American Education History

By KearstinP
  • 1 BCE

    Dame Schools

    A Dame school was an early form of a private elementary school in English-speaking countries. They were usually taught by women and were often located in the home of the teacher.
  • 1 BCE

    Latin Grammar Schools

    The Latin school was the grammar school of 14th to 19th-century Europe, though the latter term was much more common in England. Emphasis was placed, as the name indicates, on learning to use Latin
  • 1 BCE

    McGuffey Readers

    McGuffey Readers were a series of graded primers for grade levels 1-6. They were widely used as textbooks in American schools from the mid-19th century to the mid-20th century, and are still used today in some private schools and in homeschooling.
  • 1 BCE

    John Locke

    John Locke FRS was an English philosopher and physician, widely regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers
  • 1 BCE

    Christian Von Wolff

    Christian Wolff (1679–1754), also known as Christian von Wolfius, was a Rationalist philosopher of the German Enlightenment.
  • 1 BCE

    Benjamin Franklin

    Benjamin Franklin (January 17, 1706 [O.S. January 6, 1705] – April 17, 1790) was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States
  • 1 BCE

    Noah Webster

    Noah Webster, Jr. (October 16, 1758 – May 28, 1843) was an American lexicographer, textbook pioneer, English-language spelling reformer, political writer, editor, and prolific author. He has been called the "Father of American Scholarship and Education"
  • 1 BCE

    Horace Mann

    Horace Mann was an American educational reformer and Whig politician dedicated to promoting the speedy modernization of U.S. society; he served in the Massachusetts State legislature.
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    John Dewey

    John Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer whose ideas have been influential in education and social reform.
  • 1 BCE

    Johan Pestalozzi

    Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi was a Swiss pedagogue and educational reformer who exemplified Romanticism in his approach.
  • 1 BCE

    Maria Montessori

    Maria Montessori was an Italian physician, educator, and innovator, acclaimed for her educational method that builds on the way children naturally learn. She opened the first Montessori school—the Casa dei Bambini, or Children’s House—in Rome on January 6, 1907
  • 1 BCE

    Friedrich Froebel

    Friedrich Wilhelm August Fröbel or Froebel was a German pedagogue, a student of Pestalozzi who laid the foundation for modern education based on the recognition that children have unique needs and capabilities
  • 1 BCE

    Catherine Beecher

    Catharine Esther Beecher was an American educator known for her forthright opinions on female education as well as her vehement support of the many benefits of the incorporation of kindergarten into children's education.
  • 1 BCE

    William Holmes McGuffey

    William Holmes McGuffey was a college president who is best known for writing the McGuffey Readers, the first widely used series of textbooks.
  • 1 BCE

    Elizabeth Blackwell

    Elizabeth Blackwell was a British-born physician, notable as the first woman to receive a medical degree in the United States, as well as the first woman on the UK Medical Register
  • 1 BCE

    Elizabeth Palmer Peabody

    Elizabeth Palmer Peabody was an American educator who opened the first English-language kindergarten in the United States
  • 1 BCE

    Booker T Washington

    Booker Taliaferro Washington was an American educator, author, orator, and advisor to presidents of the United States. Between 1890 and 1915, Washington was the dominant leader in the African-American community
  • 1 BCE

    Alfred Binet

    Alfred Binet was a French psychologist who invented the first practical IQ test, the Binet-Simon test.
  • 1 BCE

    Jean Piaget

    Jean Piaget was a Swiss clinical psychologist known for his pioneering work in child development. Piaget's theory of cognitive development and epistemological view are together called "genetic epistemology"
  • 1 BCE

    Benjamin Bloom

    Benjamin Samuel Bloom was an American educational psychologist who made contributions to the classification of educational objectives and to the theory of mastery learning.
  • 1 BCE

    Ruby Bridges

    Ruby Nell Bridges Hall is an American activist known for being the first black child to desegregate the all-white William Frantz Elementary School in Louisiana during the New Orleans school desegregation crisis in 1960.
  • 1 BCE

    Lev Vygotsky

    Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky was a Soviet psychologist, the founder of an unfinished theory of human cultural and bio-social development commonly referred to as cultural-historical psychology
  • 1 BCE

    Herbert R. Kohl

    Herbert R. Kohl is an educator best known for his advocacy of progressive alternative education and as the author of more than thirty books on education
  • 1 BCE

    Madeline C Hunter

    Madeline Cheek Hunter was an American educator who developed a model for teaching and learning that was widely adopted by schools during the last quarter of the 20th century.
  • 1 BCE

    Gestalt Theory

    Gestalt is a psychology term which means "unified whole". It refers to theories of visual perception developed by German psychologists in the 1920s. These theories attempt to describe how people tend to organize visual elements into groups or unified wholes when certain principles are applied
  • 1 BCE

    SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test)

    The SAT (/ɛs eɪ ti/; es-ay-tee) is a standardized test widely used for college admissions in the United States. Introduced in 1926, its name and scoring have changed several times; originally called the Scholastic Aptitude Test, it was later called the Scholastic Assessment Test, then the SAT I: Reasoning Test, then the SAT Reasoning Test, and now, simply the SAT
  • 1 CE

    American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disablilities

    The American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (AAIDD) is an American non-profit professional organization concerned with intellectual disability and related developmental disabilities. AAIDD has members in the United States and more than 50 other countries
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    Massachusetts Bay School Law

    The Massachusetts School Laws were three legislative acts of 1642, 1647 and 1648 enacted in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The most famous by far is the law of 1647, also known as the Old Deluder Satan Law (after the law's first sentence) and The General School Law of 1642

  • Deluder Satan Act

    Massachusetts passed the Law of 1647, commonly called the Deluder Satan Act, which required that towns of a certain size hire a schoolmaster to teach local children. In this way, the burden of education was shifted from the parents to the local community
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    Salem Witch Trials

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    French & Indian Wars

  • Treaty of Paris

  • Young Ladies Academy

    One of the most pivotal events in the history of women's education was the opening of the Young Ladies Academy in Philadelphia in 1787. As America grew in size it also grew in prosperity. Wealthy families could soon afford to allow wives and daughters more free time, which they often filled with activities such as music, reading, and education.

  • Constitutional Convention

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    Bill of Rights & Constitution Ratified

    These 12 were approved on September 25, 1789 and sent to the states for ratification. The 10 amendments that are now known as the Bill of Rights were ratified on December 15, 1791, thus becoming a part of the Constitution
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    New England Primer

    The New England Primer was the first reading primer designed for the American Colonies. It became the most successful educational textbook published in 18th century America and it became the foundation of most schooling before the 1790s.
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    War of 1812

  • Boston English High School

    The English High School of Boston, Massachusetts, is one of the first public high schools in America, founded in 1821.

  • Mount Holyoke Female Siminary

    Chemist and educator Mary Lyon founded Mount Holyoke College (then called Mount Holyoke Female Seminary) in 1837, nearly a century before women gained the right to vote,

  • Lincoln University

    Lincoln University is the United States' first degree-granting historically black university. Founded as a private university in 1854, it has been a public institution since 1972
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    US Civil War

  • First Morrill Act

    The Morrill Act of 1862 was also known as the Land Grant College Act. There were several of these grants, but the first passed in 1862. This bill was signed by Abraham Lincoln on July 2. This gave each state 30,000 acres of public land for each Senator and Representative.

  • Emancipation Proclimation

    The Emancipation Proclamation was a presidential proclamation and executive order issued by President Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863. It purported to change the federal legal status of more than 3 million enslaved people in the designated areas of the South from "slave" to "free"

  • 13th ammendment

    Made slavery illegal

  • 14th ammendment

    The Fourteenth Amendment (Amendment XIV) to the United States Constitution was adopted on July 9, 1868, as one of the Reconstruction Amendments. The amendment addresses citizenship rights and equal protection of the laws, and was proposed in response to issues related to former slaves following the American Civil War

  • Carlisle Indian Industrial College

    The United States Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, generally known as Carlisle Indian Industrial School, was the flagship Indian boarding school in the United States from 1879 through 1918. All of the school property is now a part of the U.S. Army War College.

  • Committee of Ten

    The Committee of Ten was a working group of educators that, in 1892, recommended the standardization of American high school curriculum

  • Plessy vs. Ferguson

    Ruled "separate but equal"
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    Spanish American War

  • Joliet Junior College

    America's First Public Community College offering prebaccalaureate programs for students planning to transfer to a four-year university
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    WWI

  • Smith-Hughes Act

    The Smith-Hughes National Vocational Education Act of 1917 was an act of the United States Congress that promoted vocational agriculture to train people "who have entered upon or who are preparing to enter upon the work of the farm," and provided federal funds for this purpose

  • Progressive Education Association

    "the progressive education movement" was formed by educational reformers who were particularly active in the United States from the 1890s to 1930s, promoting the ideas of child-centered education

  • Tennessee vs John Scopes

    The Scopes Trial, formally known as The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes and commonly referred to as the Scopes Monkey Trial, was an American legal case in May 1925 in which a substitute high school teacher, John T. Scopes, was accused of violating Tennessee's Butler Act, which had made it unlawful to teach human evolution in any state-funded school
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    Great Depression

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    WWII

  • G.I. Bill

    The GI Bill provides educational assistance to servicemembers, veterans, and their dependents

  • National School Lunch Act

    The Richard B. Russell National School Lunch Act is a United States federal law that created the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) to provide low-cost or free school lunch meals to qualified students through subsidies to schools.

  • Truman Commission Report

    The President's Committee on Civil Rights was a United States Presidential Commission established by President Harry Truman in 1946. The committee was created by Executive Order 9808 on December 5, 1946 and instructed to investigate the status of civil rights in the country and propose measures to strengthen and protect them. After the committee submitted a report of its findings to President Truman, it disbanded in December 1947.[1]

  • National Defense Education Act

    The National Defense Education Act (NDEA) was signed into law on September 2, 1958, providing funding to United States education institutions at all levels

  • Civil Rights Act

    The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which ended segregation in public places and banned employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin, is considered one of the crowning legislative achievements of the civil rights movement

  • Brown vs. Board of Ed

    Segregation was ruled unconstitutional

  • Elementary and Secondary Education Act

    The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) was passed as a part of United States President Lyndon B. Johnson's "War on Poverty" and has been the most far-reaching federal legislation affecting education ever passed by the United States Congress. The act is an extensive statute that funds primary and secondary education

  • Project Head Start

    Head Start is a program of the United States Department of Health and Human Services that ... The Office of Economic Opportunity's Community Action Program launched Project Head Start as an eight-week summer program in 1965

  • No Child Left Behind

    The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), which passed Congress with overwhelming bipartisan support in 2001 and was signed into law by President George W. Bush on Jan. 8, 2002, is the name for the most recent update to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965

  • Bilingual Education Act

    The Bilingual Education Act (BEA), Title VII of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1968, was the first piece of United States federal legislation that recognized the needs of Limited English Speaking Ability (LESA) students.

  • Indian Education Act

    The 1972 Indian Education Act was the landmark legislation establishing a comprehensive approach to meeting the unique needs of American Indian and Alaska Native students

  • Title IX

    Title IX is a comprehensive federal law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in any federally funded education program or activity

  • Rehabilitation Act

    prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability

  • Plyler v. Doe

    Plyler v. Doe, 457 U.S. 202 (1982), was a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States struck down a state statute denying funding for education to undocumented immigrant children and simultaneously struck down a municipal school district's attempt to charge undocumented immigrants an annual $1,000 tuition fee for each undocumented alien student to compensate for the lost state funding.[1]

  • California Proposition 227

    California Proposition 227, also called the English Language in Public Schools Statute, was on the June 2, 1998 statewide primary ballot in California as an initiated state statute. It was approved. Proposition 227 changed the way that "Limited English Proficient" (LEP) students are taught in California.

  • McCarver Elementary School

    A man who was shot in the leg drove to McCarver Elementary School on Friday, prompting a brief lockdown.