Interest in North American colleges (the very first of them turned 340 years old) it is explained by the fact that even in the colonial period, the enlightenment and intellectual thought of the United States were born. The independent republic inherited a number of acute problems of the local education systems that emerged during the colonial era. And some of them, such as the lack of equal access to education, the subordination of colleges to narrow-class interests of ruling groups, have now generated resistance from the country's democratic forces. The history of these educational institutions also attracts attention because it helps to find out to what extent the first centers of higher education influenced the preparation of the war of independence of the North American colonies of Great Britain. In the United States, there is still a debate about the place of colleges in the life of the colonies, and sometimes opinions are diametrically opposed. Thus, K. Janks and D. Reesman declare: "The college of those years was always a pillar of the ruling classes, but it was never an important pillar of them." 1 The same authors do not rate the colleges of that time very highly in pedagogical terms, claiming that they were more like a secondary school than a university, and in their organization and content of courses were a degraded copy of British universities. An academic course on the history of American higher education in 1636-1968 states that "the influence of national conditions on imported colleges from overseas was felt from the very beginning." 2 M. Jernigan believes that American figures of the colonial era did not add anything new to European pedagogical concepts. Some of these concepts are more developed in North America, while others are less developed. So, here, in practice, the innovative idea for those years-the participation of the state in the affairs of education-was more quickly implemented. This is largely due to the fact that educational institutio ... Read more