CollegeBoard

Traditionally, historians have viewed The Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education as a significant shift in curricular emphasis from humanistic study of subjects to the preparation for life activities. Standard interpretation held that The Cardinal Principles and its functional aim replaced the academic emphasis of the 1893 Committee of Ten.

More recently, historians see the high school as having evolved from the common or elementary schools rather than developing from higher education. New interpretations suggest that the high school, not higher education, controlled the high school curriculum. Historians are now beginning to view The Cardinal Principles as the culmination of the high school's ability to determine the highly-diversified high school course of study through an insistence on practical courses and curricular differentiation, rather than seeing it as the weakening of higher education's control on the secondary schools.