Boston Latin School, the oldest US public school, was founded
On this day · 23 April 1635
Founded in 1635, a year before Harvard, Boston Latin still drills Latin into teenagers nearly four centuries later.
On April 23, 1635, Puritan settlers in the young town of Boston voted to establish a free grammar school, planting what became Boston Latin School — the oldest public school in America. It opened a full year before Harvard College, which was conveniently designed to receive its Latin-soaked graduates.
The curriculum was unapologetically classical: boys parsed Latin and Greek for years, since fluency was the price of admission to Harvard. Classes first met in the home of headmaster Philemon Pormont until a schoolhouse was finished.
Five signers of the Declaration of Independence — Franklin, Samuel Adams, John Hancock, Robert Treat Paine, and William Hooper — passed through its doors.
Benjamin Franklin attended but never graduated, making the school’s most celebrated pupil also one of its most famous dropouts. Now a coeducational exam school in Boston’s Fenway, Boston Latin has run continuously for nearly 400 years, still insisting that adolescents conjugate dead languages.
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