Committee of Ten

The committee included nine other influential educators alongside Eliot, among them William T. Harris, the U.S. Commissioner of Education. They organized nine subject-matter conferences covering Latin, Greek, English, modern languages, mathematics, physics, astronomy, chemistry, natural history, history, civil government, and political economy. Each conference produced recommendations about what should be taught, how much time should be devoted to each subject, and when instruction should begin.

The committee proposed four parallel courses of study: Classical, Latin-Scientific, Modern Languages, and English. Each track was organized around college preparation, and the report recommended that subjects be taught the same way to all students regardless of their likely future occupations. The report stated that every subject which is taught at all in a secondary school should be taught in the same way and to the same extent to every pupil, though in practice the four-track structure channeled students into separate paths that reflected existing class distinctions.

The standardization was the point. Before the Committee of Ten, a student transferring between high schools might find entirely different curricula. After the report, students in Massachusetts and Ohio moved through roughly the same subjects on roughly the same schedule. The report's influence extended beyond curriculum to the very concept of what a high school was: a four-year institution, organized by subject, measured in time units, and oriented toward college admission.