he could go on to a vocational or technical school. The upper-class child often did not attend the elementary school but was instead tutored until he was about 9 years old and could enter a secondary school, generally a Latin grammar school. The purpose of this school was to prepare him for the university, from which he might well emerge as one of the potential leaders of his country. Instead of two separate and distinct educational systems for separate and distinct classes, the United States provided one system open to everyone... a distinctly egalitarian idea. As in mid-19th-century Europe, women were slowly gaining educational ground in the United States. "Female academies" established by such pioneers as Emma Willard (1787-1870) and Catharine Beecher (1800-78) prepared the way for secondary education for women. In 1861, Vassar, the first real college for women, was founded. Even earlier, in 1833, Oberlin College was founded as a coeducational college, and in 1837, four women began to study there. In the mid-19th century there was yet another change in education. The secondary-school curriculum, that had been slowly expanding since the founding of the academies in the mid-18th century, virtually exploded. But the voice of practicality cried out again. A new society, complicated by the latest discoveries in the physical and biological sciences and the rise of industrialism and capitalism, called for more and newer kinds of knowledge. By 1861 as many as 73 subjects were being offered by the Massachusetts secondary schools. People still believed that the mind could be "trained," but they now thought that science could do a better job than the classics could. The result was a curriculum that was virtually saturated with scientific instruction. The mid-19th-century knowledge explosion also modestly affected some of the common schools, which expanded their curriculum to include such courses as science and nature study. The content of inst...
