ory, as Johanningmeier (17) explains, "formal schooling was not. . . . Compulsory schooling as known in the contemporary 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 1852."
Until the middle of the 19th century, it was far more likely for boys than girls to be sent to school. The more institutionalized education became, the less likely a student of either sex would be to see a schoolmistress rather than schoolmaster in the classroom. In the colonial period, for example, women teachers seem by and large to have been confined to what today would be called preschool, in the venue of nursery and home schoolroom (Knight passim).
As colonialism gave way to building the new nation, however, conceptions of education in American also underwent revision. Johanningmeier (39) cites Benjamin Franklin's wish to universalize education across classes and to emphasize history and good citizenship over classical curricula. Thomas Jefferson proposed a system of edu
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