OHIO
Archaeological and Historical
PUBLICATIONS.
HISTORY OF THE
EDUCATIONAL LEGISLATION IN
OHIO FROM 1803 TO 1850.
EDWARD A. MILLER
INTRODUCTION.
Ohio's educational history has been an
especially interest-
ing one. Many causes have combined to
make it so. It was
the first state admitted from the
Northwest Territory, and as
such carried on the earliest experiments
with the great state-wide
grant of school lands that has
characterized our policy since that
time in the admission of new states to
the Union. It was set-
tled with unexampled rapidity, changing
from a wilderness
frontier to a great and prosperous
commonwealth in a single
generation. The settlement was a
singularly heterogeneous one,
coming from the east, the middle states
and the south, with a
considerable influx directly from
Europe. These early settle-
ments were being established, too, while
those democratic and
individualistic tendencies that marked
the first decades of the
nineteenth century were in progress.
During these years the
district school idea was at its height
in Massachusetts and the
East, the private academy was displacing
the town grammar
school, and state control of public
education was at low ebb.
These causes, with others more local in
nature, were instru-
mental in shaping the educational
activities of the state in the
first fifty years of its history, and
have left their imprint on all
the later development.
It is my purpose to give a careful study
and interpretation
of the educational legislation of the
state from territorial days
down to 1850. In this legislation one
finds the truest expression
of the constructive educational thought
and activity of the period.
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