The 20th century became the human-capital century. No nation today-no matter how poor-can afford not to educate its youth at the secondary-school level and beyond. Yet at the start of the 20th century even the world’s richest countries-richer than many poor nations are today-had not yet begun the transition to mass secondary-school education. With one notable exception: the United States.
The United States accomplished the feat of mass education by creating a new and unique education pattern or gauge-I will call it a “template”-that broke from the templates of Europe. The U.S. template was shaped by egalitarian institutions (a commitment to equality of opportunity); by the factor endowments of the New World (lots of land relative to labor); and by republican ideology, meaning democracy and pluralism.
For much of the 20th century this template was synonymous with a set of “virtues.” That is, the template consisted of characteristics that were virtuous. Among the virtues was mass secondary education that