The colonial period was an age of child precocity. In that time overzealous parents pushed children forward till they displayed a remarkable precocious learning, to end, in most cases, in an early death either physically or mentally, and yet some of these children did survive the process to become noted and honored men. One such parent wrote to her sister asking to have sent to her a set of toys now known as alphabet blocks and stating that the child's father was contriving a set of toys to teach the child his letters by the time he could speak, he being not yet four months old at the time of the letter. In a later letter the mother wrote to the child's aunt that at twenty-two months of age he could tell his letters in any book and he was beginning to spell. This boy grew up to be the Revolutionary General Charles Cotesworth Pinckney. One boy born in 1752 learned his alphabet in a single lesson and he could read the Bible before he was four years old. At the age of six he was sent to a grammar school, and, as his father would not let him study Latin, he borrowed a Latin grammar and studied through it twice without a teacher. This boy afterward was known as President Timothy Dwight of Yale College.
This precociousness was not confined to boys, for one little girl, born in Boston in 1708, daughter of the President of Harvard College, before her second year was finished could speak distinctly, knew her letters, could relate many stories out of the Scriptures, and when three years old she could recite the greater part of the Assembly's Cathechism and also she could recite many of the psalms and many lines of poetry and read distinctly. The Governor of the colony and other distinguished guests at her home sometimes would place this little girl on a table to show off her acquirements. Another little girl, born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1759, in her third year could "read any book," so the story ran, and, too, this she could do holding the book upside down.
Boys entered the Boston Latin School as young as six and a half years of age and often parents had them begin Latin at an earlier age, some parents teaching their little ones to read Latin words when but three years old along with the English. Young Timothy Dwight would have been prepared to enter college at eight years of age had not his grammar school been discontinued because of having no teacher. A boy in 1686 entered Harvard College at eleven years of age and another boy in 1799 graduated from Rhode Island College (now Brown University) at barely fourteen years of age.
The most remarkable case of childish precocity given by Mrs. Earle was that of Richard Evelyn, who died in 1658 at the early age of five years and three days. The father in his diary recounted in the following quoted passage the wonderful acquirements of the little boy before his death:
"He had learned all his catechism at two years and a half old; he could perfectly read any of the English, Latin, French, or Gothic letters, pronouncing the first three languages exactly. He had, before the fifth year, or in that year, not only skill to read most written hands, but to decline all the nouns, conjugate the verbs regular, and most of the irregular; learned out of Puerelis, got by heart almost the entire vocabulary of Latin and French primitives and words, could make congruous syntax, turn English into Latin, and vice versa, construe and prove what he read, and did the government and use of relatives, verbs, substances, ellipses and many figures and tropes, and made a considerable progress in Comenius' Janua; begun himself to write legibly and had a strong passion for Greek. The number of verses he could recite was prodigious, and what he remembered of the parts of plays which he would also act; and, when seeing a Plautus in one's hand, he asked what book it was, and being told it was comedy and too difficult for him, he wept for sorrow. Strange was his apt and ingenious application of fables and morals, for he had read Æsop; he had a wonderful disposition to mathematics, having by heart divers propositions of Euclid that were read to him in play, and he would make lines and demonstrate them. He had learned by heart divers sentences in Latin and Greek which on occasion he would produce even to wonder. He was all life, all prettiness, far from morose, sullen, or childish in anything he said or did."[397]
The girls of colonial times did not receive much education, as it was not considered necessary for women to have learning beyond that necessary for household duties. All that was considered really needed by a girl in the way of book learning was to know how to read and write and cipher a little. Most of the girls received nothing further than elementary training in reading and writing and many of them did not even have that much of education. This was true in all the colonies, New England, New York, and the others.
A lady writing of the education of girls of her time in New York, in the first quarter of the eighteenth century stated:
"It was at that time very difficult to procure the means of instruction in those island districts; female education was, of consequence, conducted on a very limited scale; girls learned needlework (in which they were indeed both skilful and ingenious) from their mothers and aunts; they were taught, too, at that period to read, in Dutch, the Bible, and a few Calvinistic tracts of the devotional kind. But in the infancy of the settlement few girls read English; when they did, they were thought accomplished; they generally spoke it, however imperfectly, and few were taught writing."[398]
A historian of New York, writing of his fellow townswomen during the year 1756, said that "there is nothing they (New York women) so generally neglect as Reading, and indeed all the Arts for the improvement of the Mind, in which I confess we have set them the Example."[399]
The attitude of the people of the period toward the admission of girls into boys' grammar schools is shown by the following extract from the rules for governing such a school in New Haven in 1684: