1882 | Education
Education
France inaugurates free, compulsory, secular education under a law put through by Premier Jules Ferry (see 1902).
Oscar Wilde arrives at New York in January saying, "I have nothing to declare but my genius." Now 27, Irish-born poet-essayist Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde has made himself the apostle of an art-for-art's-sake cult (Gilbert and Sullivan burlesqued his affectations last year in their opera Patience with its character Bunthorne). Wilde will tour North America for a year lecturing on such subjects as "The English Renaissance of Art."
Waseda University has its beginnings in a private college founded at Tokyo by former Japanese finance minister Shigenobu Okuma.
Japan's first girls' high school opens but teaches mostly sewing, housekeeping, and poise. The private school will become a government-operated public school in 1886 but will still put its emphasis on preparing girls to be good wives, teaching them how to relate to a husband and a mother-in-law, raise children, keep house, treat servants, and behave in polite society.
The University of Mississippi opens its doors to women, becoming the first Southern state institution of higher learning to do so.