emporary United States did not come until the mid-nineteenth century. Massachusetts was the first state to pass a compulsory school law, but it was not enacted until 185211 (17).
Colonial education was also strongly elitist and malecentered in the seventeenth century, and this was reflected in rules governing school structure. Knight says that the system of educational apprenticeship that was enacted in New England in the 1640s gradually gave rise to the system of education of the underprivileged (Knight 97), but mainstream education was by and large the province of the privileged. Inevitably, therefore, schooling norms would be affected by the dominant culture of the colonies in which education was an issue. Categories of education reflected social class; serious education was held to be chiefly the province of the elite, and this, as Knight says, was nowhere "more conspicuous" than in New England (78), where classmates of Harvard and Yale were listed or seated not alphabetically but according to social rank. As in England, persons of rank in
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