Montgomery, Alabama - Education

Education

The city of Montgomery and Montgomery County are served by the Montgomery Public Schools system. As of 2007, there were 32,520 students enrolled in the system, and 2,382 teachers employed. The system manages 32 elementary schools, 10 middle schools, and 4 high schools (G.W. Carver, Jeff Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Sidney Lanier) as well as 9 magnet schools, 1 alternative school, and 2 special education centers. Montgomery is also home to 28 private schools. In 2007, Forest Avenue Academic Magnet Elementary School was named a National Blue Ribbon School. In 2008 Loveless Academic Magnet Program (LAMP) High School was named No. 20 on U.S. News & World Report's Gold Medal List, a nationwide ranking, bringing national attention to the city.

The Montgomery City-County Public Library operates public libraries.

The city is also home to Alabama's oldest law library, the Supreme Court and State Law Library, founded in 1828. Located in the Heflin-Torbert Judicial Building, the Law Library owns a rare book collection considered as one of the finest in the Southeast, containing works printed as early as 1605.

Montgomery has been the home of Alabama State University, a historically black university, since the Lincoln Normal University for Teachers relocated from Marion in 1887. Today, ASU enrolls over 5,600 students from 42 U.S. states and 7 countries. The public Troy University maintains a 3,000 student population campus in downtown Montgomery that prominently houses the award-winning Rosa Parks Library and Museum. Troy University is also a worldwide leader in distance learning programs. Another public institution, Auburn University at Montgomery, with an enrollment of 5,123, is in the eastern part of the city and operates as a satellite campus of Auburn University.

Montgomery also is home to several private colleges: Faulkner University, which has an enrollment of 3,500, is a Church of Christ-affiliated school; Huntingdon College, which has a current student population of 1,000 and is affiliated with the United Methodist Church; Virginia College and Amridge University.

Several two-year colleges also have campuses in Montgomery, including H. Councill Trenholm State Technical College

Maxwell Air Force Base is the headquarters for Air University, the United States Air Force's center for professional military education. Branches of Air University based in Montgomery include the Squadron Officer School, the Air Command and Staff College, the Air War College, and the Community College of the Air Force.

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Famous quotes containing the word education:

    Quintilian [educational writer in Rome around A.D. 100] thought that the earliest years of the child’s life were crucial. Education should start earlier than age seven, within the family. It should not be so hard as to give the child an aversion to learning. Rather, these early lessons would take the form of play—that embryonic notion of kindergarten.
    C. John Sommerville (20th century)

    It is not every man who can be a Christian, even in a very moderate sense, whatever education you give him. It is a matter of constitution and temperament, after all. He may have to be born again many times. I have known many a man who pretended to be a Christian, in whom it was ridiculous, for he had no genius for it. It is not every man who can be a free man, even.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    Whatever may be our just grievances in the southern states, it is fitting that we acknowledge that, considering their poverty and past relationship to the Negro race, they have done remarkably well for the cause of education among us. That the whole South should commit itself to the principle that the colored people have a right to be educated is an immense acquisition to the cause of popular education.
    Fannie Barrier Williams (1855–1944)