[Sidenote: First American secondary schools modeled after English.]
=The ‘Grammar’ Schools in the American Colonies.=--It was after these ‘grammar’ schools of the mother country that the first secondary schools in America were modeled and named. In many instances the fathers of the colonies, such as Edward Hopkins, William Penn, and Roger Williams, had been educated in the grammar schools of England, and naturally sought to model the institutions in their new home after them as nearly as the different conditions would permit. The Boston Latin (Grammar) School was founded as early as 1635 (Fig. 23), and other towns of Massachusetts,--Charlestown, Ipswich, Salem, Dorchester, Newbury, Cambridge, and Roxbury, also before long established grammar schools. Similarly, towns of Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and the other colonies, had in many cases founded grammar schools before the close of the century. Moreover, the legislatures of Massachusetts (1647) and Connecticut (1650) soon ordered that a ‘grammar’ school be established in every town having one hundred families. The American grammar schools, like their prototypes, were secondary and sustained no real relation to the elementary schools. They were mostly intended to fit pupils for college, although sometimes the college had not yet been established, and thus to furnish a preliminary step to preparation for the Christian ministry. Hence their course consisted chiefly in reading the classics and the New Testament, and used among its texts Lily’s _Grammar_ and the _Colloquies_ of Corderius. And while the hold of formal humanism upon secondary education was somewhat relaxed during the subsequent stages of the ‘academy’ and the ‘high school,’ the formal classical training was considered the only means of a liberal education until well into the nineteenth century.
_a._ Drawing of Winchester College and its inmates by Warden Chandler of New College, Oxford, in 1460. The picture reveals the relationship of Winchester to the old monastic institutions, before it became humanistic.]
[Illustration: _b._ Eton College in 1688, from the drawing of David Loggan.
[Sidenote: More social and moral in the North, and more individual in Italy.]