[Sidenote: Struggle won by 1890 and constant progress since.]
Despite the tremendous rally during the seventies, however, the struggle for public education in the South was not won for twenty years, but complete systems of common schools have now at length been generally established. With the cessation of the reconstruction influence and the subsidence of the dread of mixed schools, attendance and appropriations have greatly increased, schools for the education of colored children have been furnished, and provision has been made for training and stimulating teachers of both races. Separate state institutions for higher education, cultural and vocational, have been established to furnish a broad education for both whites and negroes. Since 1890 there has been an ever increasing interest in improving the public school in all respects, and the expenditures and facilities for education have been constantly increasing.
[Sidenote: Universal education, state support and control, high schools replaced academies, colleges non-sectarian, and state universities established.]
=Development of the American System of Education.=--With its final development in the South during the last decade of the nineteenth century, the distinctly American public school system may be said to have been fully elaborated. The educational ideals and institutions imported from Europe in the colonial period have gradually been modified and adapted to the needs of America. Schools have become public and free in the modern sense. The control of education has passed from private parties and even quasi-public societies to the state. The schools have likewise come to be supported by the state, and are open to all children alike without the imposition of any financial obligation. In secondary education, the academies, which supplanted the ‘grammar’ schools, first became ‘free academies’ and made no charge for tuition from local patrons, though remaining close corporations, and then were in time replaced by the true American secondary institution,--the high school (Fig. 41). Colleges became largely non-sectarian, even when not nominally so, and state universities were organized in all except a few of the oldest commonwealths (Fig. 42). Thus has the idea of common schools and the right to use the public wealth to educate the entire body of children into sound American citizenship been made complete. Although the system is still capable of much improvement, it is expressive of American genius and development. It is simply the American idea of government and society applied to education. It is the educational will of the people expressed through the majority, and the resultant of the highest thinking and aspirations of a great nation made up of the most powerful and progressive elements from all civilized peoples.