III. Education

History

Americans have shown a great concern for education since early colonial times.

Among the first settlers, in fact, there was an unusually high proportion of educated

men. In the Massachusetts Bay colony in the early 1600s, as the British historian

Rowse has pointed out, "there was an average of one university man to every 40 or 50

families – much higher than in Old England." Some of these men, many of them

graduates of Cambridge, came together and in 1636 founded Harvard College, 140

years before American independence. Other early institutions of higher learning were

the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, established in 1693, and

Yale, founded in 1701. Before the Revolution in 1776, nine colleges had already been

opened in the colonies, most of them later becoming universities.

From the 1640s on, Massachusetts required all towns with more than 50 families

to provide a schoolmaster at public expense. Other colonies also made provisions for

free public schools. In the course of the 17th century, for instance, free schools had

been established in a number of places such as New Haven, Hartford, New London,

and Fairfield. Many academies (schools offering a classical education as well as more

practical training) opened throughout the next century, including the one established by

Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia in 1751.

The importance of education in American life was also reflected in the

Ordinances of 1785 and 1787 which set guidelines for organizing the new lands to the

west. They provided for one square mile of land in each township to be reserved for

public schools. The movement for free public schools gained its greatest momentum in

the 1830s, however. By 1850, every state had provided for a system of free public

schools open to all and paid for by public taxes.

By the same year, state-supported colleges and universities had already been

established in many states. These included recently settled states such as Florida, Iowa,

and Wisconsin which were admitted to the Union in the late 1840s. In 1862, Congress

passed a law which provided states with public (federal) lands to be used for higher

education, especially for the establishment of agricultural and mechanical-arts colleges.

As a result, many "land-grant colleges" were established. These new state-supported

Institutions joined the large number of older, well-established, and well-to-do privately

funded universities. They were important in the democratization of higher education in

the United States.

By 1900, there were almost a thousand institutions of higher education in the

U.S. Among them were law and medical "schools" and hundreds of small, four-year

liberal arts colleges. One of the latter, Oberlin College in Ohio, was the first to admit

women on an equal basis with men, in 1837. There were many other institutions of

higher learning which emphasized everything from the training of teachers to the

pulling of teeth.

Today, there are some 43 million pupils and students in public schools at the

elementary and secondary levels, and another 6 million in private schools throughout

the country. In other words, 88 percent of American children attend public schools and

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12 percent go to private schools. Four out of five of the private schools are run by

churches, synagogues, or other religious groups. Any year, about 12 million Americans

are enrolled in the over 3,000 colleges and universities of every type: private, public,

church-related, small and large, in cities, counties, and states. Close to 80 percent of the

college students attend public institutions, while a little over 20 percent are enrolled in

privately supported universities and colleges. All told, just over 50 percent of all high

school graduates enter colleges and universities. The early emphasis given to education

remains today. United Nations figures (1980) show that in the amount spent on

education per capita, the U.S. is in ninth place in the world (behind Qatar, Sweden,

Norway, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Denmark, Switzerland, and Canada).

Most historians agree that a great deal of the economic, political, scientific, and

cultural progress America has made in its relatively short history is due to its

commitment to the ideal of equal opportunity. This is the ideal of educating as many

Americans as possible, to the best of their abilities. From the early times on, especially