Composition: History & Theory: 1600 - 1699
Colonial Education
Description
In The American School From the Puritans to No Child Left Behind (2008), Joel Spring paints colonial education as authoritarian. Literacy was required for obedience to God and to the state. Spring cites historian Merle Curti as identifying two tiers of colonial education: 1. elite private or dame (petty) and grammar schools, colleges; 2. everybody else went into reading-and-writing schools or apprenticeships. Regional differences influenced early colonial policies. Different regions had different regional education foci: New England was concerned with religion, New York City was concerned with diversity, and Virginia was concerned with making a profit for English-based companies (20-21). Puritan New England education was centered on moral conduct (Rousseau, Emile, good child vs. Locke, tabula rasa, proper molding). Spring also points to Lawrence Cremin’s view of schools as “ideological management” as well as his identification of “the importance of colonial policy in the transmission of culture to the New World” (20). Spring attributes the claim that “the Protestant-Calvinist nature of colonial education strongly influenced” 19th century public schools to historian Carl Kaestle (14). This is before he notes that the founding of Harvard in 1636 was meant “to ensure an educated ministry for the colony” in order to guarantee continuity in social organization and leadership (19). This assertion of Spring’s is supported by historian Ellwood Cubberly who believed that “colonial schools were eventually transformed from instruments of religion to servants of the state (14).
Date of Upload
3/13/09