<P> Teaching young students was not an attractive career for educated people . Adults became teachers without any particular skill . Hiring was handled by the local school board, who were mainly interested in the efficient use of limited taxes and favored young single women from local taxpaying families . This started to change with the introduction of two - year normal schools starting in 1823 . Normal schools increasingly provided career paths for unmarried middle class women . By 1900 most teachers of elementary schools in the northern states had been trained at normal schools . </P> <P> Given the high proportion of population in rural areas, with limited numbers of students, most communities relied on one - room school houses . Teachers would deal with the range of students of various ages and abilities by using the Monitorial System, an education method that became popular on a global scale during the early 19th century . This method was also known as "mutual instruction" or the "Bell - Lancaster method" after the British educators Dr Andrew Bell and Joseph Lancaster, who each independently developed it about 1798 . As older children in families would teach younger ones, the abler pupils in these schools became' helpers' to the teacher, and taught other students what they had learned . </P> <P> Upon becoming the secretary of education of Massachusetts in 1837, Horace Mann (1796--1859) worked to create a statewide system of professional teachers, based on the Prussian model of "common schools ." Prussia was attempting to develop a system of education by which all students were entitled to the same content in their public classes . Mann initially focused on elementary education and on training teachers . The common - school movement quickly gained strength across the North . Connecticut adopted a similar system in 1849, and Massachusetts passed a compulsory attendance law in 1852 . Mann's crusading style attracted wide middle - class support . Historian Ellwood P. Cubberley asserts: </P> <Dl> <Dd> No one did more than he to establish in the minds of the American people the conception that education should be universal, non-sectarian, free, and that its aims should be social efficiency, civic virtue, and character, rather than mere learning or the advancement of sectarian ends . </Dd> </Dl>

In what colony was the first law about school attendance made