ABSTRACT
When the English speaking white settlers first set foot on the shores of New England they did not waste much time before establishing Latin grammar schools and colleges. In 1635, five years after their landfall, the Puritan magistrates appointed a Latin schoolmaster for the city of Boston. Neither the threat of starvation nor the prospect of freezing to death in “a howling wilderness” deterred them from sending their future leaders to school. Their colleagues in Charlestown followed the next year, Dorchester acted in 1639, and Ipswich and Cambridge did likewise in 1642. The founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony hired schoolmasters to prepare boys for college. In 1636 the members of the General Court, the colony’s legislature, authorized the funding of what subsequently became Harvard College. They did this, so they informed their brethren in England, “to advance learning and perpetuate it to posterity, dreading to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches when our present ministers shall lie in the dust.”1
