GE TEACHING
_Paul Klapper_

I

HISTORY AND PRESENT TENDENCIES OF THE AMERICAN COLLEGE

1. THE COLONIAL PERIOD

=The predominance of the religious motive=

The American colonies were founded chiefly by Englishmen who came to
America for a variety of reasons. Some of these were economic and
political, but the most important of their reasons was the desire to
practice their religious convictions with greater freedom than was
permitted at home. Apart from the state religion, however, all the
colonists were animated by a love for English institutions which they
transplanted to the New World, and among these institutions were the
grammar school and the college. Wherever the Reformation had been
chiefly a religious rather than a political and ecclesiastical
movement, the interest in education and the effect upon it were direct
and immediate. This was true where Calvinism prevailed, as in the
Netherlands, Scotland, and among the Puritans in England. Hence it is
natural to find that the first effective movements in America toward
the establishment of educational institutions, both elementary and
higher, should have taken place in New England.

A large proportion of university graduates were included among the
settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. They were chiefly graduates
of Cambridge, which had always been religiously more tolerant than
Oxford, and especially of Emmanuel College, which was the stronghold
of Puritanism at Cambridge. It was natural that these men, leaders in
the affairs of the colony, should want to establish a New Cambridge
University, but it is astonishing that they were able to do so as
early as 1636, only six years after the founding of this colony. Two
years later the college was named after John Harvard, a clergyman and
a graduate of Emmanuel, who upon his death bequeathed half his estate
and all his fine library of three hundred volumes to the college. The
religious motive predominated in the founding of Harvard, for though
the colonists longed "to advance learning and perpetuate it to
posterity," they were actuated chiefly by dread "to leave an
illiterate ministry to the churches, when our present Ministers shall
lie in the Dust."

Harvard remained the sole instrument in the colonies for that purpose
for more than half a century. In 1693 the College of William and Mary
was founded in Virginia, with the most generous endowment of any
pre-Revolutionary college, generous be