The Hybrid Years 415serving children, the beginnings of the mental health, voca-
tional guidance, and child study movements, and the enact-
ment of compulsory school attendance laws for children.
Collectively, these efforts reflected the improving status of
children and youth in America and a growing commitment to
the viewpoint that the welfare of our children was closely
related to the long-term improvement of our society.
Compulsory Schooling
Compulsory schooling laws significantly influenced the con-
ditions under which school psychological services devel-
oped. Over the course of American history, the responsibility
for schooling had passed from parents in the home, to
schooling outside of the home, and eventually to formally
established, compulsory schooling. Even in the absence
of compulsory attendance laws, school enrollments grew
throughout the nineteenth century. The attendance reflected a
growing need for education to help children and youth meet
society’s demand for educated employees to fill newer and
more technologically demanding jobs. It also reflected the
need to inculcate a sense of moral values and character to
better ensure the survival of the nation. The concern for na-
tional survival was related to heightened U.S. immigration
during this period. These and other forces spurred the com-
pulsory schooling movement, and by 1920 all states had en-
acted such legislation. Thus, during the period 1890–1920,
increasingly large numbers of children were thrust upon the
public schools, many of whom had never before attended
school in America or elsewhere before coming to America
as immigrants. Between 1890 and 1930, public school en-
rollments increased from 12.7 to 25.7 million students, with
secondary school enrollment increasing from 203,000 to
4.4 million. The average number of days in the school year
increased from 135 to 173 (28%), and the average number of
days attended increased from 86 (64% of 135 day year) to
143 (83% of 173 day year).
Special Education
The schools were not well prepared for such rapid change.
The formal preparation of teachers was meager by contem-
porary standards, accreditation of programs and teacher cre-
dentialing were practically nonexistent, class sizes were
large, facilities were often ill equipped and unhealthy, and
large numbers of children had various mental, physical, and
other disabilities that impaired their efforts to learn.
Estimates of the number of children with disabilities were
large. For example, Wallin (1914) estimated that 12 million
pupils were handicapped by one or more physical defects
(e.g., defective vision or hearing, adenoids, teeth, lungs).
Such conditions quickly led to medical inspections for school
entrance. Noting the presence of other disabilities related to
school learning (e.g., intelligence, memory, speech, sensa-
tion), Wallin called for psychological inspections as well.
Wallin reasoned that if the child was to be compelled to at-
tend school, then it was the state’s responsibility to provide
conditions under which the child could learn the material
the state required him or her to learn. Compulsory schooling,
which led to the mass education of children, in effect created
the conditions under which other forms of educational treat-
ments would be needed for children who failed to profit from
the regular educational program. Thus was advanced the con-
cept and practice of special education and the groundwork for
what would become a growing separation of regular and spe-
cial education throughout the twentieth century. The growth
of special classes, usually segregated from the mainstream of
regular education, was gradual but persistent. Dunn (1973)
indicates that special education enrollment grew from 26,163
in 1922 to 356,093 in 1948 and to 2,857,551 by 1972.
Today more than five million school children are in special
education.Rise of ExpertsCompulsory schooling thus created a major community set-
ting, the school, within which psychologists could choose to
work. This was as significant to the future of school psychol-
ogy as the promise of the Community Mental Health Centers
Act of the 1960s was to clinical and counseling psychology.
Moreover, the conditions of the children placed demands on
educators that would require the addition of specialized
personnel in several fields, including school psychology.
These fields would soon be referred to collectively as pupil
personnel services and would include attendance officers,
truant officers, social workers, guidance counselors, voca-
tional counselors, school health workers including nurses and
physicians, speech and language clinicians, and psycholo-
gists. Schooling had not only become formalized outside of
the home, but there were now various experts to assist an
increasingly formally trained teaching force. Despite opposi-
tion from the scientific psychology community, the emer-
gence of psychological science during this period influenced
the rise of experts in applied psychology. Applied psycholo-
gists were part of a growing class of experts in many fields as
knowledge expanded rapidly and one could no longer expect
to manage the affairs of life without expert assistance. Real or
illusory, this perception grew during the twentieth century,
promoting the rise of psychological experts, specializations,
and subspecializations.