In America why are schools split into elementary, middle and high instead of just elementary and high?
Why not?
Why does the UK split schools into Infant, Junior, Secondary and Sixth Form college?
Where would you draw the line? Before adolescence, so that children who are just at the beginning of dealing with their new bodies are forced to be around people who are biologically adults already all day? Or after the first flushes of adolescence, so that people who haven’t mastered tying their shoes are forced to be around people who have breasts and pubic hair all day?
Middle school gives those in-between a place to deal with some of that shock of “what the hell is happening to me” before the serious business of “preparing for adulthood”* starts in high school.
- Yeah, I know, but that’s what it was supposed to be when I was gonna be a teacher.
A lot of times, it’s simple practical logistics. How big is your school building? How many grades can it physically hold? Do you build one giant central school or a couple of smaller middle schools scattered around?
At one time, they typically divided a bit differently, with some variance among school systems:
Elementary - grades 1 through 6
Junior High - grades 7 through 9
High (or “Senior High”) - grades 10 through 12
The “middle school” division was felt to make more sense. I remember that being in 9th grade was sort of odd under the above division. You were in the “Jr. High”, but were a “High School Freshman” eligible to participate in high school sports and so on. In my school the Jr High and Sr High were separate wings of the same building, but it was still odd. Junior high kids weren’t supposed to be in that other wing, except that 9th graders might venture into that territory for the extracurricular activities they were allowed to participate in.
There was another thread here a week or two ago (either in IMHO or MPSIMS) about how various Dopers’ schools were formatted. Short answer: there’s no one consistent format in the U.S.
Yes, a lot of U.S. schools are split into three tiers (elementary, then middle school / junior high, then high school), but a fair number (particularly in smaller towns and parochial schools) aren’t. Even those which are split into three tiers aren’t particularly consistent on where those dividing lines are.
I went to Catholic schools in the Midwest (Illinois and Wisconsin); there, it was pretty common for “elementary schools” to be K-8, and then the high schools went from 9-12.
As others have noted, there’s probably some sound educational / behavioral reasoning for not having 5 and 6 year olds in the same school as 12 or 13 year olds, but in some cases, it’s probably a matter of available space and budgets.
There isn’t really that much consistency in how they are split up.
When I attended the Chicago public schools (back in the middle ages), schools were elementary (or grade) K-8 and high school was 9-12. No middle, no junior.
Unless my own experience is atypical, in elementary school, children spend most of the school day in one classroom with one teacher who is responsible for their education in most or all subjects. In middle school (or junior high) as in high school, students move from classroom to classroom throughout the day and have a different teacher for each subject. Presumably this is because at approximately 7th grade, the subject matter the students are learning becomes advanced enough that it is better taught by teachers who have special expertise/training/credentials in that particular subject. Plus, it allows the opportunity for student specialization, instead of all students learning the same subjects at the same level.
Mostly what I’ve seen in the US is either K-4 / 5-8 / 9-12 or else K-6 / 7-9 / 10-12. I have no idea why different communities favor one over the other.
The middle school I went to was 5/8, but they still divided “junior high” as 7-8. The two groups of students were kept rather segregated, though without taking it to extremes. The school was designed that way, with separate sides for the two sections, and lunch times and recess times were different for the two groups. IIRC, gym classes were that way too, with two years together in the class but not across the boundary. That was in the 60’s and 70’s.
Well I suppose it varies from school to schools also but usually infants is attached to junior and a sixth form college is attached to a secondary school, so there isn’t really much of a division.
This was my experience in Virginia. In Elementary School, we had one teacher a year that taught almost everything, including History, English (called “Language Arts”, iirc), Math, Science, etc. Specialized teachers were used for Physical Education (i.e. “Gym”) and Music. Typically one would go to a separate classroom (or, in the case of gym, to the physical gym) for instruction from the specialists. In middle and high school, classes were separated by subject matter and one would go to an appropriate classroom and teacher for instruction in that subject (e.g. “Go to English class”).
If you go back far enough, you start with schools and colleges. High school as a separate concept comes later, mostly as a preparatory school to get the elite ready for college. Digging around a bit, I found this pdf:
It took another hundred years for high school to split off classes for younger students.
That Wikipedia page on middle schools lists dozens of countries that have some equivalent. They all do for probably the same reasons: it just makes sense when you have large enough need to concentrate ages and similar teaching styles and requirements together.
This thread makes me wonder. Are there High Schools where students receive instruction in many subjects from the same teacher as is common in elementary schools? I.e. are there high schools were most of the teachers are just generic “high school teachers” and they teach math, science, language, history, etc. throughout the day to their students? I would guess that there might be some private schools that do this (anyone know of any?), either because of a lack of teachers in general or because they feel it is a superior strategy, but I’m especially interested if there are any public schools that do this.
The way I see it is basically from the academic point of view.
Elementary school is important to be structured the way it is because young children need a single adult to relate to and look up to and listen to throughout the long school day. It works best for that age group. And considering the difficulty of the subject matter at that age level, a single adult is quite able to teach science, history, math, reading, writing, etc. It works out great for everyone.
Middle school is important because that’s when students start to get more specialized knowledge, start to learn what subjects they like the most, and it requires of the teachers that they be a little more specialized in their knowledge so that they can teach effectively as well. It gets students used to the high school format of having several subjects taught by several teachers, as well as the quarter and semester system where they get grades and have a GPA. It doesn’t “count” in middle school yet, as no college or employer is ever going to care what your Middle School GPA was, but it’s good practice for the kids.
High school works well because by that point, you really need specialized teachers that know how to teach their individual subjects well, and you also want the students to start to be able to diversify their learning options by allowing different levels (remedial, standard, AP) of subjects, as well as different electives so that they can focus on what interests them most. These things would not be possible at all for an elementary school style learning where you just have one teacher teaching all subjects all day long and the students have no choice whatsoever. High School GPA is also very important to colleges as it is a strong predictor of student success (along with SAT scores of course).
It’s not fair to throw a student straight from elementary school into a system where their GPA matters immensely, so middle school fills that purpose well. And it also allows them to get used to having multiple teachers, keep track of their schedule, etc. The age ranges match up fairly well with pre-pubescence, pubescence, and post-pubescence as well, and that’s very important and a good reason why there are 3 different school types mainly used in the US.
I’ve seen this claim made several time recently, both here and in another forum I frequent. In my experience, high school has always been grades 9-12, and junior high was either 7-8 or 6-8. Where are these 7-9 junior highs and 10-12 high schools that people keep talking about?
My experience in Michigan and Illinois was similar. In grade school we stayed in one room, with one teacher, for all classes except art - the art teacher didn’t have a classroom of her own, but went to the other rooms. (We didn’t have gym in grade school.) In junior high there were specialist art, music, gym, science and math teachers, each with his/her own classroom, but other classes - English, spelling, history, and geography - were taught by one’s “homeroom” teacher. And in high school, of course, each subject had its own teacher(s) with their own classrooms, and we had five minutes to get from one class to the next. The only exception I can think of was the drama teacher - there was only one class each year, plus a one-semester “senior drama” class (for seniors only), so she spent most of her day as an English teacher.
When I was in school (back in the stone age), it was:
Elementary: K-6
Junior High: 7-8
High: 9-12
But because of logistics, 9th graders went to the Junior High building, even though they were technically high-schoolers. We were always told that what happened in 9th grade “went on our permanent records.”
When I started school, elementary school was 1-7, and high school was 8-12.
In 1970, the school arrangements were turned upside down, and it became:
1-3, one elementary school
4-5, another elementary school
6-7, yet another elementary school
8-9, junior high
10-12 high school.
Then in the 1980s with some new construction and consolidation, it became the more familiar elementary (K-6), middle school (7-8), high school (9-12) models.