great army
of occupational drifters who are helpless in our
economic scheme” (Stuart 1926, 46). In
response, the year-long civics curriculum at
Tech sought to provide students with a social
and vocational purpose that would “develop an
appreciation of the real business of going to
school” (Stuart 1931, 41) and would “inspir[e]
children with strong enough purpose to go on
intensively after the ninth year” (Stuart, 1927,
126).

Freshmen began by studying their
immediate environment—the school—where
they had just entered “as into a new country,
with strange laws, customs, and traditions”
(Stuart 1926, 47). The school was conceived as
a “prototype” of society at large, a social
organization unto itself, in which the new
arrivals would have to find a place and a
purpose. From the school, the first semester
student moved to a “general survey of
community life” and studied “the essential
nature of the organization of modern society”
(Stuart 1931, 37). It was hoped that students
would begin to see themselves as members of
cooperative social groups, whether those groups
be educational, recreational, political, industrial,
or otherwise. “When an intellectual basis for
appreciation of social organization has thus been
established,” wrote Stuart, “the essential factor
in citizenship is to get the individual to sense his
own peculiar relation to such an organization

and to get himself best adjusted therein” (Stuart
1926, 47).

For Stuart, the most important social
relationship for the urban-industrial citizen was
“the economic one,” as vocation defined one’s
purpose and place in the social and economic
order (Stuart, 1926, 48). But work was more
than a means to earn money and status. Stuart
elevated vocation to the level of service. It was
one’s civic duty to do “that work in the
community for which he is best fitted” (Stuart,
1931, 38). Choosing a vocation might determine
an individual’s prospects, but it was also an
important choice that would greatly impact the
welfare of society. Wrong choices would lead to
“social waste,” while the right ones would
contribute to the general good. So conceived,
Stuart’s vision of vocational education modeled
the one set forward in the Cardinal Principles:
“Vocational education should equip the
individual to secure a livelihood for himself and
those dependent on him, to serve society well
through his vocation, to maintain the right
relationships toward his fellow workers and
society, and, as far as possible, to find in that
vocation his own best development”
(Commission 1918, 13). Vocational education,
in Stuarts mind, was not strictly a utilitarian
endeavor; it was a communal one, and one vital
to the civic health of society.

Adolescence and Bureaucracy
In pursuit of his mission to fit young

people for their adult roles, Stuart
unsurprisingly developed an educational
philosophy of adolescence, and his most
complete formulation of it is found in M.V.
O’Shea’s edited volume Types of Schools for
Boys, where he authored a five-chapter essay on
the manual training high school. The project,
which also included sections on military and
church schools, was premised on the position
that modern social and industrial life required a
variety of specialized institutions of secondary
education “to give the kind of training which is
deemed to be most suitable for the different
industrial, economic, and social groups” (Stuart
1917, n.p.). Stuart eschewed footnotes and



29

rarely referenced scholarly works in his writings,
making it difficult to provide a genealogy of his
scholarly inspirations; still, it is apparent that he
was influenced by the major progressive
thinkers of his day, John Dewey and G. Stanley
Hall included. It is impossible to determine
whether Stuart studied these thinkers directly, or
if he received their ideas indirectly, through
secondary interpretations in professional
publications and conferences, which is where
Stuart found his intellectual home. His surface-
level understanding of each does not qualify one
to label him a “Deweyan” or “Hallian” per se,
but traces of each can be found throughout his
works. Stuart was, at times, reminiscent of
Dewey in his unwavering faith that student
interest should inform curricular decisions and
in his organic view of social life in which the
individual was deeply connected to the whole.

For Dewey, it was a “pedagogic
blunder” to ignore the adolescent’s natural
interest in exploring the connections between
self and the social whole, an interest that was
more pronounced during adolescence than at
any other time in life (Dewey, 1896, 9). Dewey
recommended that high school students study
“social ethics,” a guided examination of social
life based on the premise that the individual and
whole were interdependent: “Society is a society
of individuals and the individual is always a
social individual. He has no existence by
himself” (Dewey, 1903, 8). Stuart’s course on
occupational civics is strikingly similar to
Dewey’s social ethics. Further, the overall
mission of Arsenal Technical High School—to
connect adolescents’ individual interests to a
course of study that had as its ultimate aim the
improving general welfare of society—was
markedly Deweyan.

The spirit of G. Stanley Hall lingers, too:
both Hall and Stuart worried that the modern
adolescent would be corrupted by the urban-
industrial environment; each man romanticized
and revered the adolescent to an almost cloying
degree; and both respected student interest and,
more importantly, entrusted the adolescent with
the freedom and responsibility to pursue those
interests. Stuart institutionalized and

operationalized some of the key educational
reforms recommended by Hall in his seminal
1904 work, Adolescence. Considering Stuart’s
membership on the NEA’s Commission on the
Reorganization of Secondary Education, it is
worth noting that Adolescence contained a
lengthy and incisive critique of the Committee
of Ten, whose work had been built on “three
extraordinary fallacies,” among them the belief
that fitting students for college was the same as
fitting them for life, a position that Hall found
absurd and irrational (Hall 1904b, 510). Hall
and Stuart both argued that subject matter
should be subservient to student interest; Stuart,
a strong advocate for the elective system,
wanted students to choose courses “which will
best serve his interest, no matter what this may
be” (Stuart 1931, 83). But the freedoms granted
by course election required a faith on the part of
educators that the developmental capacities and
instincts that accompanied adolescence could
and should inform educational choices. Stuart
possessed this faith, arguing that educators
should work to grasp the “connection between
what a boy craves and what his whole system
needs” (Stuart, 1917, 144-145). A more concise
summary of Hall’s child study movement can
hardly be found.

That is not to say that Stuart, Hall, and
other educators focused on adolescent education
did not harbor deep suspicions and uncertainties
about those youth they cherished most.
Adolescence was a developmental stage rife
with risks, and adolescents could quickly slide
into “abnormal,” “antisocial,” and “criminal”
behaviors that could undermine the efforts of
even the most expert pedagogue. The problem
of truancy, for example, was a special one
during adolescence, a period when “youth long
intensely for the utter abandon of a wilder life”
and instinctively rebel “against limitations of
freedom and unnatural methods of education”
(Hall 1904a, 348). Hall argued that a youthful
tendency toward truancy was natural and drew
from his theory of recapitulation to locate its
cause in those “primitive” instincts that
subsumed adolescence. Stuart accepted the
“world-old truant boy” (Stuart 1926, 70) as a



30

professional given, and characterized
adolescence as “period of impatience” and
“restless energy” (Stuart 1917, 147). But each
thinker possessed a simple solution to the
problem of absenteeism. In Stuart’s case,
truancy and school failure could be solved by
“adapting the work of [Arsenal Technical High
School] to the needs of Indianapolis youth”
(Stuart 1926, vii). Thus, while truancy might be
a symptom of the adolescent stage, Hall and
Stuart argued that the cure to this and all other
problems of adolescent education lay in
carefully study of their needs, seriously
considering their interests, and crafting a
responsive curriculum that would engage them.
In Stuart’s words, “cases of irregularity are not
so much cases for discipline so much as they are
symptoms of maladjustment and such that need
helpful guidance” (Stuart 1931, 70-71). G.
Stanley Hall made a similar point, albeit a touch
more poetically:

The apex of the runaway and truancy
curve is here. It is the age of spring fever,
when previous life seems dead, and the
soul would moult it and be done with it. It
is the most vulnerable and difficult of all
the periods after infancy, the severest test
of parent, teacher, and pedagogical
methods…What shall we do with the
hobbledehoys, Backfische, larrakins, is
the oldest problem of education, and one
answer is plain. We must first study them
(Hall 1901, 34-35).

And study Stuart did. Arsenal Technical
High School was not just an educational
laboratory, it was designed with impressive
bureaucracy to function as an observatory as
well. Much of The Organization of a
Comprehensive High School (1926) and
Guidance at Work (1931) were devoted to
meticulous and technical descriptions of a
complex and insatiable information-gathering
network of offices, committees, and forms. No
detail, however small, about a student’s life was
deemed insignificant in Stuart’s effort to reveal
each individual’s aptitudes and interests.

All members of Tech’s administrative
and teaching corps participated in the study of
the school’s students. Teachers were not merely
instructors, they were “mental and social
diagnostician[s]” (Stuart 1926, 79) who took
into account classroom performance as well as
“all the elements of home surroundings, family
attitudes, and personal traits” (Stuart, 1931, 14).
The ideal teacher, according to Stuart, would be
described by a student as someone “who knows
all about you and likes you anyhow” (Stuart
1926, 84). Teachers recorded grades, as they
always had, but they were also expected to
maintain a “record of personal traits” of all their
students (Stuart 1931, 88). Stuart instructed his
staff to conduct “a natural and moral
observation of individuals such as occur in the
affairs of everyday life” (91) and log those
observations on a card. They were to record
instances in which students exhibited “desirable
personal qualities under one of three types” (89).
Over the course of an entire four-year career at
Tech, each student generated forty such cards,
all of which were included in the “pupil’s
permanent record and becomes an item of
specific, definite, and lasting evidence of the
pupil’s personal worth.” Finally, each card was
measured and ranked against other students’
cards and students falling within the top quintile
were recognized as “superior” (91).

Stuart’s “system of record of personal
traits” did “not provide for record of adverse
qualities”—that work fell to other personnel and
was recorded on different forms (Stuart 1931,
91). Tech’s imposing bureaucracy included the
sinister sounding “Department of
Reclassification” and its erudite partner, “The
Council of Research and Personal Record.” The
former concerned itself with failing students
who had no hope of earning credits for a class in
which they were enrolled. “It is futile to have
the machinery for detecting the needs of pupils,”
Stuart wrote, “unless there be established at the
same time the machinery to make teaching
adjustments to meet individual needs” (65).
Only the most thorough system of record
keeping and analysis could help Stuart
accomplish his ultimate goal: to provide a



31

population of 5,500 students with “a program of
courses which would make possible five
thousand five hundred curriculums, each
adapted to the five thousand five hundred
individual needs” (Stuart 1926, 4).

“The Council of Research and Personal
Record” had an equally ambitious assignment:
“collect, classify, and interpret information
about individual pupils and to make such
available for every other agency of guidance
within the school” (Stuart 1931, 67). All manner
of academic details, personal information, and
even physical characteristics were collected, as
were IQ scores and results from the Thorndike
Test of Word Knowledge. Further, the Council
was endowed with the power to administer
further tests if circumstances warranted.
“[C]onstantly active in finding new ways to find
new facts about pupils,” the research group
served as a clearing house, disseminating
information and recommendations to all of
Tech’s administrative, counseling, and teaching
personnel (69). Such work, in Stuart’s mind,
took full “advantage of aids which modern
science is fast applying” (69).

Stuart sought to transform his high
school into a full-fledged technocracy. At times,
Tech is portrayed as an overwhelmingly
bureaucratic environment, governed by a corps
experts and “scientists” who endlessly tabulated
the interests and aptitudes of students and
recorded their findings on a stack of dull forms.
But Stuart was also a humanist. This spirit was
best captured in his 1917 publication “The
Manual-Arts Training School.” “For a school
worth the name is not building nor equipment,
nor even course of study. It is people. Wherever
boys and girls are drawn to a real man or
woman and there learn the beauty of soul and
mind, or useful accomplishments, there is a
great school,” he wrote (Stuart 1917, 130). He
also claimed that the modern manual arts high
school was “one of the least ‘institutional’ and
most intensely human projects that has entered
into the heart of a man for a long time” (133).
The school Stuart built was decidedly
institutional, and his later works are less
sentimental, far more technical, and chronicle,

perhaps, the efforts of a man committed to
serving G. Stanley Hall’s romanticized
adolescent while simultaneously remaining
loyal to the professional imperatives of his day,
social efficiency and scientific management
included.

Guidance and Social Sorting
According to Stuart, the high school

freshman “is ready to consider life as a whole
and he is going to think out what he wants to
do” (Stuart 1927, 128). But incoming secondary
students also required careful and expert
guidance from teachers and administrators to
ensure they selected vocations that fit with their
individual interests and aptitudes, since most
“come to high school lacking purpose in any
form. All that they do is a result of chance. They
change their courses according to whim;
ofttimes their decisions are determined by the
prejudices of a chum” (Stuart 1931, 37). In
response, the first year at Tech was “considered
a year of exploration and finding.” Male
students were provided with numerous
opportunities to test and try out various
“industrial processes” in the building and metal
crafts. The exploratory courses continued into
the following year, by the end of which
sophomore completers were exposed to “12
distinct processes of industry,” including
carpentry, automobile construction, cement
work, and foundry work (56).

As was typical nationally, vocational
courses were segregated by sex, and female
students, after studying the “evolutionary
history of woman’s work” in occupational civics,
were introduced to those occupations associated
with home economics, with especial focus on
domestic, culinary, and textile work (Stuart
1926, 49). While the boys tried their hands in
the wood- or machine shops, girls divided their
time between the food and clothing
“laboratories,” where “an attempt is made to
present to the girl such a range of activities as
will awaken a new interest in the science and art
of home making” (Stuart 1931, 58). This was
considered foundational work for those young
women who hoped to join fields deemed



32

appropriate, such as “journalism, dietetics,
salesmanship, occupations in libraries and
laboratories, social service, secretaryship,
nursing, [and] interior decorating” (48).

None of the above signaled a departure
from the Cardinal Principles, where the idea of
guidance played a significant role. But Stuart
did define the term more broadly. The
Commission typically paired “guidance” with
“vocation.” Stuart’s definition, on the other
hand, was more expansive. He reimagined
guidance as a more holistic endeavor. To be
sure, successful navigation through Tech’s
comprehensive course catalog—which
contained over 270 semester-long offerings—
would require careful guidance, but Stuart
frequently reminded his readers that the purpose
of secondary education extended well beyond
the formal curriculum. Among the high school’s
most important objectives, he wrote, was
fostering “the development of every desirable
personal attribute”; ultimately, the educator’s
primary aim lay in “molding human lives.” To
accomplish this “higher purpose,” Stuart called
for every administer, department, and faculty
member to be “integrated and unified in the
interest of the care and guidance of each
individual pupil” (Stuart 1931, 3).

Though all students were met with a
robust and complex system of guidance at Tech,
some, in Stuart’s mind, needed more attention
than others. He sparingly addressed the social
inequalities wrought by industrial capitalism
and was careful explain the sorting of students
at Tech as more practical than socially
reproductive. However, he made as clear as any
of his contemporaries that the project of the
comprehensive high school, with its myriad
options and attention to the individual, “were
not introduced primarily for the sake of the
pupils who were in the schools [already], but for
those who were out of them” (Stuart 1917, 138).
He accepted that the nineteenth-century high
school, with its narrow and largely academic
curriculum, had worked well for the small
number of mostly middle-class children who
had attended it.

Instead, his most coherent thoughts on
social class centered on the children of the
working-class or poor, who left school before
freshman year or earlier to earn money as
“elevator boys, and cash girls, [and] delivery
boys.” He acknowledged they were likely proud
to be wage-earners with some level of
independence, but he feared they might be
inattentive to the reality “that most of them are
doomed to remain among the unskilled” (Stuart
1917, 138). At Tech, as an alternative, they
might have a chance to consider their prospects
and catch “a vision of the possibility of training
in exactly what they wished to do” (146). He
accepted, nonetheless, the likelihood that “the
personal limitations” of a student’s “economic
and social environment [were] factors in
determining the degree to which the abilities of
the individual may be developed” (Stuart 1926,
3). The world needed management and labor;
the high school, Stuart discerned, should begin
fitting people for jobs in both.

Despite his demonstrably classist views
on student potential, Stuart took seriously the
task of framing the various subjects of study at
Tech, whether academic or vocational, as equals.
To his mind, other subjects had followed a
similar trajectory in the past, both in the high
school and the academy. “Physics has done it;
chemistry, botany, zoology, and modern
languages. Skepticism regarding these has
almost vanished,” he noted. The process would
be an uphill battle, however, because of what he
referred to as the “taint of toil.” That is, while
physics and botany recalled for most the degree-
holding and sophisticated scientist, sheet metal
work and plumbing were “connected in our
minds with toil, real manual labor which soils
the hands and calls for overalls. We might as
well own it.” It was a class-based “bigotry,” one
“which mental training has always assumed
toward manual,” and, he believed, one that
implicated “our colleges and universities” and
the common person alike (Stuart 1917, 151-152).
It was more society’s problem than the high
schools’.

Along those lines, Stuart viewed the
practice of definitively labeling classes as



33

“vocational” or “academic” (he often used the
term “cultural” for the latter) as a difference of
perspective at its best and implicitly elitist at its
worst. “Greek is a vocational study to the future
Greek professor, and [a class in] forging a real
piece of culture, acquainting [the future
professor] with a contrasting phase of life,” he
argued. “This is just as true as is its converse,
that to the future blacksmith forging is
vocational and Greek purely cultural” (Stuart
1917, 168). What truly marked the difference—
between the professor and the forger—was
unrelated to whether their studies led directly to
an occupation, and was instead tied to a value
judgement, inexorably bound to social class, of
the importance and status of their lines of work.
Stuart explained sardonically that “[w]e deserve
no credit at all in this country for not having a
caste system. Fancy our trying to rate a man’s
social standing according to his occupation!”
(174).

No matter the path one might pursue at
Tech, Stuart saw the time his pupils spent
together in high school as the great “introducer”
of the social classes. Under ideal circumstances,
the future manager and laborer could study
together, maybe even developing a respect and
mutual appreciation that would be unlikely
should they have an encounter as adults,
hardened by the realities of the workplace.
“Right beside the boy who is taking auto
construction because he wishes to understand
his father’s Packard touring car, works a boy
who will run a Packard truck instead,” he
explained. Just down the hall perhaps, “[a]long
with the boy who intends to make printing his
trade, studies the boy who will inherit his
father’s printing establishment” (Stuart 1917,
193). Aside from serving as a safeguard against
future class animosity, Stuart also believed there
was great benefit in the future managers
studying the trades in-depth and with
seriousness. A manager “may, or may not, assist
in the manual work himself, but he must
understand it in every detail.” In the same vein,
the head of a business “may not keep his own
books, but he must know when it is rightly
done.” Judging from the records of students,

Stuart found that an appreciable number of his
well-to-do pupils agreed, noting that “[m]any of
our most purposeful boys in the shops are sons
of manufacturers” (178).

Ultimately, Stuart viewed the
comprehensive high school, regardless of its
efficacy as a lever of social uplift, as among the
bottom layers of an expanding social safety net.
Because society recognized that schools such as
Tech existed to educate all young adults, “be
[they] dull, normal, or brilliant, and irrespective
of…social position, wealth, creed, or race,” he
knew they could not simply ignore or turn away
pupils (Stuart 1926, 3). The cost to society was
too great, though his rationale on this point was
distinctly more practical than romantic: “And
‘keep him in [school]’ must be the verdict for
the sufficiently normal if future society is to be
spared an unduly institutionalized population”
(4). As with the Cardinal Principles report,
Stuart portrayed the institution of the
comprehensive high school—as complex and
substantial as it was—as vital.

Conclusion
Through careful study and constant

guidance, Arsenal Technical High School
sought to pair individual interests and aptitudes
with the needs of a growing city. Stuart
designed his school to foster curiosity in those
technical and industrial disciplines “for which
there is a recognized community demand”
(Stuart 1926, 14-15). But Stuart’s educational
vision was not purely vocational; he “believe[d]
that if our school should attempt to make a boy
of high school age a mechanical expert without
a grasp of the social problems of the community
at large…it would be failing its duty to the
individual and to the state” (23). He hoped
Tech’s graduates would be free and thinking
beings, not mere cogs in an industrial machine.
If their work did not inspire thought, then the
student “needs to be educated all the more to
think for himself above the grind of the
machinery” (Stuart 1917, 179). Stuart’s
approach—however “modern,” “scientific,” and
sometimes bureaucratic it was—had a



34

humanistic element at its core. He wanted Tech
to humanize both individuals and their labor.

Beyond Tech, Stuart’s role in producing
the Cardinal Principles report, along with only
twenty-five other committee members, places
him among the most cited and influential
authors on the high school curriculum from his
era. Returning to the texts that he produced on
his own in the wake of the report, however,
allows for important historiographical lines of
inquiry. It situates Stuart’s ideas among the
most prolific writers on education and
adolescence of his day, including John Dewey
and G. Stanley Hall, which serves to recognize
that he found his intellectual home among
professional educators but did not operate in a
theoretical or conceptual vacuum. Moreover, the
analysis captures the perspective of Stuart as a
prolific practitioner-author, one who evolved
over time, was limited by the constraints of time
and money, was rooted in time and place, and
who dealt daily with high schoolers and the staff
who served them. If the comprehensive high
school was, as Stuart put it, its own “country,
with strange laws, customs, and traditions,” then
the ideas of its leader and innovator provide a
glimpse into such a place (Stuart 1926, 47).

References

Cohen, Ronald D. 1990. Children of the Mill:
Schooling and Society in Gary, Indiana,
1906-1960. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press. http://www.
worldcat.org/oclc/19847191

Commission on the Reorganization of
Secondary Education. 1918. Cardinal
Principles of Secondary Education.
Washington: US Government Printing Office.
http://www.worldcat.org/ oclc/926689412

Cuban, Larry. 1984. How Teachers Taught:
Constancy and Change in American
Classrooms, 1890-1980. New York:
Longman. http://www.
worldcat.org/oclc/956743626

Dewey, John. 1903. Ethical Principles
Underlying Education. Chicago: University

of Chicago Press. http://www.worldcat.org/
oclc/27000093

Dewey, John. 1896. “The Influence of the High
School Upon Educational Methods.” The
School Review, Volume 4, no. 1 (January): 1-
12.

Engs, Robert Francis. 1999. Educating the
Disfranchised and Disinherited: Samuel
Chapman Armstrong and Hampton Institute,
1839-1893. Knoxville: The University of
Tennessee Press.
http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/800661196

Faculty and Students of Arsenal Technical High
School. 1940. Milo H. Stuart, 1871-1933: His
Vision, Wisdom, and Leadership Inspired and
Directed the Development of the Arsenal
Technical Schools. Indianapolis: Arsenal
Technical High School Graphic Arts
Department. http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/
28155104

Gaus, Laura Sheerin. 1985. Shortridge High
School, 1864–1981, in Retrospect.
Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society.
http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/624393835

Griffin, Carolyn. 1969. Emmerich Manual High
School: A History, 1895–1969. Indianapolis:
Manual High School.
http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/38738536

Hall, G. Stanley. 1904a. Adolescence: Its
Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology,
Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime,
Religion and Education (Vol. 1). New York:
D. Appleton and Co.
http://www.worldcat.org/ oclc/56947845

Hall, G. Stanley. 1904b. Adolescence: Its
Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology,
Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime,
Religion and Education (Vol. 2). New York:
D. Appleton and Co.
http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/ 56947845

Hall, G. Stanley. 1901. “The Ideal School as
Based on Child Study.” Forum, Volume 32,
no. 1 (September): 24-39.

Indianapolis School Board. 1923. School Board
Minutes (November).

Jackson, Eric R. 2000. “The Endless Journey:
The Black Struggle for Quality Public
Schools in Indianapolis, Indiana, 1900–

http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/956743626
http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/956743626


35

1949.” PhD diss., University of Cincinnati.
http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/45146822

Kliebard, Herbert. 1999. Schooled to Work:
Vocationalism and the American Curriculum,
1876–1946. New York: Teachers College
Press. http://www. worldcat.org/oclc
/40881589

Kliebard, Herbert. 1995. The Struggle for the
American Curriculum, 1835–1958, 2nd Ed.
New York: Routledge.
http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/844311955

Mirel, Jeffrey. 2006. “The Traditional High
School: Historical Debates over Its Nature
and Function.” Education Next, Volume 6, no.
1 (Winter): 14–21. http://www.worldcat.org/
oclc/425321328

Pierce, Richard. 2005. Polite Protest: The
Political Economy of Race in Indianapolis,
1920-1970. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press.
http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/748854105

Reese, William J. 2011. America’s Public
Schools: From the Common School to “No
Child Left Behind.” Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press.
http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/746261031

Stuart, Milo H. 1931. Guidance at Work: A
Description of the Plan of Organization and
Integration of the Various Guidance Agencies
of the Arsenal Technical Schools,
Indianapolis, Indiana. New York: McGraw-
Hill. http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/786426

Stuart, Milo H. 1917. “The Manual-Training
High School.” In Types of Schools for Boys,
edited by M.V. O’Shea, 129-196.
Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company.
http://www.worldcat. org/oclc/613267332

Stuart, Milo H. 1926. The Organization of a
Comprehensive High School; A Presentation
of Plans and Devices of the Arsenal
Technical Schools, Indianapolis, Whereby the
Interest of the Individual is Kept Paramount.
New York: The Macmillan Company.
http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/903871305

Stuart, Milo H. 1927. “The Problems of the
Ninth Year.” Yearbook of the National
Association of Secondary-School Principals,

Volume: 11, no. 15 (March): 125-131.
http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/19403825

Thornbrough, Emma Lou. 1993. The
Indianapolis Story: School Segregation and
Desegregation in a Northern City.
Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society.
http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/27919535

Tyack, David. 1974. The one best system : a
history of American urban education.
Harvard University Press.

Tyack, David and Larry Cuban. 1995. Tinkering
Toward Utopia: A Century of Public School
Reform. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press.
http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1041149658