Free education has long been identified with "sponsored education". This may now evoke images of advertising campaigns, but
in the past, especially during the Renaissance, it was common practice among rich dignitaries to sponsor the education of a
young man as his patron.[citation needed]
In the late 1700s, Thomas Paine was amongst the earliest proponents of universal, free public education, which was
considered to be a radical idea at the time.
In the United States, government compulsory education was introduced as free or universal education during the late 1800s,
and extended across the country by the 1920s.
Compulsory education is typically funded through taxes. Aggravated truancy can be prosecuted. Homeschooling or private or
parochial schooling is usually a legal alternative.
Free education on the Internet
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Online education has become an option. One of the pioneering Universities to sponsor free education in management is the
School of Business and Economics at Umeå University. Free education has become available through several websites, some of
them resembling online universities. Online education faces barriers such as institutional adoption, license/Copyright
restrictions and incompatibility, and educator awareness of available resources[6].
Due to the extensive requirements of material for online education, many open community projects have been initiated.
Specifically, the Wikimedia Foundation has developed a project devoted to free online educational resources, Wikiversity,
and recently, several other sites for specific topics have developed. MyMCAT was designed as a free community project to
aid students wishing to take the MCAT. freeed.com was launched in March 2010 as a free online knowledge and learning
platform. Users and experts upload multimedia content to expand specific topics.
World University and School aggregates free, open teaching and learning content on the internet. World University and
School - http://worlduniversity.wikia.com/wiki/World_University - is a global, digital, open, free-to-students, potentially
degree-granting Wiki university and school, potentially in all languages, nation-states, subjects and at all levels, using
a Wikipedia-with-MIT Open Course Ware model, for everyone, especially OLPC countries and the emerging world, which anyone
can edit, primarily by teaching, adding, or learning.
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