AMERICA'S FIRST SCHOOL: 350 YEARS AT BOSTON LATIN (TV)
Summary
This documentary examines the history of America's first publicly supported school, Boston Latin, on its 350th anniversary. Founded in 1635, Boston Latin School was at the core of the country's growing public education movement; the school's Puritan founders believed learning would help ward off Satan. Historian James Fraser at the University of Massachusetts believed that the school became a stepping stone to matriculation at Harvard and a training ground for an elite cadre of leaders and teachers, including John Hancock and Samuel Adams. Alumni Ernest Caverly, Robert Coles, Robert Dentler, Aaron Gordon, and Elliot Norton recall the school's homogeneous student body, its Puritan work ethic, and its similarities to the English public school system. By the late nineteenth century, vast waves of immigrants led to non-Yankee names appearing on class lists, and by the 1920s and 1930s an influence of Jewish students. Eventually, most of the old Boston families sent their children to private schools, and Boston Latin became known as the college preparatory school for the poor. Conductor Leonard Bernstein as well as alumni Arthur Curley, Lawrence DiCara, Paul Garrity, and Nat Hentoff recall the establishment of qualifying examinations and the inclusion of the "non-gentlemanly" subjects of American history and laboratory sciences. By the 1950s and 1960s, the school's middle-class families moved to the suburbs, and in the 1970s the predominantly white, all-boys school implemented coeducation and racial quotas, as recalled by alumni Mary Chan, Lee Daniels, Walter Graham, and Jean O. O'Callaghan. The program concludes with a contemporary look at Boston Latin: the school is admired for producing the city's students, but also criticized for diverting resources from other Boston public schools.
Cataloging of this program was made possible by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, 1998.
Details
- NETWORK: PBS WGBH Boston, MA
- DATE: September 21, 1986 Sunday 10:00 PM
- RUNNING TIME: 0:57:45
- COLOR/B&W: Color
- CATALOG ID: T:13465
- GENRE: Public affairs/Documentaries
- SUBJECT HEADING: Education; Public institutions; Race awareness in children; Schools; U S - History - Colonial period
- SERIES RUN: WGBH (Boston, MA) - TV, 1986
- COMMERCIALS: N/A
CREDITS
- Raquel Ortiz … Executive Producer
- Howard Husock … Producer, Director, Writer
- Suzanne Goldsmith … Associate Producer, Direction (Misc.), Additional Direction
- Harry Murphy … Narrator
- John C. Largess … Instrumentalist, Pianist
- Leonard Bernstein
- Ernest Caverly
- Mary Chan
- Robert Coles
- Arthur Curley
- Lee Daniels
- Robert Dentler
- Lawrence DiCara
- James Fraser
- Paul Garrity
- Aaron Gordon
- Walter Graham
- Nat Hentoff
- Elliot Norton
- Jean O. O'Callaghan