Boston Latin School

They were busy and broke all the time.

So it wasn't like in the sixth grade, they said, we got to get Jay into Boston Latin School.

They just sent out a uniform test all over the city.

Apparently, I did well in it.

And I ended up at the oldest public high school in the United States, Boston Latin School, created in 1635, one year before Harvard University.

Wow.

So now I'm the smart kid in the sixth grade at the Harriet A. Baldwin Grammar School, and I show up with a thousand other kids from all over the city, and they hustle us into a huge auditorium, scariest auditorium ever, because the pictures staring down at you with these stern looks are the founding fathers of the United States.

there?

Now, my mom's dad was from Boston.

He went to Boston Latin School and then MIT, so he was wicked smart.

Uh, he met my grandmother, who was a lawyer in Washington, DC, uh, and then he ended up getting into the shipping business.

He served in that capacity for World War II in the Philippines, and then he ended up starting a business, a shipping business, when he got out of World War II.

The Puritans in the colonies wanted their children to be able to read and interpret the Bible themselves, rather than have to rely upon the clergy for interpretation.

In 1635, they established the Boston Latin School to educate their sons, the first and oldest formal education institution in the English-speaking New World.

They also set up what were called dame schools for their daughters.

and in other cases, they taught their daughters at home how to read.

In 1642, Massachusetts required heads of households to teach their wives, children, and servants basic reading and writing so that they could read the Bible and understand colonial laws.

In 1647, the government required all towns with 50 or more households to hire a teacher, and required towns of 100 or more households to hire a grammar school instructor to prepare promising boys for college.

Philemon Pormort's Boston Latin School was the only one in Boston The first school of public instruction in Massachusetts.

Boys who were interested in the ministry were often sent to colleges such as Harvard, founded in 1636, or Yale, founded in 1770.

I'm number six of seven kids.

Went to school in Boston, bumped around quite a bit, ended up going to Boston Latin School, and then almost didn't go to college, but ended up just by chance going to UMass Boston, where I studied music and computers, and that was incredibly fun.

After I graduated with my master's at UMass, I worked for one company in Cambridge for five or six years.

And since I'm doing my own startups.

We now look at Joseph Patrick Kennedy Senior, who's seen as the patriarch of the main Kennedy family, as it's known.

Joe Kennedy attended Boston Latin School, excelled at baseball, was elected class president, went to Harvard University to study economics and gained admittance into their hasty pudding club.

Alumni of which include Fred Herman Munster-Gwynn, Jack Lemmon, William Randolph Hearst, and BJ Novak from the American office.

My

That was the union that produced John Kennedy and his famous brothers, Bobby and Teddy, Robert and Edward Kennedy.

Joseph P. Kennedy, the son of P.J. Kennedy, went to Boston Latin School.

He went to Harvard.

He began making money even when he was a Harvard undergraduate running a tour company.

Consider these notable back-to-school facts.

In the United States, the oldest educational institution is Boston Latin School.

It opened on April 23, 1635.

Five people who signed the Declaration of Independence attended boston's latin school benjamin franklin john hancock robert treat payne samuel adams and william hopper high school was not introduced in the united states until 1910 and it was the 1930s before most students attended before then students attended school only through grade 8.

That's right.

And, um, you know, the, the curriculum at that time in Boston Latin School where he went before Harvard and at Harvard, it, it was a classical curriculum, so they were, they were reading the, the stuff about the Greeks and the Roman Senate and, and, um, stories about war and virtue, and they were also reading the Bible, and he was going to church with his family.

I, uh, um, you know, so, so s- and, and he had a lot of ministers in his extended f- family, uh, cousins and eventually he, he married the daughter of a, m- of a minister.

Um, so that was the environment that, that he grew up in.

Well, let's rewind back.

Uh, he was born in Roxbury, Boston, and attended Boston Latin School, and graduated from English High School of Boston.

After graduating high school, he became an assistant at the Harvard College Observatory before moving on to the US Naval Academy, uh, as a professor of mathematics.

That's...