Education Act — free, secular and compulsory
- When
- 29 November 1877
- Reach
- Nationwide
A national primary system, free and compulsory for children aged 7 to 13, and deliberately secular to sidestep sectarian argument.
The Act created one of the earliest national education systems in the world and drove literacy close to universal within a generation. Native schools, run separately from 1867, operated under a policy of assimilation: English was the language of instruction and children were punished for speaking te reo Māori into the middle of the twentieth century, a practice central to the language’s later decline.
Regions affected
Sources
Written for this project from these references rather than copied from them. Follow a link to check the account against the original.
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