Pre-school responses to the 19th-century youth crisis

The travails of 19th-century urban youth were a precondition to the invention of modern adolescence and the rise of the modern secondary school. These travails led to a child-saving movement during the last century aimed at taking youth off the streets, putting them in schools, stretching out the normal home-leaving age from 14 to 18 and, in general, prolonging a developmental period. While the ultimate solution to the youth crisis would be the creation of the modern school, other solutions-less expensive, less innovative, and much less effective-were tried first. As unproductive as these attempts were, they nevertheless underscore an increased readiness on the part of the American people to solve the youth problem, not out of egalitarianism or increased moral acuity, but out of social necessity.