Ohio History Journal


OHIO

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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