Education In The Middle Colonies

A child'south teaching was anything but "standardized" during America'due south colonial era, which spanned most of the 17th and 18th centuries. The modern institution of the public school—a complimentary, tax-supported education for all children—didn't go a foothold in America until the mid-19th century.

For children living in the 13 colonies, the availability of schools varied greatly by region—and race. The vast bulk of colonial schools catered to children of European settlers who could afford to contribute a fee for their children's didactics. At that place were, however, a minor number of schools, such as the Bray School in Williamsburg Virginia, that offered instruction to around 400 free and enslaved African American students between 1760 and 1774.

The quality of education offered during colonial times was highly variable—even young George Washington was taught by a schoolmaster who, according to an early biographer of the Founding Father, knew next to zilch.

For Puritans, Reading Was a Religious Duty

The Protestant Reformation was founded on the belief that the faithful could commune directly with God by reading the Bible. That'due south why the English Puritans who founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1630s put a high priority on teaching.

"Literacy took on a religious element," says Edward Janak, an educational historian and professor at the Academy of Toledo. "If y'all look at the New England colonies, the construction of schools outpaced all other types of buildings. That tells yous the value they placed on reading."

Massachusetts passed the first laws governing educational activity in America. The "Massachusetts Compulsory Omnipresence Law," passed in 1642, didn't require children to become to school, but stated that all Massachusetts heads of household were responsible for the "education" of any children living nether their roof (including the children of servants and apprentices), which meant didactics in "reading, religion and the laws," says Janak.

At dwelling house, the youngest children often learned their letters from something chosen a "hornbook," a thin wooden board held by a handle with a piece of newspaper fastened to it. On the paper was the alphabet, written in lowercase and majuscule letters, and the Lord's Prayer. To protect it from sticky toddler fingers, the paper was covered in a translucent sheet of pressed and polished animal horn (this was centuries earlier lamination).

Illustration showing a hornbook in the foreground, and a young colonial boy studying from his hornbook, in the background. The hornbook was a primer for children, often listing the alphabet.

Acting Archives/Getty Images

"A child would take a piece of velim, which is very thin paper, put it over the letters and they would trace," says Janak, author of A Brief History of Schooling in the Us: From Pre-Colonial Times to the Present. "That's how children learned to write."

The first law related directly to schooling came in 1647, when Massachusetts passed the "Old Deluder Satan Human action," named for the opening line of the act ("It being one principal projection of that former deluder, Satan, to keep men from the knowledge of the Scriptures…"). The law required every town with 50 households to provide a "petty schoolhouse" (the equivalent of uncomplicated school) and towns larger than 100 households to provide both a petty school and a "grammar schoolhouse" (a "Latin grammar" or secondary school).

Inside a New England Schoolhouse

Every Massachusetts town held meetings and voted on how many schools to build (children weren't expected to walk more than a mile or ii to school), how much public funds to use, and how much the students would pay to attend.

"In the colonial era, all schools were 'public' in the sense that anyone who could beget information technology could become," says Janek.

In Massachusetts towns, tuition at a petty schoolhouse was 6 pence per calendar week for reading and another 6 pence for arithmetics, according to Old-Time Schools and School Books, published past Clifton Johnson in 1904. In rural areas, produce from the family farm was accepted as payment (barley, wheat, "Indian corn" and peas). And during the winter, every student was required to supply a bundle of woods for the fire, or be fined four shillings.

New England lilliputian schools were ane-room schoolhouses filled with boys (and ofttimes girls) of varying ages. Children attended school when the circumstances immune, says Janak. They might attend for five or six weeks and then take a month off to assistance on the subcontract or in the shop. Then they'd come dorsum and pick up where they left off.

The petty schools taught reading, writing, spelling, grammar, and bones arithmetic, all infused with a healthy dose of religious and moral instruction. The nigh popular textbook was The New England Primer (pronounced "primmer"), a pocket-sized book with rough-hewn drawings and a rhyming alphabet of Puritan couplets: "In Adam's autumn, we sinned all." "Sky to find, the Bible mind." Students would by and large memorize and recite passages, a type of rote learning popular at the time.

Whorl to Continue

Goose quills and ink were the merely writing implements bachelor, and much of a schoolmaster's time was spent preparing and repairing quills. The students had to supply their ain ink, which was made by dissolving an ink powder in h2o or by humid the bark of swamp maple.

The youngest children, ages 5 to seven, might get to a "dame schoolhouse," an breezy schoolhouse run by an older adult female (oft a widow) in the neighborhood who kept watch over the children in her home and taught them "the rudiments of cognition," wrote Johnson, in exchange for a "small corporeality of coin."

In New England, grammar schools were reserved for the wealthy (boys but) who needed to chief Latin and some Greek for access to Harvard College (founded in 1636) and the seminary.

Schools in the Middle Colonies and the Southward

Massachusetts Bay Colony was substantially a theocracy, and its fervent commitment to Bible literacy is what drove the government's interest in compulsory schooling. Outside of New England, colonial governments let the burden of children's education largely fall on families, churches and a few privately endowed schools for the poor.

In 1671, the governor of Virginia, William Berkeley, wrote that when it came to teaching, Virginians were following "the same form that is taken in England out of towns; every human being according to his ain ability in instructing his children."

In the Centre colonies (New York, New Bailiwick of jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware), schools were mostly run by local churches. Janak says that there was an Enlightenment-era influence in the Middle colonies, so the curriculum leaned more than philosophical and less theological. Most schools charged tuition, but in that location were too charity schools (free schools) for the working form and poor.

The Southern colonies presented a geographical challenge considering the population was spread out on farms and plantations. The Southern economic system was closely tied to England and Europe, and so the wealthiest Southern planters either hired private tutors or sent their children overseas to study.

Some Southern communities pooled resources to hire a schoolmaster and build a "field schoolhouse," a school that literally sat in a fallow tobacco field for a flavour. When information technology came time to found the field, they would "put the schoolhouse on log and coil it from one plantation to the other," says Janak.

Colonial Teachers and Corporal Punishment

Qualified teachers were hard to find in the colonial era since there was no such thing as teacher education or professional grooming. "Instruction was very much a commercial effort," says Janak. "Whoever hung up a shingle as a 'schoolmaster' got to do it."

Outside of the "dame schools," colonial-era schoolmasters were nigh exclusively men. Some were afoot teachers who traveled from town to town educational activity a unmarried bailiwick area or specialty like arithmetics or penmanship. "One time they wearied the local population, they'd leave and become to the next town," says Janak.

In Virginia and the Southern colonies, debtors and petty criminals were sometimes "sold" into education equally bondsman or indentured slaves. "Non infrequently they were coarse and degraded, and they did not always stay their fourth dimension out," wrote Johnson, who found an advertizing from the era: "Ran abroad: a servant man who followed the occupation of a Schoolmaster, much given to drinking and gambling."

George Washington'southward beginning instructor was a bondservant purchased by Washington'southward father, a Virginia plantation owner. "He was a tiresome rusty man by the name of Hobby," wrote Johnson. Hobby was likewise the church building sexton, who swept out the building and dug an occasional grave.

Corporal punishment was acceptable and expected in colonial schools. In Puritan New England, beating students was divinely sanctioned. "The rod of correction is a rule of God necessary sometimes to be used on children," read the rules of a Massachusetts school from 1645. "The schoolmaster shall have full ability to punish all or any of his scholars, no thing who they are. No parent or other person living in the place shall go almost to hinder the master in this."

Across the colonies, the preferred tool for "correcting" misbehaving students was a long, flat-ended ruler called a ferule, although a potent cane of rattan or even a medieval-looking cat-o-nine-tails "was not unknown," wrote Johnson.

Janak says that some colonial schoolmasters got more than creative. "Caging" meant that a disobedient student would be locked in a small cage suspended in forepart of the school, so the whole boondocks would know they had misbehaved. "Cooping" was a worse fate. The errant pupil would exist forced to lie on their back underneath a chicken coop for the day.

Fifty-fifty the old widows of the dame schools had their limits. "Almost dames had great faith in a thimble tapped sharply on the runaway's cranium," wrote Johnson. Other students would be forced to article of clothing a dunce cap or be affixed with signs reading "Lying Ananias" or "Idle Male child."