Essentially then, private education in the colonies came before public education. As public education took hold, private schools sprang up in order to fill a need not provided for in the public sector. Parents who felt that they wanted more for their children had options even back in the early days of the nation.

Private schools date back to the schools opened by Catholic missionaries in Florida and Louisiana in the sixteenth century, which predated the beginning of formal education in Massachusetts. These Catholic schools were the offspring of missionary zeal.

Like the Catholics before them, Protestants felt compelled to establish their own private schools to protect their children from the humanist and agnostic education they would now receive at the hands of the state. 9 Their forefathers had failed to see the danger common to all “democratic” coercion: one day the comfortable majority may find itself in the oppressed minority.

Private schools in the South were established, expanded, and supported to preserve the Southern tradition of racial segregation in the face of the federal courts’ dismantling of “separate but equal.” White students left public schools in droves to both traditional and newly formed private schools.