France and England.

The French and the English considered education a vital part of their imperial missions. When Francis I commissioned Jacques Carder's third voyage to Canada in 1540, he ordered the explorer to collect information about "savage peoples who live without knowledge of God and without use of reason . . . [and] . . . to have them instructed in the love and fear of God and of the holy Christian law and doctrine." The English colonizers of Roanoke Island in the 1580s carried with them a similar missionary imperative to collect information about Native Americans and to begin the process of converting them to Christianity. But neither the French nor the English founded permanent settlements in North America before 1600, and their attempts to build colonies were so short-lived that they neither built schools for colonial children nor fulfilled their mission to instruct Indians in Christian doctrine.

Spain.