Collegiate School is founded in New Amsterdam…
November 1626 CE
Collegiate School is founded in New Amsterdam in 1628 by the Dutch West India Company and the Classis of Amsterdam.
The school’s initial incarnation is located south of Canal Street and is an academic institution for both sexes.
The school's location is to change several times over the next four centuries, although the school will been at its current location, next to the West End Collegiate Church on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, from 1892.
Today an independent school for boys in New York City, Collegiate claims to be the oldest school in the United States.
Controversy surrounds the school's actual founding date.
The common belief before 1984 was that the school had been founded in 1638, placing it two years later than the founding of Harvard University and three years after the founding date of Boston Latin School.
Massimo Maglione, a historian and Upper School teacher at Collegiate, will conduct research into the accuracy of this date and find that Collegiate's founder—the Reverend Jonas Michaëlius, the first minister of the Dutch Reformed Church in America—had written of his efforts to teach the catechism to Immediately after the armistice period between the Dutch Republic and Spain (1609–1621), t children as early as 1628.
Based on this evidence, the school in 1984 will officially move up its founding to the earlier date.
Whether Michaëlius' early teaching actually constituted the founding of a school, however, will remain under debate.
Maglione will tell The New York Times in 1985 that "it seems clear that the school was not an official entity until 1638."