II.

Learning Institutions

Used to denote a school, the word academy has come to be applied to certain kinds of institutions of learning. The Ritterakademien, or schools for knights, appeared increasingly in Germany after the end of the Thirty Years' War in 1648. The term academy was adopted in England during the late 17th and the 18th centuries by Puritan religious sects as a name for secondary schools that they organized to provide for the general education of their children; these institutions were especially designed to train young men for the Puritan ministry, because such education could not be obtained in contemporary public schools. The word gradually lost its religious denotation, and by the 19th century it applied to a secondary school for boys corresponding roughly to the gymnasium in Germany. In colonial America, the term academy was introduced by Benjamin Franklin; his proposal resulted in the chartering (1753) of the Academy and Charitable School of the Province of Pennsylvania. In 1755 it was renamed the College and Academy and Charitable School of Philadelphia (now the University of Pennsylvania), with power to grant degrees. On the secondary-school level, the earliest academies, Phillips Andover and Phillips Exeter, founded in 1780 and 1781, respectively, introduced a modern curriculum. The academies were private, religion-oriented boarding schools. As they displaced the colonial Latin grammar schools, so were they largely superseded by the public high school after the American Civil War; those that survive, and other similar institutions, have largely become college-preparatory schools.

As a designation for a school, the word academy is also used in a looser sense to indicate institutions in which special accomplishments such as horseback riding, fencing, or dancing are taught. It may also be applied to schools that prepare students for a particular profession, such as the U.S. Military Academy, the U.S. Naval Academy, and the U.S. Air Force Academy.