[Sidenote: Their rise as a supplement to the narrow ‘grammar schools’.]
=The Academies in America.=--Academies arose also in America. When the number of religious denominations had greatly increased and the demands upon secondary education had expanded, the ‘grammar schools’ (see pp. 120 f.), with their narrow denominational ideals and their limitation to a classical training and college preparation, proved inadequate, and efforts were made to organize academies as a supplement. There may have been earlier academies in America, but the first well-known suggestion of an academy was made in 1743 by Benjamin Franklin. He wished to inaugurate an education that would prepare for life, and not merely for college. Accordingly, he proposed for the youth of Pennsylvania a course in which English grammar and composition, penmanship, arithmetic, drawing, geography, history, the natural sciences, oratory, civics, and logic were to be emphasized. He would gladly have excluded Latin and other languages altogether, but for politic reasons these courses were allowed to be elective. Through the efforts of a number of leading citizens, such an academy was opened at Philadelphia (Fig. 32), in January, 1750 (although not chartered until July, 1753). During the next generation a number of similar institutions sprang up, especially in the middle and southern colonies. A great impulse was given the movement by the foundation of the two Phillips academies,--one in 1780 at Andover, Massachusetts, and the other the next year at Exeter, New Hampshire. The Dummer Grammar School was reorganized as an academy in 1782, and the movement spread rapidly throughout New England during the last two decades of the eighteenth century.
[Sidenote: After the Revolution the prevailing type of secondary education.]
[Sidenote: Support, location, and functions.]
Shortly after the Revolution, owing in part to the inability or unwillingness of the towns to maintain grammar schools, and in part to the wider appeal and greater usefulness of the academies, the latter institutions quite eclipsed the former, and became for about half a century the prevailing type of secondary school in the United States. They were usually endowed institutions managed by a close corporation, but were often largely supported by subscriptions from the neighborhood, and sometimes subsidized by the state. Located in small towns or villages, they served a wide constituency and made provision for boarding, as well as day pupils. Unlike the grammar schools, they were not originally intended to prepare for the learned professions exclusively, but, as time passed, they tended more and more to become preparatory schools for the colleges, instead of finishing schools for the middle classes of society. The academies were also the first institutions of secondary education to offer opportunities to women. Many of them were co-educational, and others, frequently burdened with the name of ‘female seminary,’ were for girls exclusively. Academies for some time likewise furnished the only means of training teachers for the elementary schools, and have generally played an important part in education in the United States.