Education in North America

Three interacting forces shaped education in the North American colonies: religious fervor, early Enlightenment thought, and contact with native peoples and with the wilderness itself. The early settlers of North America, as distinguished from the mercantile explorers who worked the traps in Hudson Bay and planted the tobacco fields of Virginia, or the explorers and missionaries who controlled the Spanish and French territories, immigrated to the North American continent to establish Christian religious communities with strong sectarian identities. The settlers arrived in the New World with a sense of righteousness and a powerful sense of possibility. They aimed at nothing short of creating a new kind of society on the tabula rasa of the New World. But when they arrived, the settlers discovered that the indigenous peoples of the continent had created complex communities with deep histories and an easy relationship to the wilderness they inhabited. Within just a few years, the leaders of settlements across New England began to doubt the internal coherence of their communities, castigating the younger generation for their wavering faith. The chief cause, they surmised, was the lack of civilizing structures they had left behind in the established cities of Europe. They worried, too, that the wilderness and native culture were temptations to be resisted, and in their sermons they began to demonize the tribes who were their neighbors. To remedy this perceived declension and entropy, settlements turned to education as a means of reinforcing common values and ideals. In 1640, the General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony enacted the first law on the continent requiring universal education among its youth as a way of defeating "that ould deluder, Satan," and of securing the tenuous hold the colony had over the hearts and minds of its citizens.

Formal education, then, has its origins in North America as a tool for the dissemination of common norms and values perceived as necessary by the leaders of the religious colonies of the seventeenth century. Education was, in other words, a defensive force aimed at the conservation of a particular set of ideas, values, and behaviors. Throughout the seventeenth century, communities across North America supported education as a means of internal cohesion. Schools, such as they were, were often temporary or informal affairs, connected to local churches, established at home by women who could teach their charges to read and write as well as cook and sew, or by masters who taught their apprentices to read by candlelight after the day's work was done. Even at Harvard and William and Mary, the first of the colonial colleges, admission, courses, and requirements were informal affairs. Critically, during this period of local informality, gender roles, racial discrimination, and even the socioeconomic stratification of opportunity, while ubiquitous, were neither as rigid nor as obvious as they were to become. Their very ubiquity made them a part of the social fabric, unobserved and unscrutinized. At the same time, the lack of rigid structures enabled individuals, especially young women, to enjoy relatively unfettered access to primary education. Indeed, throughout the colonial period rates of literacy for women in North America exceeded those for men.