Education In Colonial America

The form that education took in colonial America differed according to the cultures that emerged in its various geographical regions. The diverse cultures of New England, the South, and the Middle Colonies strongly affected the official attitudes toward the educational systems, and these attitudes were reflected in legislation that governed the forms that educational systems took. As Edgar Knight points out, "schools and other means of education in the American colonies were for the most part inherited from Europe; so also was colonial culture in general" (71).

The Puritan culture in New England profoundly affected the structure of education from 1607 to 1776. The initial settlement of Massachusetts Bay brought with it the Puritan version of English norms, which mandated that children be educated within the family, and as Johanningmeier points out, formal institutional schooling eventually replaced in-home schooling of children (12). Yet institutions were not common in the initial years of the colony, which resulted in the establishment in 1642 of what Johanningmeier terms the family law, whereby

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pears to have made just as much sense to educate the (nonslave) labor force as to leave it illiterate. Thus Virginia Colony early on enacted an apprenticeship act that was similar to the one enacted in 1642 in New England. The Virginia Apprenticeship Law, enacted in 1646, however, emphasized "the necessity of teaching the poor a useful trade" (Johanningmeier 26) rather than religion as a guiding principle. Thus was also born, an attitude toward education in the South that stressed the importance of pauper schools. Johanningmeier adds, however, that this was less an aspect of philanthropy than of the implication that well educated children would be good for the state. The importance of protecting property figured into the various laws governing education that emerged in Virginia. Johanningmeier cites an orphan-estate-protection law of 1642 in Virginia that "stated that guardians were to ensure that their charges be taught the Christian religion and 'the rudiments of learning'" (27). Knight puts the year of this law as 1643, and he says that North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia passed similar laws before the end of the seventeenth century (101). Similar laws enacted in 1705, 1730, 1740, 1748, and 1751 in Virginia req
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Approximate Word count = 3187
Approximate Pages = 13 (250 words per page)

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