Alva Review-Courier -

Since funding for public education has become a hot topic for discussion in several states (including Oklahoma), it seems altogether appropriate to look at the origins of public education in this country.

If we examine the beginnings of European migration to what is now the United States in the early 1600s, we can note that many of these migrants were poor people who had never had the opportunity to learn to read and write.

Others, however, were highly literate – the Pilgrims who came to Plymouth Rock in 1620 and the Puritans who founded Boston in 1630, for example. These two groups of settler...