Education in Indiana
South of Indianapolis the arrivals from the Southern states considered education a private affair, with wealthy families supporting tutors.
[1] Across the state Presbyterian and other Protestant churches set up Sunday Schools that provided basic training in reading, writing, arithmetic and piety.
The 1820s saw the start in a few places of free public township schools, locally funded by taxes.
[5] Indiana lagged the rest of the Midwest with the lowest literacy and education rates into the early 20th century.
[6] Caleb Mills (1806–1879) was a Presbyterian Yankee who served as the Superintendent of Public Instruction in Indiana and was the first faculty member at Wabash College.
[7] Mills arrived in Crawfordsville in 1833 after graduating from Dartmouth College in New Hampshire and Andover Theological Seminary in Massachusetts.
[8] Mills was recruited to the job by his old college roommate Edmund Otis Hovey, one of the nine founders of the school, who later joined him on the faculty as one of the professors.
The most enthusiastic support came from the Whig strongholds, led by St. Joseph County (South Bend) on the Michigan border, with 94% voting in favor.
[10] Mills played a major role in preparing materials that pro-school editors included in their newspapers.
[11] Starting in 1846, for six years, Mills wrote an annual address to the Indiana legislature on the subject of public education.
[12] These very long letters argued for a statewide system of taxpayer funded free public schools.
In 1854 Mills was elected Indiana Superintendent of Public Instruction, defeating the incumbent Democrat, William C. Larrabee, 99,857 to 85,835.
Larrabee was a Yankee and a professor of mathematics at Asbury College; he agreed with Mills on the need to modernize the schools.
However, in the 1850s their work was repeatedly frustrated by the state supreme court, which nullified key parts of the school laws.
Purdue for the first half of the 20th century boasted the largest enrollment of any engineering school in the country.
The University of Notre Dame, founded by Rev Edward Sorin in 1842, emerged as the most prominent Catholic school in the country, thanks in large part to football under Knute Rockne.
One unexpected result was that whites in Indianapolis cheered Oscar Robertson and the all-black Crispus Attucks High School in winning the state basketball championship in 1955 and 1956 under coach Ray Crowe.
In the 1840s, Caleb Mills pressed the need for tax-supported schools, and in 1851 his advice was included in the new state constitution.
The overall goal of these new state standards is to ensure Indiana students have the necessary skills and requirements needed to enter college or the workforce upon high school graduation.
[34] State standards can be found for nearly every major subject taught in Indiana public schools.
[35] The rate of Indiana high school students attending college fell to 53% in 2022, a significant decline from 65% in 2017.
[47][48][49] Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) has recently made it into the top 200 U.S. News & World Report rankings.
