<P> Free schooling was available through some of the elementary grades . Graduates of these schools could read and write, though not always with great precision . Mary Chesnut, a Southern diarist, mocks the North's system of free education in her journal entry of June 3, 1862, where she derides misspelled words from the captured letters of Union soldiers . </P> <P> By 1900, 34 states had compulsory schooling laws; four were in the South . 30 states with compulsory schooling laws required attendance until age 14 (or higher). As a result, by 1910, 72 percent of American children attended school . Half the nation's children attended one - room schools . In 1918, every state required students to complete elementary school . </P> <P> As the nation was majority Protestant in the 19th century, most states passed a constitutional amendment, called Blaine Amendments, forbidding tax money be used to fund parochial schools . This was largely directed against Catholics, as the heavy immigration from Catholic Ireland after the 1840s aroused nativist sentiment . There were longstanding tensions between Catholic and Protestant believers, long associated with nation states that had established religions . Many Protestants believed that Catholic children should be educated in public schools in order to become American . By 1890 the Irish, who as the first major Catholic immigrant group controlled the Church hierarchy in the U.S., had built an extensive network of parishes and parish schools ("parochial schools") across the urban Northeast and Midwest . The Irish and other Catholic ethnic groups intended parochial schools not only to protect their religion, but to enhance their culture and language . </P> <P> Catholics and German Lutherans, as well as Dutch Protestants, organized and funded their own elementary schools . Catholic communities also raised money to build colleges and seminaries to train teachers and religious leaders to head their churches . In the 19th century, most Catholics were Irish or German immigrants and their children; in the 1890s new waves of Catholic immigrants began arriving from Italy and Poland . The parochial schools met some opposition, as in the Bennett Law in Wisconsin in 1890, but they thrived and grew . Catholic nuns served as teachers in most schools and were paid low salaries in keeping with their vows of poverty . In 1925 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Pierce v. Society of Sisters that students could attend private schools to comply with state compulsory education laws, thus giving parochial schools an official blessing . </P>

The history of public education in the united states