Education: Tutors

Private education arranged by parents for their children was especially popular in elite southern families in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In the North, schools—rather than private tutors—were more common both in the colonial and early Republic eras. Colonial New England towns often pooled resources to create common schools, institutions where children were provided with the language skills necessary for reading the Bible; the towns thereby promoted moral order in their communities. Northern states organized teaching much more systematically in the early nineteenth century as public schools became the norm and tutoring declined further in significance. Nonetheless, one could expect to find tutors in elite families in both North and South in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century America. Generally, young men—and sometimes women—who had yet to become settled in marriage or occupation filled such roles for well-to-do families.

In theory, tutoring can be seen as distinct from apprenticeship, which involves instruction by a master craftsman in pragmatic labor skills. In practice, however, the distinction was murkier, for apprenticeship often included instruction in reading and writing as well as training in a trade. In ideal form, tutors were hired by wealthy families to provide education and cultural polish for young members of the gentry. The South relied on tutors longer and more fully for several reasons. For one, families were more scattered in settlement, making collective education less workable. In addition, southerners did not develop the penchant for the public financing of economic development as northerners did; in northern eyes, education was thought to spur economic progress and social stability. Finally, in the agricultural and stratified South, only the elite could afford to spare the labor of their children, so private education with a tutor became a privilege of those living within the great plantation houses. Ironically, southerners often employed northern young men as tutors, since the North educated a much larger share of its population. For example, Eli Whitney (1765–1825), best known as the inventor of the cotton gin, worked as a tutor for a family in Georgia shortly after graduating from Yale.

Tutoring promoted important family and gender dynamics. In late-eighteenth-century planter families, tutors were often expected to assume disciplinary control of young children, allowing fathers to develop more affectionate bonds with the young. While sometimes using force to implement discipline, tutors could also serve as a model to emulate, assuming the role of a wiser, older brother. Young men and women received distinctive types of training from tutors. While such instructors provided young men with education in utilitarian fields such as mathematics and Latin, equipping the young man for crop sales and courthouse transactions, household educators were more likely to give young southern belles instruction in skills such as French, music, and dancing. Yet even for young men, the goal was more to create a complete gentleman who could drop classical allusions into conversation than equip him for a career in the marketplace.

ELI WHITNEY

Needing to repay some debts before pursuing a career in law, Eli Whitney—a young Yale graduate—left New England in 1792 to work as a tutor on a Georgia plantation. This seemingly prosaic journey proved incalculably important to the social and cultural history of the young nation. In less than a year's time Whitney had invented the cotton gin and sealed the fate of both northern and southern societies. In the late eighteenth century, a glutted tobacco market had caused many planters to rethink the value and utility of growing that crop. An alternative crop, long-staple cotton, a variety that could easily be separated from its seeds, only grew in coastal territories. In contrast, short-staple cotton could be grown much more widely but was extremely difficult to clean. Whitney's cotton gin mechanically removed fiber from seed, spurring enormous growth in the cultivation of cotton and thereby greatly increasing the demand for slaves.

Rodney Hessinger

Another distinct type of tutoring evolved in the colleges of the young nation. Professors relied on the assistance of young men to teach lessons to the students enrolled in their schools. These young men were most often recent college graduates themselves, only a couple years older than their charges. In fact, where impoverished young men were entering colleges at advanced ages, as they were in New England, tutors were younger than some of their students. Colleges in the early Republic suffered from disciplinary problems, and the use of youthful tutors only exacerbated this trend. Tutors had trouble commanding the respect of students, so they often adopted a domineering stance that only created further conflict. As in southern families, tutors were instructing their students in a classical curriculum that seemed out of touch with the wider world. Until college education became more relevant and the teaching profession itself became more professionalized in the late nineteenth century, college students would continue to challenge the authority of tutors.

In general, the fate of tutors stood in inverse relation to the notions of equality in the early Republic. As Americans became more committed to this ideal, they turned increasingly toward publicly funded schools that offered the prospect of equal opportunity for all. Tutors seemed to hark back to an aristocratic society that aimed to prepare gentlemen to rule rather than allowing all to compete for political authority. Since the South bore a more tortured relationship to notions of equality, it is not surprising that tutors enjoyed a longer and more prosperous history in that region.

See alsoChildhood and Adolescence .

bibliography

Smith, Daniel Blake. Inside the Great House: Planter Family Life in Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake Society. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1980.

Kett, Joseph F. Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America, 1790 to the Present. NewYork: Basic Books, 1977.

Farish, Hunter Dickenson. Journal and Letters of Philip Vickers Fithian, 1773–1774: A Plantation Tutor of the Old Dominion. Williamsburg, Va.: Colonial Williamsburg, 1943.

Rodney Hessinger