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Beginnings 3
the name most suggests, was not taught in such a school at all. But in this country the grammar schools, with few exceptions, were Latin and English schools combined. Even in those of the early Boston schools which were distinctly " Latin Schools," there appears to have been an usher, as the master's assistant was called, who taught English. The grammar schools rounded out and completed the educational svstem of Massachusetts, and this colony was decidedly in advance of all the others in providing for a general distribution of knowledge.
The legislature of Connecticut soon followed the example of Massachusetts in enacting a system of school laws ; but in all the other colonies each parish or settlement was a law unto itself in educational matters, and the schools were mainly under the patronage and control of the church.
The claim has been made that New Amsterdam had a free school before Boston did; but its first school, established in 1633, was a public school in only a very limited sense. It was maintained for the town's children of the Dutch Reformed Church and no others. The citizens were complaining fourteen years later that no schoolhouse had yet been built, and that " the school is kept very irregularly, by this one or that, according to his fancy, as long as he sees fit." Ten years more passed, and we find the Manhattan folk humbly representing to the Dutch West India Company, under whose auspices they were governed, that there was no school in the colony where their children could learn Latin ; that there was no such school nearer than New England; |
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