In his Letters, Saul Bellow writes of Tuley High School, which he entered in 1930:
"The children of Chicago bakers, tailors, peddlers, insurance agents, pressers, cutters, grocers, the sons of families on relief, were reading buckram-bound books from the public library and were in a state of enthusiasm, having found themselves on the shore of a novelistic land to which they really belonged, discovering their birthright, hearing incredible news from the great world of culture, talking to one another about the mind, society, art, religion, epistomology..."
I don't want to suggest a decline, but does that remind you of any high school today?