Polk Administration - Education
Education
Polk received only rudimentary schooling during his childhood in the North Carolina and Tennessee frontiers and still had difficulty with basic spelling at the age of 18. His first encounter with formal classical education came in 1813 when he was allowed to enroll in a small Presbyterian academy near Columbia, Tennessee, run by Rev. Robert Henderson. Polk spent one year there studying Greek and Latin, and despite his background, proved himself one of the school's finest students. His success greatly impressed his father, and in 1814 Polk transferred to the larger Murfreesboro Academy, 50 miles south of Columbia. Under the tutelage of the Presbyterian schoolmaster Samuel Black, Polk rose to the top of his 1815 graduating class.
Polk continued his successful academic progress at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, another Presbyterian institution, where he was admitted as a sophomore in January 1816. An...
[The entire page is 261 words long]
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