As a country with a relatively short history, America boasts a much longer history of education. Education has occupied and is still occupying a very important position in American life. As a result, the overall level of education of Americans has been raised and the country has been highly developed.

    Americans have shown a great concern for education since early colonial （殖民地的）times. Among the first settlers, in fact, there was an unusually high proportion of educated men. In the Massachusetts Bay colony in the early 1600s, as the British historian Rowse has pointed out, ‘there was an average of one university man to every 40 or 50 families — much higher than in Old England.” Some of these men, many of them graduates of Cambridge, came together and in 1636 founded Harvard College, 140 years before American independence. Other early institutions of higher learning were the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, established in 1693, and Yale, founded in 1701. Before the Revolution in 1776, nine colleges had already been opened in the colonies, most of them later becoming universities.
     From the 1640s on, Massachusetts required all towns with more than 50 families to provide a schoolmaster at public expense.¹ Other colonies also made provisions for free public schools. In the course of the 17th century, for instance, free schools had been established in a number of places such as New Haven, Hartford, New London, and Fairfield. Many academies (schools offering a classical education as well as more practical training) opened throughout the next century, including the one established by Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia in 175l.
     The importance of education in American life was also reflected in the Ordinances of 1785 and 1787 which set guidelines for organizing the new lands to the west. They provided for one square mile of land in each township to be reserved for public schools.² The movement for free public schools gained its greatest momentum（势头）in the 1830s, however. By 1850, every state had provided for a system of free public schools open to all and paid for by public taxes.
     By the same year, state-supported colleges and universities had already been established in many states. These included recently settled states such as Florida, Iowa, and Wisconsin which were admitted to the Union in the late 1840s. In 1862, Congress passed a law which provided states with public (federal) lands to be used for higher education, especially for the establishment of agricultural and mechanical-arts colleges. As a result, many “land-grant colleges” were established. These new state-supported institutions joined the large number of older, well-established, and well-to-do privately funded universities. They were important in the democratization（普及）of higher education in the United States.
     By 1900, there were almost a thousand institutions of higher education in the U.S. Among them were law and medical “schools” and hundreds of small, four-year liberal arts（文理科）colleges. One of the latter, Oberlin College in Ohio, was the first to admit women on an equal basis with men, in 1837. There were many other institutions of higher learning which emphasized everything from the training of teachers to the pulling of teeth.
     Today, there are some 43 million pupils and students in public schools at the elementary and secondary levels, and another 6 million in private schools throughout the country. Four out of five of the private schools are run by churches, synagogues（犹太教教堂）, or other religious groups.³ Any year, about 12 million Americans are enrolled in the over 3,000 colleges and universities of every type: private, public, church-related, small and large, in cities, counties, and states. Close to 80 percent of the college students attend public institutions, while a little over 20 percent are enrolled in privately supported universities and colleges. All told, just over 50 percent of all high school graduates enter colleges and universities. The early emphasis given to education remains today. United Nations figures (l980) show that in the amount spent on education per capita, the U.S. is in ninth place in the world (behind Qatar, Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Denmark, Switzerland, and Canada). ⁴
     Most historians agree that a great deal of the economic, political, scientific, and cultural progress America has made in its relatively short history is due to its commitment to the ideal of equal opportunity.⁵ This includes the ideal of educating as many Americans as possible, to the best of their abilities. From the early times on, especially in the northern and western states, the public policy was to produce an educated people. In these states, the large majority of adults were literate at a time when an education was still denied to most Europeans. ⁶ There can be little doubt that American education in its aim to provide equality of opportunity as well as excellence has raised the overall level of education of Americans. It has encouraged more Americans than ever before to study for advanced degrees and to become involved in specialized research. The belief that the future of society depends on the quantity and quality of its educated citizens is widely held. It explains why a great many Americans are still willing to give more money to education, even during times of economic difficulty.

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