=American Education a Development from European.=--We have hitherto had little occasion to speak of American education, except by way of anticipating certain great waves of influence and important institutions that have come into America from Europe. But we have now reached the period when the New World began to be extensively colonized, and in the rest of our study educational practices in America will become increasingly distinctive and influential. The schools of America are the offspring of European institutions, and have their roots deep in the social soil of the lands from which the colonists came. While the universal, free, and secular schools of the United States are a natural accompaniment of its republican form of government, like the new democracy itself, this development of popular education was not reached at a bound. At first the American schools resembled the institutions of the Mother Country as closely as the frontier life would permit. The seventeenth century was, therefore, for American education distinctly a period of ‘transplantation of schools,’ with little or no conscious change; and it is only toward the middle of the next century, as new social and political conditions were evolving and the days of the Revolution were approaching, that there are evident the gradual modification of European ideals and the differentiation of American schools toward an ideal of their own. [Sidenote: Influence of Reformation period upon the colonists.] =Conditions in Europe from Which American Education Sprang.=--Hence, in order to understand American education in the colonial period, we must briefly consider the social and educational conditions in Europe during the early part of the seventeenth century, when the colonists began their migrations. The thirteen American colonies were started while the fierce agitations of the Reformation period were still at their height. The settlers, for the most part, were Protestants, and many of them had emigrated in order to establish institutions--political, ecclesiastical, educational--that would conform to their own ideals, and in all cases education in the New World was given a peculiar importance by the dominant religious interests and conflicts of the old. At this time in practically all the states of Europe, educational institutions were controlled and supported by the Church and religious orders, with the assistance of private benevolence; but a few schools everywhere, and especially in Teutonic countries, were maintained by pre-Reformation craft gilds, and so had a close connection with municipalities (see p. 92). Thus the American schools at first naturally adopted the religious conception of education and religious domination, but had some acquaintance with free schools and municipal management. [Sidenote: Tendency toward universal education among Calvinists, but aristocratic ideals among Anglicans.]