DEWITT CLINTON HIGH SCHOOL, the major academic public secondary school for boys in Manhattan during the first two decades of this century, was the central locus for the development of the American high school subject of biology. Beginning in 1902, nearly all freshmen-soon more than one thousand annually-enrolled in a year of the coherent study of life. Clinton's teachers made their experience with these students the basis for national influence. They outlined and justified biology in science-education journals; they participated on local, state, and national educational committees recommending the new subject; and, most significantly, they published textbooks that reproduced their teaching throughout the country. By the 1920s biology had become a standard high school science and thus part of the common experience of middle-class Americans. In the spring of 1925 the teacher John T. Scopes of Dayton, Tennessee, was a typical performer within this new element of the nation's culture. In what follows, I examine the reasons for the sudden genesis of high school biology in early twentieth-century America and explore the implications of the subject's singular early developmental circumstances. Understanding how biology acquired the pedagogically fundamental status that distinguished it, along with physics and chemistry, from all other sciences contributes to the analysis of the dynamics of academic disciplines. Historical examination of high school biology also helps in understanding the nature of the contacts between Americans and the world of science in this century-both through the explicit content of the subject and through the equally important, if fragmentary, images, impressions, and morals that generations of students absorbed. In this paper, however, these inquiries are subordinate to a more sharply focused issue: the aims motivating the creators of high school biology. As a subject that was both ostentatiously objective and intensely value laden, biology encompassed the many purposes that educators hoped to achieve from science teaching in the first half of this century, before this activity was reshaped by national security concerns. * Department of History, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey 08903. This essay was adapted from a paper presented at the annual meeting of the History of Science Society, 30 December 1988, Cincinnati, Ohio. Research was supported in part by a Rockefeller Humanities Fellowship at the Francis Clark Wood Institute for the History of Medicine, College of Physicians of Philadelphia. Michele H. Bogart, John C. Burnham, Eric Engles, Emanuel D. Rudolph, and Jonathan Zimmerman offered valuable suggestions. The staff of the Department of Special Collections, Milbank Memorial Library, Teachers College, Columbia University, provided guidance concerning documentation on education in New York City.

Edgar F. Van Buskirk

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