With great pride, the Museum of Education begins its two year-long Secondary School Study Exhibition by featuring Pearl High School of Nashville. My reasons for beginning with Pearl High School are both historical as well as sentimental. In many respects, the Secondary School Study officially began in Nashville at the Fisk Conference, staged on April 24-27, 1940, where participating schools’ principals met with college presidents, deans, and faculty, state agents, and General Education Board staff members for the “public presentation” of the project. [more in the Curator's Statement]

The Museum of Education’s Web Exhibitions center primarily on the academic life of individual schools during the 1940s and early 1950s, the focus of the Secondary School Study. Our vignettes serve not to lessen the accomplishments and accolades from prior or subsequent decades nor do they diminish the significance of the social and athletic dimensions of school life. Instead, the Museum presents web exhibitions   of the Secondary School Study schools as a way to feature the experimental efforts of progressive educators during the 1940s. Since these vignettes were not prepared to serve as school histories, we encourage alumni and historians to prepare their own comprehensive school accounts, histories, and memoirs of these important educational institutions.