1874 - Education

Education

The London School Board grants degrees to women for the first time after agitation by reformers who include Board member Emily Davies, mistress of Girton College at Cambridge.

Japan's Ministry of Education founds a teachers' school for women in Tokyo's Ochanomizu (the word means "water for tea") district but has trouble finding girls who are qualified, or willing, to be teachers (only 80 students apply for 100 places, and only 15 will be in the first graduating class of 1878, because teaching is considered a suitable occupation only for unattractive girls from families without means). Ochanomizu Women's College, opened in March, will become a liberal-arts college under that name in 1949.

About 33 percent of school-age Japanese girls are in elementary school as compared with 54 percent of school-age boys (see 1873).

The U.S. public high school system wins support from the Supreme Court, which rules against Kalamazoo property owners who had filed suit to prevent collection of additional taxes. The court upholds the city's right to establish a high school and to levy taxes to support it.

The Chautauqua movement in U.S. education has its beginnings in a summer training program for Sunday School teachers started at Fair Point on Lake Chautauqua, New York, by clergyman John Heyl Vincent, 42, and Akron, Ohio, farm machinery maker Lewis Miller, 44: they begin an institution 10 miles from Lake Erie that will develop into a traveling tent show of lecturers, bringing culture to small-town America. President Grant's appearance at Chautauqua next year will lend prestige to the movement, more than 100,000 people will sign up for home-study correspondence courses by 1877, the Chautauqua Normal School of Languages will start in 1879, and the Chautauqua Press will list 93 titles by 1885 by which time there will be Chautauquas in more than 30 states (see music [Damrosch], 1909).

Cornell University cofounder Ezra Cornell dies at Ithaca, New York, December 9 at age 67.