Americans have shown great concern for education since early colonial times. Among the first settlers, in fact, there was an unusually high proportion of educated men. Some of these men, many of them graduates of Cambridge, came together and in 1636 founded Harvard College, 140 years before American independence. Other early institutions of higher learning were the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, established in 1693, and Yale, founded in 1701. Before the Revolution in 1776, nine colleges had already been opened in the colonies, most of them later became universities.
From the 1640s on, Massachusetts required all towns with more than 50 families to provide a schoolmaster at public expense. Other colonies also made provisions