The History of Education / Educational Practice and Progress Considered as a Phase of the Development and Spread of Western Civilization

by Ellwood Patterson Cubberley

III. THE REFORMATION AND AMERICAN EDUCATION

THE PROTESTANT SETTLEMENT OF AMERICA. Columbus had discovered the new world just twenty-five years before Luther nailed his theses to the church door at Wittenberg, and by the time the northern continent had been roughly explored and was ready for settlement, Europe was in the midst of a century of warfare in a vain attempt to extirpate the Protestant heresy. By the time that the futility of fire and sword as means for religious conversion had finally dawned upon Christian Europe and found expression in the Peace of Westphalia (1648), which closed the terrible Thirty Years' War (p. 301), the first permanent settlements in a number of the American colonies had been made. These settlements, and the beginnings of education in America, are so closely tied up with the Protestant Revolts in Europe that a chapter on the beginnings of American education belongs here as still another phase of the educational results of the Protestant Revolts.

Practically all the early settlers in America came from among the peoples and from those lands which had embraced some form of the Protestant faith, and many of them came to America to found new homes and establish their churches in the wilderness, because here they could enjoy a religious freedom impossible in their old home-lands. This was especially true of the French Huguenots, many of whom, after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes [1] (1685), fled to America and settled along the coast of the Carolinas; the Calvinistic Dutch and Walloons, who settled in and about New Amsterdam; the Scotch and Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, who settled in New Jersey, and later extended along the Allegheny Mountain ridges into all the southern colonies; the English Quakers about Philadelphia, who came under the leadership of William Penn, and a few English Baptists and Methodists in eastern Pennsylvania; the Swedish Lutherans, along the Delaware; the German Lutherans, Moravians, Mennonites, Dunkers, and Reformed-Church Germans, who settled in large numbers in the mountain valleys of Pennsylvania; and the Calvinistic dissenters from the English National Church, known as Puritans, who settled the New England colonies, and who, more than any others, gave direction to the future development of education in the American States. Very many of these early religious groups came to America in little congregations, bringing their ministers with them. Each set up, in the colony in which it settled, what were virtually little religious republics, that through them they might the better perpetuate the religious principles for which they had left the land of their birth. Education of the young for membership in the Church, and the perpetuation of a learned ministry for the congregations, from the first elicited the serious attention of these pioneer settlers.

Englishmen who were adherents of the English national faith (Anglicans) also settled in Virginia and the other southern colonies, and later in New York and New Jersey, while Maryland was founded as the only Catholic colony, in what is now the United States, by a group of persecuted English Catholics who obtained a charter from Charles I, in 1632. These settlements are shown on the map on the following page. As a result of these settlements there was laid, during the early colonial period of American history, the foundation of those type attitudes toward education which subsequently so materially shaped the educational development of the different American States during the early part of our national history.

THE PURITANS IN NEW ENGLAND. Of all those who came to America during this early period, the Calvinistic Puritans who settled the New England colonies contributed most that was valuable to the future educational development of America, and because of this will be considered first.

[Illustration: FIG. 107. MAP SHOWING THE RELIGIOUS SETTLEMENTS IN AMERICA]

The original reformation in England, as was stated in chapters XII and XIII, had been much more nominal than real. The English Bible and the English Prayer-Book had been issued to the churches (R. 170), and the King instead of the Pope had been declared by the Act of Supremacy (R. 153) to be the head of the English National Church. The same priests, though, had continued in the churches under the new régime, and the church service had not greatly changed aside from its transformation from Latin into English. Neither the Church as an organization nor its members experienced any great religious reformation. Not all Englishmen, though, took the change in allegiance so lightly (R. 183), and in consequence there came to be a gradually increasing number who desired a more fundamental reform of the English Church. By 1600 the demand for Church reform had become very insistent, and the question of Church purification (whence the name "Puritans") had become a burning question in England.

[Illustration: FIG. 108. HOMES OF THE PILGRIMS, AND THEIR ROUTE TO
AMERICA]

The English Puritans, moreover, were of two classes. One was a moderate but influential "low-church" group within the "high" State Church, possessed of no desire to separate Church and State, but earnestly insistent on a simplification of the Church ceremonial, the elimination of a number of the vestiges of the old Romish-Church ritual, and particularly the introduction of more preaching into the service. The other class constituted a much more radical group, and had become deeply imbued with Calvinistic thinking. This group gradually came into open opposition to any State Church, stood for the local independence of the different churches or congregations, and desired the complete elimination of all vestiges of the Romish faith from the church services. [2] They became known as Independents, or Separatists, and formed the germs of the later Congregational groups of early New England. Both Elizabeth (1558-1603) and James I (1603-25) savagely persecuted this more radical group, and many of their congregations were forced to flee from England to obtain personal safety and to enjoy religious liberty (R. 184). One of these fugitive congregations, from Scrooby, in north-central England, after living for several years at Leyden, in Holland, finally set sail for America, landed on Plymouth Rock, in 1620, and began the settlement of that "bleak and stormy coast." Other congregations soon followed, it having been estimated that twenty thousand English Puritans migrated [3] to the New England wilderness before 1640. These represented a fairly well-to-do type of middle-class Englishmen, practically all of whom had had good educational advantages at home.

Settling along the coast in little groups or congregations, they at once set up a combined civil and religious form of government, modeled in a way after Calvin's City-State at Geneva, and which became known as a New England town. [4] In time the southern portion of the coast of New England was dotted with little self-governing settlements of those who had come to America to obtain for themselves that religious freedom which had been denied them at home. These settlements were loosely bound together in a colony federation, in which each town was represented in a General Court, or legislature. The extent of these settlements by 1660 is shown on the map on the opposite page.

BEGINNINGS OF SCHOOLS IN NEW ENGLAND. Having come to America to secure religious freedom, it was but natural that the perpetuation of their particular faith by means of education should have been one of the first matters to engage their attention, after the building of their homes and the setting up of the civil government (R. 185). Being deeply imbued with Calvinistic ideas as to government and religion, they desired to found here a religious commonwealth, somewhat after the model of Geneva (p. 298), or Scotland (p. 335), or the Dutch provinces (p. 334), the corner- stones of which should be religion and education.

[Illustration: FIG. 109. NEW ENGLAND SETTLEMENTS, 1660]

At first, English precedents were followed. Home instruction, which was quite common in England among the Puritans, was naturally much employed to teach the children to read the Bible and to train them to participate in both the family and the congregational worship. After 1647, town elementary schools under a master, and later the English "dame schools" (chapter XVIII), were established to provide this rudimentary instruction. The English apprentice system was also established (R. 201), and the masters of apprentices gave similar instruction to boys entrusted to their care. The town religious governments, under which all the little congregations organized themselves, much as the little religious parishes had been organized in old England, also began the voluntary establishment of town grammar schools, as a few towns in England had done (R. 143) before the Puritans migrated. The "Latin School" at Boston dates from 1635, and has had a continuous existence since that time. The grammar school at Charlestown dates from 1636, that at Ipswich from the same year, and the school at Salem from 1637. In 1639 Dorchester voted:

that there shall be a rent of 20 lb a year for ever imposed upon Tomsons Island … toward the mayntenance of a schoole in Dorchester. This rent of 20 lb yearly to bee payd to such a schoole-master as shall vndertake to teach english, latine, and other tongues, and also writing. The said schoole-master to bee chosen from tyme to tyme p'r the freemen.

Newbury, in 1639, voted "foure akers of upland" and "sixe akers of salt marsh" to Anthony Somerby "for his encouragement to keepe schoole for one yeare," and later levied a town rate of £24 for a "schoole to be kepte at the meeting house." Cambridge also early established a Latin grammar school "for the training up of Young Schollars, and fitting them [5] for Academicall Learning" (R. 185).

The support for the town schools thus founded was derived from various sources, such as the levying of tuition fees, the income from town lands or fisheries set aside for the purpose, [6] voluntary contributions from the people of the town, [7] a town tax, or a combination of two or more of these methods. The founding of the "free (grammar) school" at Roxburie, in 1645, is representative (R. 188) of the early methods. There was no uniform plan as yet, in either old or New England.

FOUNDING OF HARVARD COLLEGE. In addition to establishing Latin grammar schools, a college was founded, in 1636, by the General Court (legislature) of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, to perpetuate learning and insure an educated ministry (R. 185) to the churches after "our present ministers shall lie in the dust." This new college, located at Newtowne, was modeled after Emmanuel College at Cambridge, an English Puritan college in which many of the early New England colonists had studied, [8] and in loving memory of which they rechristened Newtowne as Cambridge. In 1639 the college was christened Harvard College, after a graduate of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, by the name of John Harvard, who died in Charlestown, a year after his arrival in the colony, and who left the college his library of two hundred and sixty volumes and half his property, about £850.

The instruction in the new college was a combination of the arts and theological instruction given in a mediaeval university, though at Harvard the President, Master Dunster (R. 185), did all the teaching. For the first fifty years at Harvard this continued to be true, the attendance during that time seldom exceeding twenty. The entrance requirements for the college (R. 186 a) call for the completion of a typical English Latin grammar-school education; the rules and precepts for the government of the college (R. 186 b) reveal the deep religious motive; and the schedule of studies (R. 186 c) and the requirements for degrees (R. 186 d) both show that the instruction was true to the European type. In the charter for the college, granted by the colonial legislature in 1650 (R. 187 a), we find exemptions and conditions which remind one strongly of the older European foundations. A century later Brown College, in Rhode Island, was granted even more extensive exemptions (R. 187 b).

THE FIRST COLONIAL LEGISLATION: THE LAW OF 1642. We thus see manifested early in New England the deep Puritan-Calvinistic zeal for learning as a bulwark of Church and State. We also see the establishment in the wilderness of New England of a typical English educational system—that is, private instruction in reading and religion by the parents in the home and by the masters of apprentices, and later by a town schoolmaster; the Latin grammar school in the larger towns, to prepare boys for the college of the colony; and an English-type college to prepare them for the ministry. As in England, too, all was clearly subordinate to the Church. Still further, as in England also, the system was voluntary, the deep religious interest which had brought the congregations to America being depended upon to insure for all the necessary education and religious training.

It early became evident, though, that these voluntary efforts on the part of the people and the towns would not be sufficient to insure that general education which was required by the Puritan religious theory. Under the hard pioneer conditions, and the suffering which ensued, many parents and masters of apprentices evidently proved neglectful of their educational duties. Accordingly the Church appealed to its servant, the State, as represented in the colonial legislature (General Court) to assist it in compelling parents and masters to observe their religious obligations. The result was the famous Massachusetts Law of 1642 (R. 190), which directed "the chosen men" (Selectmen; Councilmen) of each town to ascertain, from time to time, if the parents and masters were attending to their educational duties; if the children were being trained "in learning and labor and other employments … profitable to the Commonwealth"; and if children were being taught "to read and understand the principles of religion and the capital laws of the country," and empowered them to impose fines on "those who refuse to render such accounts to them when required." In 1645 the General Court further ordered that all youth between ten and sixteen years of age should also receive instruction "in ye exercise of arms, as small guns, halfe pikes, bowes & arrows, &c."

[Illustration: PLATE 9. Two TABLETS ON THE WEST GATEWAY AT HARVARD
UNIVERSITY
Reproducing colonial records relating to the founding of Harvard College.]

The Law of 1642 is remarkable in that, for the first time in the English- speaking world, a legislative body representing the State ordered that all children should be taught to read. The law shows clearly not only the influence of the Reformation theory as to personal salvation and the Calvinistic conception of the connection between learning and religion, but also the influence of the English Poor-Law legislation which had developed rapidly during the half-century immediately preceding the coming of the Puritans to America (R. 173). On the foundations of the English Poor Law of 1601 (R. 174) our New England settlers moulded the first American law relating to education, adding to the principles there established (p. 326) a distinct Calvinistic contribution to our new-world life that, the authorities of the civil town should see that all children were taught "to read and understand the principles of religion and the capital laws of the country." This law the Selectmen, or the courts if they failed to do so, were ordered to enforce, and the courts usually looked after their duties in the matter (R. 192).

The Law of 1647. The Law of 1642, while ordering "the chosen men" of each town to see that the education and training of children was not neglected, and providing for fines on parents and masters who failed to render accounts when required, did not, however, establish schools, or direct the employment of schoolmasters. The provision of education, after the English fashion, was still left with the homes. After a trial of five years, the results of which were not satisfactory, the General Court enacted another law by means of which it has been asserted that "the Puritan government of Massachusetts rendered probably its greatest service to the future."

After recounting in a preamble (R. 191) that it had in the past been "one cheife proiect of y't ould deluder, Satan, to keepe men from the knowledge of y'e Scriptures, … by keeping y'm in an unknowne tongue," so now "by pswading from y'e use of tongues," and "obscuring y'e true sence & meaning of y'e originall" by "false glosses of saint-seeming deceivers," learning was in danger of being "buried in y'e grave of o'r fath'rs in y'e church and comonwealth"; the Court ordered:

1. That every town having fifty householders should at once appoint a
teacher of reading and writing, and provide for his wages in such
manner as the town might determine; and

2. That every town having one hundred householders must provide a
grammar school to fit youths for the university, under a penalty of
£5 (afterwards increased to £20) for failure to do so.

This law represents a distinct step in advance over the Law of 1642, and for this there are no English precedents. It was not until the latter part of the nineteenth century that England took such a step. The precedents for the compulsory establishment of schools lie rather in the practices of the different German States (p. 318), the actions of the Dutch synods (R. 176) and provinces (p. 335), the Acts of the Scottish parliament of 1633 and 1646 (p. 334; R. 179), and the general Calvinistic principle that education was an important function of a religious State.

PRINCIPLES ESTABLISHED. The State here, acting again as the servant of the Church, enacted a law and fixed a tradition which prevailed and grew in strength and effectiveness after State and Church had parted company. Not only was a school system ordered established—elementary for all towns and children, and secondary for youths in the larger towns—but, for the first time among English-speaking people, there was an assertion of the right of the State to require communities to establish and maintain schools, under penalty if they refused to do so. It can be safely asserted, in the light of later developments, that the two laws of 1642 and 1647 represent the foundations upon which our American state public-school systems have been built. Mr. Martin, the historian of the Massachusetts public-school system, states the fundamental principles which underlay this legislation, as follows: [9]

1. The universal education of youth is essential to the well-being of
the State.

2. The obligation to furnish this education rests primarily upon the
parent.

3. The State has a right to enforce this obligation.

4. The State may fix a standard which shall determine the kind of education, and the minimum amount.

5. Public money, raised by general tax, may be used to provide such
education as the State requires. The tax may be general, though the
school attendance is not.

6. Education higher than the rudiments may be supplied by the State.
Opportunity must be provided, at public expense, for youths who
wish to be fitted for the university.

"It is important to note here," adds Mr. Martin, "that the idea underlying all this legislation is neither paternalistic nor socialistic. The child is to be educated, not to advance his personal interests, but because the State will suffer if he is not educated. The State does not provide schools to relieve the parent, nor because it can educate better than the parent can, but because it can thereby better enforce the obligation which it imposes." To prevent a return to the former state of religious ignorance it was important that education be provided. To assure this the colonial legislature enacted a law requiring the maintenance and support of schools by the towns. This law became the corner-stone of our American state school systems.

Influence on other New England colonies. Connecticut Colony, in its Law of 1650 establishing a school system, combined the spirit of the Massachusetts Law of 1642, though stated in different words (R. 193), and the Law of 1647, stated word for word. New Haven Colony, in 1655, ordered that children and apprentices should be taught to read, as had been done in Massachusetts, in 1642, but on the union of New Haven and Connecticut Colonies, in 1665, the Connecticut Code became the law for the united colonies. In 1702 a college was founded (Yale) and finally located at New Haven, to offer preparation for the ministry in the Connecticut colony, as had been done earlier in Massachusetts, and Latin grammar schools were founded in the Connecticut towns to prepare for the new college, as also had been done earlier in Massachusetts. The rules and regulations for the grammar school at New Haven (R. 189) reveal the purpose and describe the instruction provided in one of the earliest and best of these.

[Illustration: FIG. 111. WHERE YALE COLLEGE WAS FOUNDED]

Plymouth Colony, in 1658 and again in 1663, proposed to the towns that they "sett vp" a schoolmaster "to traine vp children to reading and writing" (R. 194 a). In 1672 the towns were asked to aid Harvard College by gifts (R. 194 b). In 1673-74 the income from the Cape Cod fisheries was set aside for the support of a (grammar) school (R. 194 c). Finally, in 1677, all towns having over fifty families and maintaining a grammar school were ordered aided from the fishery proceeds (R. 194 d).

The Massachusetts laws also applied to Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont, as these were then a part of Massachusetts Colony. After New Hampshire separated, in 1680, the Massachusetts Law of 1647 was virtually readopted in 1719-21. In Maine and Vermont there were so few settlers, until near the beginning of our national life, that the influence of the Massachusetts legislation on these States was negligible until a later period.

Only in Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, of all the New England colonies, did the Massachusetts legislation fail to exert a deep influence. Settled as these two had been by refugees from New England, and organized on a basis of hospitality to all who suffered from religious oppression elsewhere, the religious stimulus to the founding of schools naturally was lacking. As the religious basis for education was as yet the only basis, the first development of schools in Rhode Island awaited the humanitarian and economic influences which did not become operative until early in the nineteenth century.

Outside of the New England colonies, the appeal to the State as the servant of the Church was seldom made during the early colonial period, the churches handling the educational problem in their own way. As a result the beginnings of State oversight and control were left to New England. In the central colonies a series of parochial-school systems came to prevail, while in Episcopalian Virginia and the other colonies to the south the no-business-of-the-State attitude assumed toward education by the mother country was copied.

THE CHURCH SCHOOLS OF NEW YORK. New Netherland, as New York Colony was called before the English occupation, was settled by the Dutch West India Company, and some dozen villages about New York and up the Hudson had been founded by the time it passed to the control of the English, in 1664. In these the Dutch established typical home-land public parochial schools, under the control of the Reformed Dutch Church. The schoolmaster was usually the reader and precentor in the church as well (R. 195), and often acted, as in Holland, as sexton besides. Girls attended on equal terms with boys, but sat apart and recited in separate classes. The instruction consisted of reading and writing Dutch, sometimes a little arithmetic, the Dutch Catechism, the reading of a few religious books, and certain prayers. The rules (1661) for a schoolmaster in New Amsterdam (R. 196), and the contract with a Dutch schoolmaster in Flatbush (R. 195), dating from 1682, reveal the type of schools and school conditions provided. All except the children of the poor paid fees to the schoolmaster. [10] He was licensed by the Dutch church authorities. As the Dutch had not come to America because of persecution, and were in no way out of sympathy with religious conditions in the home-land, the schools they developed here were typical of the Dutch European parochial schools of the time (R. 178). A trivial (Latin) school was also established in New York, in 1652.

After the English occupation the English principle of private and church control of education, with schooling on a tuition or a charitable basis, came to prevail, and this continued up to the beginning of our national period. [11] Of the English colonial schools of New York Draper has written: [12]

All the English schools in the province from 1700 down to the time of the Declaration of Independence were maintained by a great religious society organized under the auspices of the Church of England—and, of course, with the favor of the government—called "The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts." The law governing this Society provided that no teacher should be employed until he had proved "his affection for the present government" and his "conformity to the doctrine and discipline of the Church of England." Schools maintained under such auspices were in no sense free schools. Indeed, humiliating as it is, no student of history can fail to discern the fact that the government of Great Britain, during its supremacy in this territory, did nothing to facilitate the extension or promote the efficiency of free elementary schools among the people.

THE PAROCHIAL SCHOOLS OF PENNSYLVANIA. Pennsylvania was settled by Quakers, Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, German Lutherans, Moravians, Mennonites, and members of the German Reformed Church, all of whom came to America to secure greater religious liberty and had been attracted to this colony by the freedom of religious worship which Penn had provided for there. All these were Protestant sects, all believed in the necessity of learning to read the Bible as a means to personal salvation, and all made efforts looking toward the establishment of schools as a part of their church organization. Unlike New England, though, no sect was in a majority; church control for each denomination was considered as most satisfactory; and no appeal was made to the State to have it assist the churches in the enforcement of their religious purposes. The clergymen were usually the teachers in the parochial schools established, [13] while private pay schools were opened in the villages and towns. These were taught in English, German, or the Moravian tongue (Czech), according to the original language of the different immigrants. The Quakers seem to have taken particular interest in schools (R. 199), a Quaker school in Philadelphia (R. 198) having been established the year the city was founded. Girls were educated as well as boys, and the emphasis was placed on reading, writing, counting, and religion, rather than upon any higher form of training.

[Illustration: FIG. 112. AN OLD QUAKER MEETING-HOUSE AND SCHOOL AT
LAMPETER, PENNSYLVANIA
(From an old drawing)]

The result was the development in this colony of a policy of depending on church and private effort, and the provision of education, aside from certain rudimentary and religious instruction, was left largely for those who could afford to pay for the privilege. Charitable education was extended to but a few, for a short time, while, under the freedom allowed, many communities made but indifferent provisions or suffered their schools to lapse. Under the primitive conditions of the time the interest even in religious education often declined almost to the vanishing point. So lax in the matter of providing schooling had many communities become that the second Provincial Assembly, sitting in Philadelphia, in 1683, passed an ordinance requiring (R. 197) that all persons having children must cause them to be taught to read and write, so that they might be able to read the Scriptures by the time they were twelve years old, and also that all children be taught some useful trade. A fine of £5 was to be assessed for failure to comply with the law. So much in advance of English ideas as to what was fitting and proper was this compulsory law that it was vetoed by William and Mary, when submitted to their majesties for approval. Ten years later it was reënacted by the Governor and Assembly of the colony, but proved so difficult of enforcement that it was soon dropped, and the chance of starting education in Pennsylvania somewhat after the New England model was lost. The colony now settled down to a policy of non state action, and this in time became so firmly established that the do- as-you-please idea persisted in this State up to the establishment of the first free state school system, in 1834.

MIXED CONDITIONS IN NEW JERSEY. In New Jersey, situated as it was near the center of the different colonies, the early development of education there was the product of a number of different influences. The Dutch crossed from New Amsterdam, the English came from Connecticut and later from New York, Scotch and Scotch-Irish Presbyterians came from the mother country, Swedish Lutherans settled along the Delaware, and Quakers and German Lutherans came over from Pennsylvania. The educational practice of the colony or land from which each group of settlers came was reproduced in the colony. After the English succeeded the Dutch in New Amsterdam (1664), English methods and practice in education gradually came into control throughout most of New Jersey, and as a result here, as in New York, but little was accomplished in providing schools for other than a select few until well after the beginning of the nineteenth century. Neither New Jersey, New York, nor Pennsylvania may be said to have developed any colonial educational policy aside from that of allowing private and parochial effort to provide such schools as seemed desirable.

VIRGINIA AND THE SOUTHERN TYPE. Almost all the conditions attending the settlement of Virginia were in contrast to those of the New England colonies. The early settlers were from the same class of English yeomen and country squires, but with the important difference that whereas the New England settlers were Dissenters from the Church of England and had come to America to obtain freedom in religious worship, the settlers in Virginia were adherents of the National Church and had come to America for gain. The marked differences in climate and possible crops led to the large plantation type of settlement, instead of the compact little New England town; the introduction of large numbers of "indentured white servants," and later negro slaves, led to the development of classes in society instead of to the New England type of democracy; and the lack of a strong religious motive for education naturally led to the adoption of the customary English practices instead of to the development of colonial schools. The tutor in the home, education in small private pay schools, or education in the mother country were the prevailing methods adopted among the well-to-do planters, while the poorer classes were left with only such advantages as apprenticeship training or charity schools might provide. Throughout the entire colonial period Virginia remained most like the mother country in spirit and practice, and stands among the colonies as the clearest example of the English attitude toward school support and control. As in the mother country, education was considered to be no business of the State. Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and the Carolinas followed the English attitude, much after the fashion of Virginia.

Practically all the Virginia colonial legislation relating to education refers either to William and Mary College (founded in 1693), or to the education of orphans and the children of the poor. Both these interests, as we have previously seen, were typically English. All the seventeenth- century legislation relating to education is based on the English Poor-Law legislation, [14] previously described (p. 325), and included the compulsory apprenticeship of the children of the poor, training in a trade, the requirement that the public authorities must provide opportunities for this type of education, and the use of both local and colony funds for the purpose (R. 200 a), all, as the Statutes state, "according to the aforesaid laudable custom in the Kingdom of England." It was not until 1705 that Virginia reached the point, reached by Massachusetts in 1642, of requiring that "the master of the [apprenticed] orphan shall be obliged to teach him to read and write." In all the Anglican colonies the apprenticing of the children of the poor (see R. 200 b for some interesting North Carolina records) was a characteristic feature. During the entire colonial period the indifference of the mother country to general education was steadily reflected in Virginia and in the colonies which were essentially Anglican in religion, and followed the English example.

TYPE PLANS REPRESENTED BY 1750. The seventeenth century thus witnessed the transplanting of European ideas as to government, religion, and education to the new American colonies, and by the eighteenth century we find three clearly marked types of educational practice or conception as to educational responsibility established on American soil.

The first was the strong Calvinistic conception of a religious State, supporting a system of common vernacular schools, higher Latin schools, and a college, for both religious and civic ends. This type dominated New England, and is best represented by Massachusetts. From New England this attitude was carried westward by the migrations of New England people, and deeply influenced the educational development of all States to which the New Englander went in any large numbers. This was the educational contribution of Calvinism to America. [15] Out of it our state school systems of to-day, by the separation of Church and State, have been evolved.

The second was the parochial-school conception of the Dutch, Moravians, Mennonites, German Lutherans, German Reformed Church, Quakers, Presbyterians, Baptists, and Catholics. This type is best represented by Protestant Pennsylvania and Catholic Maryland. It stood for church control of all educational efforts, resented state interference, was dominated only by church purposes, and in time came to be a serious obstacle in the way of rational state school organization and control.

The third type, into which the second type tended to fuse, conceived of public education, aside from collegiate education, as intended chiefly for orphans and the children of the poor, and as a charity which the State was under little or no obligation to assist in supporting. All children of the upper and middle classes in society attended private or church schools, or were taught by tutors in their homes, and for such instruction paid a proper tuition fee. Paupers and orphans, in limited numbers and for a limited time, might be provided with some form of useful education at the expense of either Church or State. This type is best represented by Anglican Virginia, which typified well the laissez-faire policy which dominated England from the time of the Protestant Reformation until the latter half of the nineteenth century.

These three types of attitude toward the provision of education became fixed American types, and each deeply influenced subsequent American educational development, as we shall point out in a later chapter.

DOMINANCE OF THE RELIGIOUS MOTIVE. The seventeenth century was essentially a period of the transplanting, almost unchanged in form, of the characteristic European institutions, manners, religious attitudes, and forms of government to American shores. Each sect or nationality on arriving set up in the new land the characteristic forms of church and school and social observances known in the old home-land. Dutch, Germans, English, Scotch, Calvinists, Lutherans, Anglicans, Presbyterians— reproduced in the American colonies the main type of schools existing at the time of their migration in the mother land from which they came. They were also dominated by the same deep religious purpose.

The dominance of this religious purpose in all instruction is well illustrated by the great beginning-school book of the time, The New England Primer. A digest of the contents of this, with a few pages reproduced, is given in R. 202. This book, from which all children learned to read, was used by Dissenters and Lutherans alike in the American colonies. This book Ford well characterizes in the following words:

As one glances over what may truly be called "The Little Bible of New England," and reads its stern lessons, the Puritan mood is caught with absolute faithfulness. Here was no easy road to knowledge and salvation; but with prose as bare of beauty as the whitewash of their churches, with poetry as rough and stern as their storm-torn coast, with pictures as crude and unfinished as their own glacial-smoothed boulders, between stiff oak covers which symbolized the contents, the children were tutored, until, from being unregenerate, and as Jonathan Edwards said, "young vipers, and infinitely more hateful than vipers" to God, they attained that happy state when, as expressed by Judge Sewell's child, they were afraid that they "should goe to hell," and were "stirred up dreadfully to seek God." God was made sterner and more cruel than any living judge, that all might be brought to realize how slight a chance even the least erring had of escaping eternal damnation.

One learned to read chiefly that one might be able to read the Catechism and the Bible, and to know the will of the Heavenly Father. There was scarcely any other purpose in the maintenance of elementary schools. In the grammar schools and the colleges students were "instructed to consider well the main end of life and studies." These institutions existed mainly to insure a supply of learned ministers for service in Church and State. Such studies as history, geography, science, music, drawing, secular literature, and organized play were unknown. Children were constantly surrounded, week days and Sundays, by the somber Calvinistic religious atmosphere in New England, [16] and by the careful religious oversight of the pastors and elders in the colonies where the parochial-school system was the ruling plan for education. Schoolmasters were required to "catechise their scholars in the principles of the Christian religion," and it was made "a chief part of the schoolmaster's religious care to commend his scholars and his labors amongst them unto God by prayer morning and evening, taking care that his scholars do reverently attend during the same." Religious matter constituted the only reading matter, outside the instruction in Latin in the grammar schools. The Catechism was taught, and the Bible was read and expounded. Church attendance was required, and grammar-school pupils were obliged to report each week on the Sunday sermon. This insistence on the religious element was more prominent in Calvinistic New England than in the colonies to the south, but everywhere the religious purpose was dominant. The church parochial and charity schools were essentially schools for instilling the church practices and beliefs of the church maintaining them. This state of affairs continued until well toward the beginning of the nineteenth century.