ithis on 27 August 2012
Interesting read on Wikipedia about education. I skimmed through what is from start just a short history of it. the US did not invent education. Some parts of it did implement some sort of modern education (for males) pretty early (17th century), but not before others did in Europe (see Scotland).
The Islamic world has a good claim on being among the first that had schools for all. (10th century?)
@Mr Khan: Japan was modernizing it's existing education system, not implementing one when they (according to Wikipedia) took inspiration in what the western Europeans were doing, which I suppose could easily have been the US actually.
