1784 | Education
Education
The first school for the blind opens at Paris. Having seen a group of blind men exhibited at a local sideshow, calligraphy professor Valentin Haüy, 39, has determined to help blind people gain a sense of self-worth, paid a blind boy to take instruction, invented a method for embossing characters on paper, and opened the Institution for Blind Children (it will later become a state-supported facility); brother of the mineralogist, Haüy will open a similar school at St. Petersburg, teaching blind children to read (see Barbier, 1819; Braille, 1834).
New York's Columbia College opens after 6 years of wartime suspension of King's College, founded in 1754. The war has obliged King's College students such as Alexander Hamilton to educate themselves.