From Captain America: Patriot #4
This story is set in 1950. While the middle school concept had been created by then ( the very first middle school in the United States was designated that very year), it would be many years before it caught on throughout the country. At that point, it would have been far more likely that Cap was looking for West Lake Junior High.
Replies
The main idea is that young adolescents need to have a different structure than just a smaller version of high school. The main difference is a team structure, which divides the school into smaller units, in order to enable the teachers to get to know the students better.
(in R/L, most of my career has been as principal, helping make the change from junior high structures to middle school ones.)
Cavalier said:
It's one of those things that no-one thinks much about---unless he moved around a great deal in his youth---but school hierarchy is not universal; it varies from district to district. Case in point: though I was attending it long before anyone had ever heard of "middle school" (but not, as Rich points out, before the concept originated), my junior high school consisted of grades seven and eight, while high school was grades nine through twelve.
Bujin's explanation for the change in school structure echoes one I believe Rich himself told me once. But it really doesn't explain why the term was changed from "junior high" to "middle school".
I've always suspected it was the influence of some touchy-feely functionary who didn't want the little darlings' self-esteem to be irrevocably damaged by the term "junior high school". So it was changed to "middle school"---since, obviously, "middle school" is self-actualising.
The Commander wrote what I was thinking about the change in name. I'm sure that there were good reasons to change the way that junior high teaches students but changing the name just doesn't sound like it was necessary.
A big "thanks" to Bujin, though, for writing about the changes in what students do at that level and for helping teach the kids. That thanks-for-teaching goes to Rich, too, of course.
I would think the changed name will have helped administrators keep track of which schools had been reformed.
Here in Canada, or at least in my home province of Nova Scotia, the term "junior high" is very much still in use. In fact, I can't think of any schools that use the term "middle school" as part of their names.