Pre-1600: Education: Overview

Native Americans. In October 1492 Christopher Columbus landed on an island he named San Salvador and set in motion the creation of the New World. How Native Americans educated themselves and their children before his arrival is difficult to say. In the absence of sufficient archaeological evidence scholars have attempted to piece together how prehistoric Americans taught their children by assuming that the practices used in the centuries after Columbus were similar to the ones used before. This method is problematic because it does not take into account the cultural discontinuity that resulted from the devastating epidemics spread by European explorers and settlers.

The Renaissance. European explorers comprehended and explained what they saw and the people they met in North America in terms of their own intellectual and educational traditions. The years of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were part of the Renaissance, a general movement across Europe that affected everything from the arts to politics to religion. Although the encounter with the New World forced European scholars to revise what they had known before with what they learned afterward, it nevertheless took several centuries for the importance of Columbus’s discovery to make its full impact on European scholarship.

European Education in America. Upon their arrival in North America, Spanish, French, and English colonial officials and settlers attempted to replicate the social structures and political systems that had formed their home societies. The French and English, however, were unable to found permanent colonies in North America before 1600. French settlements in present-day Florida and Canada lasted less than a year, and the English experiment on Roanoke Island in present-day North Carolina failed twice. Without colonies neither power faced the need to educate colonists and their children, nor, for that matter, did they have to educate Native American populations that might have threatened their interests. The Spanish, however, founded two colonies that lasted beyond 1600, one in present-day Florida and the other in present-day New Mexico. As part of Spanish imperial policy the Crown sent out missionaries to convert the Indians to Catholicism and to subjugate them politically. Education ranked among the missionaries’ tasks, and they opened schools to educate Indians in the new faith as well as in the various technological and social skills required for survival in a Spanish society. During the latter decades of the 1500s Franciscan missionaries made a strong start in this direction in Florida, but their counterparts in the Southwest did not open their first missions until 1598.