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HISTORY OF COMPULSORY EDUCATION
Compulsory education is defined as a required period of attendance for all students. The earliest examples of compulsory education can be found in 1st century Israel, when Joshua ben Gamia established compulsory education starting at age 6 (Roth, 1956). Compulsory education can be found in A.D. 1500-1600 Aztec societies, where male students were required to be educated until the age of 16 years (Soustelle, 2002). The earliest evidence of formal public education occurred in Gotha, Calemburg, and Prussia, Germany where education was compulsory between the ages of 5 and 13 years old. Prior to this, teachers and tutors were only for elite and upper class families. Private schools existed only for the wealthy (Rothbard, 2006).
Compulsory education in the American colonies was first established in Massachusetts in 1647. The law required that every town create a grammar school. The government imposed fines on parents who failed to send their children to school. The government also had the authority to remove children from their parents and apprentice them if they felt that parents were deemed "unfit" to educate their children. Today education in the United States is compulsory for all students, but each state has varying ages when students are allowed to stop schooling (Thattai, 2001).
HISTORY OF PUBLIC SCHOOLS IN AMERICA
The first public schools in the United States began in the 1600s. The oldest public school is Boston Latin School, located in Boston, Massachusetts. In the United States, formal compulsory education was initially established to provide education to orphans who had no parents to educate them. The concept continued to spread until Massachusetts established a law in 1789 for compulsory public education and another law in 1852 for compulsory school attendance. Thomas Jefferson was the first leader of the United States to suggest a public school system (Rothbard, 2006). The rest of the country adopted compulsory public education by the 1850s. Until this time, most parents provided their children's education, which was limited to the parents' education or trade skills. Even in the 1850s in the United States, formal education requirements were lackadaisical, with moratoriums provided to students during harvest and sowing times.
Public schools in the 1600s based their curriculum mainly on religious beliefs. At this time the...