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Chicago has one of the largest public school systems in the United States. The Chicago Board of Education administers the system in a centralized fashion; in recent years it has been experimenting with local school councils as a means of partial devolution of authority. These councils, established in 1989, have authority in several areas, including the ability to approve budgets and curriculum. In addition, Chicago has many private schools, including large parochial systems maintained by the Roman Catholic and Lutheran churches. Chicago is a center of higher education, with numerous colleges and universities. The University of Chicago (1891) was in 1942 the site of the world's first controlled nuclear chain reaction. Among the other schools of higher learning are Northwestern University (1851), with campuses in both Chicago and nearby Evanston; the Illinois Institute of Technology (1890); Roosevelt University (1945); Loyola University of Chicago (1870); DePaul University (1898); Chicago State University (1867); Northeastern Illinois University (1961); and the University of Illinois at Chicago (1965).
Chicago contains many museums. These include the Adler Planetarium and Astronomy Museum; the Art Institute of Chicago, one of the country's largest art museums; the Field Museum; and the John G. Shedd Aquarium, the world's largest, all of which are in the Grant Park area. In Hyde Park are the Oriental Institute Museum, which contains a collection of antiquities from the Middle East; the Du Sable Museum of African-American History; and the Museum of Science and Industry. In Lincoln Park are the Chicago Academy of Sciences and the Chicago Historical Society; the latter is known for its material on Abraham Lincoln and the American Civil War (1861-1865). Also in the city is the Museum of Contemporary Art. The Harold Washington Library Center is the headquarters of the Chicago Public Library. The largest municipal library building in the United States, it is named for the first black mayor of Chicago, who served from 1983 to 1987. The public library, with 79 branches, has a collection of about 6 million books, with representative collections in 35 languages and small collections in more than 300 languages. The Newberry Library is a reference library containing an important collection focused on the humanities, including holdings on Native Americans, the history of printing, and cartography. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra, founded in 1891, is considered one of the finest in the world. The city's opera company is The Lyric Opera, founded in 1954.
