Democratic Sentinel, Volume 7, Number 35, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 September 1883 — First American Free Schools. [ARTICLE]

First American Free Schools.

A law was passed in Massachusetts in 1649 requiring every township to maintain a free school and every town of 100 families to maintain a grammar pchool to “fit youths for the university;” and it is recorded in 1665 that a free school was then supported by each town in New England. The Connecticut, Plymouth and New Haven colonies soon (followed this good example of Massachusetts, either in whole or in part. The first public school in Pennsylvania was established in Philadelphia by the Quakers, in 1689, free to those who could not pay. In 1694 Maryland enacted that every county should have a (public school and every parish a free library of at least fifty volumes. A free grammar school was established in New York by an act passed in 1702; but a system of free common schools was not inaugurated in this State until after 1795, in which year, on the recommendation of Gov. Clinton, the Legislature appropriated $50,000 to encourage the establishment of common schools—not wholly free. It was years after this before the system of schools free to all (except colored children) went into operation in New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana and Michigan. The Southern States waited until after the war before adopting the free-school system, even for white children. Their common schools were free only for the children of confessed paupers. Who was ‘‘the first advocate” of free schools it is now impossible to determine positively. Several of them came over in the Mayflower, as there were a few free schools in Massachusetts before the above enactment of 1649, making it obligatory on every town to have them, the chief argument then being that “every child must know how to read the Bible.”— Chicago Inter Ocean.