By 1599, there were nearly 250 Jesuit schools. All of them called for scholars in scripture, Hebrew, Greek, theology, mathematics, philosophy, and moral philosophy. Nothing in the curriculum was "sectarian," for a common humanity erases the traditional barriers of sect and party.
All in all, in the long and still intense struggle between urbanity and provincialism, it would be the university that would revise the maps of thought and set loose the instructed mind. Locke's reference to "the learning now in fashion in the schools of Europe" was chiefly a reference to this education, which had been his own: an education that shaped the Anglo-European mind and bequeathed it, with refinements and ever more daring possibilities, to the Founders of the American Republic.
The Scottish influence
The intellectual and philosophical sources of greatest use to and influence upon the American Founders were the productions of the classical world, interpreted and systematically presented in the major works of British – primarily Scottish – and Continental scholars. Much of this was delivered by way of the Scottish Enlightenment and, indeed, by native Scots.
Scottish education, with its distinctively "humanistic Calvinism," was widely adopted in the Colonies and then in the states of the Union. The diffuse influence of Scottish thought, itself beholden to classical sources, did much to immunize the Founders against metaphysical extremes, which were all too often followed by extremes of action. This same influence protected the colonial consumer from most of the products still minted in Europe's frippery shops.
