Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II The Middle Period THE next great period of secondary education in the United States covers something over one hundred years. It extends from late pre-Revolutionary days down to, or beyond, the era of the "Common School Revival" in the first third of the nineteenth century. Its approximate dates may be fixed as 1750 at one end of the span and 1850 at the other. It is an important century in the development of American ideas, character, and institutions; but so far as it bears directly and immediately on the development of free, public, secondary education it is a time that is relatively barren. The dominant school of the age was the academy, and this in a very limited and general way only may be regarded as a public school. Nevertheless in a very true sense the academies did serve public educational needs, and a complete account of the secondary education in the United States could not be given without making considerable mention of them. They were not always supported by a public tax; but neither were the public Latin schools during all their history. Their administration was not undertaken by elected public officials; but in many of the early grammar schools the control was not vested in a body of men elected by all the citizens. Tuition fees were charged in most academies; but in this respect, too, the practice differs not at all from that found in the earlier schools. Indeed, in many ways the academy was but a modified type of the Latin school. It arose in this transformed shape to fill a social need, and it filled it. We have seen that the New England grammar school had, under pressure of the democratic, secular, and social changes and demands of the people, gradually lost its hold upon society, and had been either abolished entirely or else converted (in f...