Dave's ESL Cafe's Student Discussion Forums

[learner1]

Hello,

Are elementary school and primary school the same thing?

Thank you very much.

[CP]

In the U.S. for most of the last century, elementary school (also called primary school) included Kindergarten through 6th grade, and secondary school included 7th through 12th grades. Usually, 7th and 8th, or 7th, 8th, and 9th, were junior high school, and 9th or 10th through 12th were high school.

In the 1970s and 1980s, some school districts changed the way they called the different levels and segregated the grades. Some were motivated by political correctness; some by the earlier maturation of children these days. For those districts, they might have done this:

K-2 or K-3: primary school / the primary grades of elementary school
3-5 or 4-5 or 4-6: elementary school
6-8 or 7-8: middle school
9-12: high school

Why "junior high school" was renamed "middle school" is a mystery to me. Is "junior" so bad?

So the answer to your question is, sometimes yes, sometimes no, some places yes, some places no -- impossible to say for sure!
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[learner1]

Hello CP,

Thank you very much for your detailed explanation.