"Among English Inns." Josephine Tozier. (The Page Company.)
CHAPTER XVIII
Our Educational System
In order to understand the state of education in our land to-day it is necessary to know something about the beginnings in our early history. So the first meeting should be on the founding of schools in Colonial and Revolutionary days.
One paper should tell of the earliest grant of money made by Parliament in 1619 for a university in Virginia. The Indian wars prevented the carrying out of the plan for a time, and meantime the first schoolmaster came over to the Dutch of New Amsterdam and opened a school in Brooklyn. The Boston Latin School was begun in 1635, two years later, and schools were opened also in Dorchester and New Haven. Notice that in many of these early schools provision was made to educate Indian children free of charge. Rhode Island had the first public school, founded at Newport in 1640. Throughout the colonies the schools were endowed with lands and money and later taxes were given for their support, but tuition was always paid.
I—COLONIAL COLLEGES
The Colonial colleges rose from the spirit of forty men, all educated at Cambridge, England, who lived in the New England colonies. John Harvard, a young minister, gave his library of two hundred and sixty volumes and half his estate of seventeen hundred pounds to found Harvard College.
The University of William and Mary rose in Virginia at this time, richly endowed at once with money, a tobacco revenue, and lands; this was the direct outcome of the school originally planned sixty years earlier.
Yale was founded in 1700, each trustee giving a few books as a guarantee; but it had been originally planned as early as 1647, when John Davenport had a lot set apart for a college in New Haven. Its early years were full of hardship; it existed at New Milford for fifteen years, and was not settled at New Haven until 1718, when it received a bequest of five hundred pounds from Elihu Yale.