In the year 1900 F.E. DeYoe and C. H. Thurber articulated the following concerns in an article for The School Review entitled, “Where Are the High School Boys?” According to DeYoe and Thurber, a school system that served more girls than boys was a school system headed for disaster.
American schools in 1900
“It is the people’s college, and yet it is obvious that from this people’s college the boys are, for some reason or other, turning away. During most of this century we have been agitating the question of higher education for women. Possibly we have neglected a little to attend to the higher education of boys. Certainly, if we are not to have a comparatively ignorant male proletariat opposed to a female aristocracy, it is time to pause and devise ways and means for getting more of our boys to attend the high school.
We have the anomaly of schools attended chiefly by girls though planned exclusively for boys. A half century ago girls were reluctantly admitted to the high schools and academies as the simplest and most inexpensive way of meeting the cry for justice to women in educational advantages. Now we find the girls apparently driving the boys out of these very schools.”