Primary education in the United States typically refers to the first six years of formal education in most jurisdictions. Primary education may also be referred to as elementary education and most schools offering these programs are referred to as elementary schools. Preschool programs, which are less formal and usually not mandated by law, are generally not considered part of primary education. The first year of primary education is commonly referred to as kindergarten and begins at or around age 5. Subsequent years are usually numbered being referred to as first grade, second grade, and so forth. Students graduating from fifth grade, typically the last primary year, are normally age 11.
In 2001 there were 92,858 elementary schools (68,173 public, 24,685 private) in the United States, a figure which includes all schools that teach students from grades one through eight. According to the National Center for Education Statics, in the fall of 2009 almost 3.5 million students attended public primary schools. In addition, 1,085,000 children were projected to attend public preschool or prekindergarten in the fall of 2009.
Read more about Primary Education In The United States: Elementary School (Kindergarten Through Grade 4/5/6), Preschool, Teachers' Pay, National Science Standards
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“Places where he might live and die and never hear of the United States, which make such a noise in the world,—never hear of America, so called from the name of a European gentleman.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“It was the feeling of a passenger on an ocean steamer whose mind will not give him rest until he has been in the engine-room and talked with the engineer. She wanted to see with her own eyes the action of primary forces; to touch with her own eyes the action of primary forces; to touch with her own hand the massive machinery of society; to measure with her own mind the capacity of the motive power. She was bent upon getting to the heart of the great American mystery of democracy and government.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“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)
“The United Nations cannot do anything, and never could; it is not an animate entity or agent. It is a place, a stage, a forum and a shrine ... a place to which powerful people can repair when they are fearful about the course on which their own rhetoric seems to be propelling them.”
—Conor Cruise O’Brien (b. 1917)
“I believe the citizens of Marion County and the United States want to have judges who have feelings and who are human beings.”
—Paula Lopossa, U.S. judge. As quoted in the New York Times, p. B9 (May 21, 1993)