image in the public domain
The United States has a long history of public education, stretching back to within just a few years of the establishment of the Massachusetts Bay Colony (1620). In 1635 — just 15 years after the Mayflower’s arrival — the Boston Latin School was opened with a novel premise: that anyone, regardless of social class, could attend the school. So that tuition was not an obstacle to attendance, the school was funded by land rents and donations. This predated the first tax-funded public school, which was founded in Dedham, Massachusetts in 1644. The school was modeled on the Boston Grammar School in England, about which there isn’t much information other than that is was founded by a charter from Mary I in the 1550s. Presumably there was something about the BGS model that the founders of Boston Latin School liked and implemented, but what that might have been is unclear.
The first students met in the home of the Schoolmaster. Like its model, Boston Latin was a ‘grammar’ school, meaning all its students had completed their studies in a ‘petty’ school or equivalent home study. The petty (which I am guessing is a distortion of ‘petite’) school taught children reading, writing, spelling, grammar, and basic arithmetic (though I found at least one source that noted arithmetic cost extra). Petty schools were not free — students had to be able to afford the sixpence a week plus provide a large bundle of firewood in winter — but they had the option to pay in goods like dried corn.* A child started at the petty school around age 5 or 6 and stayed a few years until they either quit or went on to grammar school, sometime between ages 8 and 10.** Until Boston Latin School opened, grammar school attendees had to be able to afford the expense of schooling, which might include room and boarding fees since not every community had a grammar school.
Schoolmaster with pupils, circa 1640. Image in the public domain.
The purpose of Boston Latin School from its inception was to prepare students to attend Harvard College (founded one year after Boston Latin School).*** All colonial colleges required students to be able to read at least Cicero and Virgil in the original Latin; Harvard would go on to require all students to be able to write and speak Latin in both verse and prose in its College Laws of 1642. To that end, Boston Latin School’s curriculum was geared toward what most colleges and universities studied — the classics. And since the classics were read in their original languages, the focus of the Boston Latin School was on those languages, i.e. Latin and Greek. The curriculum — all 7 years of it — was entirely devoted to ensuring students had a thorough grounding in Latin, Greek, and classical literature and not much else. Boys finished their grammar school education ages 14-15 and then either went to university or — more often — began learning the particulars of a trade.***
First (or possibly second) Boston Latin schoolhouse, i.e. not in the schoolmaster’s home. Image in the public domain
What’s interesting about Boston Latin School is that it was established before other, landmark pieces of legislation. The Massachusetts Compulsory Attendance Law of 1642 stated that all Massachusetts heads of household were responsible for the “education” of any children living under their roof, including the children of servants and apprentices. As such, they were required to give or pay for enough instruction “perfectly to read the English tongue, & knowledge of the Capital Lawes.” The authorities weren’t playing either: failure to do so could result in the removal of the children from the household. Five years later (1647), saw the creation of the Old Deluder Satan Act, which required any community of 50 households to appoint a teacher, whose pay would be provided by the parents or masters of the children. This was to ensure that no child was unable to read the scriptures and understand the laws of God. The law further stipulated that if a community grew to 100 households, it must establish a grammar school and pay a school master to “instruct youth so far as they may be fitted for the Universitie.”^ Boston Latin School (and, I should note, the tax-supported school in Dedham) comfortably predates both of these acts. Taken all together, education appears to have been a deeply held value and one colonists did not want kept as a preserve of the wealthy as it had been in England. Education was thought to be critical to a person’s ability to function properly within the confines of society and to participate as a citizen. It was a strikingly egalitarian premise for the time, and also strikingly effective: By 1750, just a little over a hundred years, 90% of women in New England and almost 100% of men could read and write.
But Boston Latin School wasn’t all it could have been. Let’s acknowledge the elephant in the room: “anyone” in 1635 did not literally mean anyone. Very few girls were formally educated in petty schools and none of them went on to grammar school. Boston Latin School was not open to girls in 1635 and over its entire history (until 1972 when it became co-educational) it graduated just one girl: Helen Magill White, whose father was a French and Latin instructor at the school. She enrolled there in 1859 — the only girl in the school — graduated in 3 years, and went on to be the first woman in the U.S. to get a PhD.^^ Boston Latin also did not admit Black students, though Black people were present at its outset: probate records show that one of the first schoolmasters kept two enslaved people to assist with the work around the school. Other records show that some students brought “valets” or private slaves with them to the school. Boston Latin would not graduate a Black student until 1877. That student, Parker Bailey, wasn’t the only Black student to graduate from BLS, but he was among a fairly tiny group. The school would not become fully integrated until 1974 after a court decision about busing.
So Boston Latin School wasn’t perfect. But it was a massive step forward after so many centuries of education that was only available to the wealthiest people, and it embodied an ideal — later expressed in legislation — that education was for everyone and that the public bore a responsibility to ensure that all had access to it.
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*Sixpence was half a shilling. Average wage data is tricky to find for this period. Some sources say 2-3 shillings a day, 12-15 shillings a week, others put the rate for laborers and skilled laborers much lower. Either way, sixpence a week doesn’t seem like a lot until you consider that every child from a family had to pay sixpence and families were much larger — an average of 8 children that needed to be clothed and fed in addition to their schooling. Also, actual coins were scarce in the colonies so many paid in goods — corn, beaver skins, firewood, etc. — that they might otherwise have used for themselves. Additionally, many children contributed significantly to the family income, so sending them to school closed off that earning potential.
**This is fuzzy no matter where you look. Ben Franklin attended Boston Latin School for 2 years, beginning there at age 8. I think the discrepancy might be that some transferred to a grammar school around age 8 or 9 while others stayed at the petty school longer, perhaps to age 10. Unlike today, children didn’t just start school and keep going; many started, stopped for a while to help at home or because money was tight, then started again. Franklin himself had to drop out at age 10 because his father needed him at home to work.
***Initially most students didn’t go on to higher education because college study wasn’t required for the majority of professions at that time, even professions that we would normally assume would, like medicine and law.
^This is really striking — it establishes the right for any boy, regardless of status, to have access to secondary education. Even if he didn’t go on to university (and most did not) such an education would put him on a par with every other grammar school graduate. It’s a practical outworking of some of the ideals that would later be expressed in the Constitution — that all men truly were created equal and should therefore enjoy the same rights and privileges, one of those being an education.
^^Interestingly, she had sisters but they did not attend BLS. Helen must have been something quite special.