Elementary, Grammar, and Secondary Schools

Education during the colonial, Revolutionary, and early national periods was diverse and is best discussed within regional contexts.

new england

In colonial New England a child's education was not just a family responsibility but a civil and church matter. Formal education began in New England during the late 1630s, only a few years after the Puritan migration to Massachusetts. For Calvinists being able to read the Bible was paramount, and thus education was essential to the success of their religious experiment. A two-tier educational system developed during the seventeenth century, consisting of the dame school and the elite grammar schools. Dame schools were usually set up in the private homes of women who charged a modest fee to give boys and girls formal instruction in reading, writing, and rudimentary arithmetic. Not surprisingly, discipline in a Puritan school or household was strict and all teaching and learning doctrinaire. Students were forced to memorize the New England Primer, containing the catechism as well as poems, prayers, and hymns that espoused Puritan theology, warning children of satanic temptations as well as describing the horrors of eternal damnation.

Massachusetts was the first region in colonial America to establish secondary or grammar schools for boys. In 1635 the Boston Public Latin School was established to educate the sons of the elite in both the classics and further religious studies (some schools also taught algebra, geometry, and geography). After primary school, most boys either joined an apprentice program or attended a grammar school. Boys who were destined for Harvard College were educated at a grammar school, beginning at the age of seven or eight. Moreover, to maintain religious orthodoxy, both the church and the civil authorities in the Massachusetts Bay Colony took direct responsibility for the education of their children. This can be seen in two seventeenth-century laws passed by the Massachusetts General Court. In 1642, by Massachusetts law, parents of illiterate children were fined. In 1647 the Old Deluder Satan Act was the first law that provided for a public-supported system of education. This law required towns of over fifty households to provide a teacher of reading and writing and towns with over a hundred households to establish a grammar school also.

During the eighteenth century, Massachusetts had an especially high literacy rate for males, reaching 80 percent. Although the literacy rate for females was below 50 percent during the same period, it was still relatively high in comparison to the other regions of colonial America. In the nineteenth century girls began to attend town schools in New England at levels comparable with boys; many women turned to teaching basic literacy in elementary schools, especially in outlying districts, while male teachers dominated the town grammar schools. In the first decades of the eighteenth century only 30 to 40 percent of women could write; that number reached 80 percent by the 1890s. This is explained by increased attendance in both elementary and secondary schools for girls during the last half of the nineteenth century.

the mid-atlantic

Colonial education in the middle colonies lacked the support of any civil authority and generally developed along sectarian lines. In Pennsylvania the Quakers did not establish a state-controlled system of education, but they did set up elementary schools that provided basic literacy. Essentially children were taught to read the Bible. In the middle colonies, the majority of schools were denominational, yet in the major towns, such as Philadelphia, nonsectarian private secondary schools or academies began to emerge during the first half of the eighteenth century, offering the student a variety of practical subjects such as navigation, agriculture, and surveying besides the classics, mathematics, and English. After independence prominent figures including Benjamin Franklin, influenced by the Enlightenment and the American Revolution, pushed for a more secular and utilitarian secondary education that reflected the republican nation and commercial society. This led to the further growth of small private schools and academies (sometimes referred to as the English Grammar School), which were popular among the new merchant classes. Also, throughout the eighteenth century, some parents hired private tutors to instruct children in the classics, modern languages (particularly French), arithmetic, art, and even dancing.

New York City established only a few grammar schools during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The authorities in New York did, however, encourage the work of the Church of England's Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG) in supporting ten charity schools during the course of the eighteenth century. Some of these charity schools taught African Americans as well as poor whites. By the latter part of the eighteenth century, a few African free schools were established in progressive towns like Philadelphia and New York. Both Pennsylvania and New York provided state funds for charity schools by the early nineteenth century.

the south

Education in the South during the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century reflected the region's paternalist and agrarian society. In 1779 Thomas Jefferson encouraged education reform in Virginia to spread knowledge to a "free" society. Jefferson's plan included a free elementary education for all white boys and girls as well as the founding of twenty state-supported secondary schools that provided a grammar school education for talented white boys. But Jefferson's ideas on state-sponsored education did not pass in the Virginia legislature, and there was little discussion of a state tax-supported system in Virginia until the early decades of the nineteenth century. Any education received by slaves during this period was minimal because most state laws forbade it. Even so, some basic literacy was taught to slaves on a few plantations and farms. By the Civil War, only 5 percent of blacks were literate.

In the eighteenth century and through the antebellum period, education in the South was not considered a civic concern (as in New England) but instead mostly an individual and private matter. Much of the teaching came from informal sources, such as the family and the church. The planter class hired tutors to provide their sons with an education based on humanism—mainly focusing on the Latin and Greek classics, as well as history, philosophy, law, music, and science. Southern aristocrats' daughters studied French from the plantation tutor. More often, however, girls were taught manners and other social graces from their mothers. In large towns such as Savannah and Charleston, some formal education took place in the guise of new private schools advertising a broad curriculum. Similar to the mid-Atlantic states, most of the formal education in the South was provided by churches and philanthropic societies, such as the SPG, which established several charity schools. With this tradition of both informal and formal education, basic literacy rates among white males were surprisingly high. In the South Carolina backcountry, for example, literacy rates for white males may have reached 80 percent.

As demand for skilled labor increased during the colonial era, the Southern colonies legally established an apprenticeship system. This marked the first time the Southern colonies enforced education. The system was put in place not only to provide an opportunity for those who wanted to learn a trade, but also for orphans and the destitute. Most children of the rural poor, however, had no formal education because farms were too scattered to establish a community school. In Virginia and Maryland, however, wealthy planters sometimes bequeathed funds to establish "free schools" for the poor. These schools taught the basics: reading, writing, and arithmetic. If a family could afford it, a small fee was charged, but otherwise it was free. Even though formal schooling was limited in the colonial and Revolutionary periods, the South was nevertheless influenced by the common school movement of the 1830s, with common schools emerging especially in North Carolina and the upper regions of the Piedmont.

the national government and the new territories

The new Republic created as a result of the American Revolution relied on a new civic-minded and educated electorate. As a result, there was a push for state-supported education in settled areas as well as the new territories. Independence soon led to an American nationalism that valued education not just to provide for good citizenship but also to cultivate loyalty for the new national government and to construct national identity. Noah Webster was the most famous advocate of this new American nationalism in education which led to the rise of the common school movement of the 1830s. The common school reformers called for a state-supported school system that provided all children with a common curriculum, arguing that if children from diverse backgrounds were taught a common political and social ideology, a strong sense of community could be constructed and social problems limited. This movement provided the blueprint for the later development of the modern state public schools.

Although the common school movement also influenced the development of public-funded education in the new territories, an earlier policy—the Northwest Ordinance—enacted by the new national government had lasting effects on the development of American education. After the Revolution, settlers flooded into the new territories, and in 1787 the Northwest Ordinance established public support for education in the new territories (north of the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi). Each township in the new territories was divided into thirty-six sections, with the sixteenth section required to provide either a school or at least apply the rents and sales received from that section explicitly for education.

See alsoNorthwest and Southwest Ordinances .

bibliography

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Cremin, Lawrence A. American Education: The Colonial Experience, 1607–1783. New York: Harper and Row, 1970.

——. American Education: The National Experience, 1783–1876. New York: Harper and Row, 1980.

Perlmann, Joel, Silvana R. Siddali, and Keith Whitescarver. "Literacy, Schooling, and Teaching among New England Women, 1730–1820." History of Education Quarterly 37, no. 2 (summer 1997): 117–139.

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Jeremy David Rowan