The year 1630, chronicled in New England annals as the beginning of the Great Migration, witnessed the founding there of Puritanism as the established religion. Rejecting democracy and toleration as unscriptural, the Puritans put their trust in a theocracy of the elect that brooked no divergence from Puritan orthodoxy. So close was the relation between state and church that an offense against the one was an offense against the other and, in either case, “treason to the Lord Jesus.” The early Puritans also put their confidence in centralized church governance; however, geographic reality forced them to settle for a localized, congregational administration, for impossible roads made land travel over any distance onerous and even dangerous, and thus the focal point of social and political life had to be the village. Small and constricted, a place where the vital necessities, sacred and profane, were within walking range of all and where one’s conduct was exposed to constant public watch, the New England village was the prime mover of communal life.
In Puritan moral theology, the young, like the old, were sinners doomed by almost insurmountable odds to perdition. To God, indeed, even infants were depraved, unregenerate, and damned. Hence, the sooner the young learned the ground rules of the good society, as revealed in the Bible, the better. The task of teaching them first befell the parents. Later, when they were old enough, the burden was conferred upon the school. The first secondary school was probably the Boston Latin School. Founded in 1635, it was modeled on the grammar schools of England, which is to say that it put an overwhelming emphasis on the ancient languages and “humane learning and good literature.” By the 1640s the idea of town-supported schooling had lost its novelty.
If towns braved the first steps in education, then the Commonwealth of Massachusetts did not trail far behind. In 1642 it ordered parents and masters of apprentices to see to it that their charges were instructed in reading, religion, and the colony’s principal laws. Five years later, the General Court reinforced this enactment with yet another. Aimed at the “old deluder Satan,” it undertook to thwart him from keeping “men from a knowledge of the Scriptures,” by requiring every township of 50 households to commission someone to teach reading and writing. The law also directed towns of 100 families to furnish instruction in Latin grammar so that youth might be “fitted for the university.” Finally, the measure required teachers to be paid by “parents or masters… or by the inhabitants in general.” The measure was given only a pallid obedience, but its assumption that the state may compel the schooling of its young and that, in order to support education, it may impose taxes is pertinent to subsequent times.
The first colonists had scarcely settled when, in 1636, the General Court appropriated £400 “towards a school or college.” When two years later John Harvard died and left the institution his library and some £800, the grateful founders honoured their school with his name. Designed to train youth for important Puritan places, particularly in the ministry, the college accepted only those who could read, write, and speak Latin in prose and verse, besides knowing Greek nouns and verbs familiarly. Once admitted, the student was lodged at the college, pledged to a blameless behaviour, and put upon a prescribed four-year course of grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, ethics, ancient history, Greek, and Hebrew. If he weathered these hazards, he was made a bachelor of arts (B.A.), and, if ambition still roweled him, he could enroll for another three years to become a master of arts (M.A.).
So things sat until the century’s passing. Then, swayed by the intellectual breezes of Europe’s Enlightenment, Harvard College ventured some earnest renovation. Its texts, cobwebbed with Aristotelianism, were replaced with newer ones by John Locke and Sir Isaac Newton. In 1718 it added mathematics and sciences to its offerings, and 20 years later it enriched itself with a professorship of mathematics and natural philosophy. There were the usual grumblings from conservatives, and in 1701 a number of Congregational parsons, all Harvard sons, distressed by their alma mater’s dalliance in newfangled ideas, inaugurated the collegiate school of Connecticut, now Yale University. The new academies
Disdainful of the challenging intellectual values, the secondary schools continued in their Classical tracks. By the 18th century, however, their tradition was playing out, especially among the rising nabobs of the marketplace. When the old schools failed to respond to their demands for an education calculated to prepare their sons for everyday living, they resorted to private schooling. From such endeavour emerged the academy. The first school of strictly native provenance, it made its advent in 1751 in Philadelphia (the Philadelphia Academy), the work in the main of Benjamin Franklin. What differentiated it from its Classical antecedent was its promotion of “useful learning,” to wit, the vernacular, modern languages, history, geography, chronology, navigation, mathematics, natural and applied science, and the like.
The first academies addressed themselves solely to boys, but time saw them vouchsafe instruction to girls in a “female department,” which in turn gave way to the “female academy,” whose curriculum reflected debates of the time about female education. Fine arts, domestic subjects, and training for occupations open to women were included, though some female educators stressed intellectual attainment rather than practical learning.
Private ventures always, academies generally were not loath to solicit outside assistance—some, indeed, as in New York, enjoyed a public subsidy. Whatever their special character, to their very end they maintained their original purpose of bringing education into closer consonance with “the great and the real business of living,” as Phillips Academy of Andover, Massachusetts, phrased it when, in 1778, it held its first sessions. The middle colonies
The religious uniformity that marked the Puritan theocracy was missing in the middle colonies. From New York through Delaware there flourished a host of sects whose scriptural interpretations were diverse—often, in fact, in collision. Nor was there even the tie of a common language, for the settlers came from many lands. Divergent in religion and language—the bedrock in those times of elementary schooling—the middle colonists could not accommodate themselves, as did the Puritans, to a single school teaching reading and religion to all the children of the neighbourhood. Instead, they depended on parish or parochial schools, each of them free to teach by its own denominational lights. True, for a time New Netherland, with its established Dutch Reformed Church, maintained some town schools, but, after the English seized the colony (renaming it New York), such endeavours ceased. Pennsylvania, linguistically and denominationally the most heterogeneous of the colonies, began its educational history by ordering the erection of public schools and the instruction of children. But the ordinance fell prey to powerful sectarian antagonisms, and in 1701 the colony essayed to make peace by sanctioning the establishment of parochial schools.
Like the New Englanders, the middle colonists aspired to establish colleges, but, with no friendly lawmakers to sustain them, they found their task heavily hobbled, and the mid-1700s were upon them before their hopes materialized with the advent, in 1746, of the College of New Jersey (Princeton). There followed King’s College (Columbia) in 1754, the College and Academy of Philadelphia (Pennsylvania) in 1755, and Queen’s College (Rutgers) in 1766. Common to these schools was their stress on the ancient languages, metaphysics, and divine science. At the same time, however, one discerns signs of a new liberalism. Both Rutgers and Columbia announced their interdenominationalism. Pennsylvania offered courses in physics, and in 1765 it became the first colonial college to sponsor systematic instruction in medicine. The Southern colonies