=Religion and Higher Learning.=—­Religious motives entered into the establishment of colleges as well as local schools.  Harvard, founded in 1636, and Yale, opened in 1718, were intended primarily to train “learned and godly ministers” for the Puritan churches of New England.  To the far North, Dartmouth, chartered in 1769, was designed first as a mission to the Indians and then as a college for the sons of New England farmers preparing to preach, teach, or practice law.  The College of New Jersey, organized in 1746 and removed to Princeton eleven years later, was sustained by the Presbyterians.  Two colleges looked to the Established Church as their source of inspiration and support:  William and Mary, founded in Virginia in 1693, and King’s College, now Columbia University, chartered by King George II in 1754, on an appeal from the New York Anglicans, alarmed at the growth of religious dissent and the “republican tendencies” of the age.  Two colleges revealed a drift away from sectarianism.  Brown, established in Rhode Island in 1764, and the Philadelphia Academy, forerunner of the University of Pennsylvania, organized by Benjamin Franklin, reflected the spirit of toleration by giving representation on the board of trustees to several religious sects.  It was Franklin’s idea that his college should prepare young men to serve in public office as leaders of the people and ornaments to their country.

=Self-education in America.=—­Important as were these institutions of learning, higher education was by no means confined within their walls.  Many well-to-do families sent their sons to Oxford or Cambridge in England.  Private tutoring in the home was common.  In still more families there were intelligent children who grew up in the great colonial school of adversity and who trained themselves until, in every contest of mind and wit, they could vie with the sons of Harvard or William and Mary or any other college.  Such, for example, was Benjamin Franklin, whose charming autobiography, in addition to being an American classic, is a fine record of self-education.  His formal training in the classroom was limited to a few years at a local school in Boston; but his self-education continued throughout his life.  He early manifested a zeal for reading, and devoured, he tells us, his father’s dry library on theology, Bunyan’s works, Defoe’s writings, Plutarch’s Lives, Locke’s On the Human Understanding, and innumerable volumes dealing with secular subjects.  His literary style, perhaps the best of his time, Franklin acquired by the diligent and repeated analysis of the Spectator.  In a life crowded with labors, he found time to read widely in natural science and to win single-handed recognition at the hands of European savants for his discoveries in electricity.  By his own efforts he “attained an acquaintance” with Latin, Italian, French, and Spanish, thus unconsciously preparing himself for the day when he was to speak for all America at the court of the king of France.