Puritans Developed Education to be an
Extension of Their Church
The
Puritans were a group of people who left Britain seeking religious
freedom. Their arrival in the new world
brought new hardships. They were a
deeply religious people and that was reflected in the type lives they
lead. One of the areas of life that
religion was clearly in was the system of education that they developed. The system of education that they developed
was influenced by two main factors.
Education became an extension of the Puritan church because they found
themselves in a wilderness that seemed to have Satan hiding everywhere and
because of the separation from European institutions and churches.
When the Puritans left Europe, they left behind civilization. The New World they came to was, according to William Bradford, “a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men” (249). Bradford’s initial experiences in the New World involved hard labor, starvation, and death (251). This in addition to the dark and unfamiliar forests gave rise to many tales of Satan and his minions in the forests. Skirmishes and raids that occurred between the natives and the settlers supported the view that the native peoples were savage, wild and followers of Satan. One of these raids was experienced and written about by Mary Rowlandson in her Narrative or the Captivity and Restauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson. It occurred on February tenth in the year 1675 (Rowlandson, 343). Rowlandson watched as natives disemboweled men and burned down buildings and in her own words, “Thus these murtherous wretches went on, burning, and destroying before them” (Rowlandson, 343). Rowlandson also described the rampaging Indians as “a company of hell-hounds, roaring, singing, ranting and insulting” (Rowlandson, 344).
Bradford and Rowlandson are good sources to find out the mindset of the early colonists because not only are they contemporary with this period, they both witnessed events firsthand. Philip Gould of DePaul University says in his essay “William Bradford,” on Bradford that Bradford was one of a congregation in Leyden that left on the Mayflower to “maintain a church of “ancient purity” freed from European entanglements” and sailed to America (247). Sharon Harris of the University of Nebraska reveals in her essay “Mary White Rowlandson 1637? - 1711,” Mary Rowlandson lived in a fronntier town and witnessed for herself a raid and was imprisoned by Indians for three months (340). Their first hand accounts provide background and understanding for the colonial opinion of a new world full of “the satanic barbarism of the wilderness” (Cremin, 176-177). The experiences of Rowlandson are not limited to just her and her settlement. The fear was wide spread and gave motivation to set up institutions of God, to keep society focused on Him even during the most difficult times.
As a result the Puritans saw Satan and his power in the untamed land that they had come to and set out immediately to organize their churches. In his American Education The Colonial Experience 1607-1783 Lawrence Cremin notes that it was common in all of the colonies in North America for “preaching and catechizing” to be the initial forms that education took in the early 1600’s (176). This served as the method of educating citizens until the community had managed to firmly establish it in the wilderness. The colonists knew that “schooling” was next in importance if not as important in strengthening people for the never-ending struggle against Satan (Cremin, 176). Puritans believed that the main goal of “the universities was the advancement of religion” (Cohen, 302). In addition to this, they believed that the mysteries of God would be revealed through the Spirit and also by reason and thus they “looked to the universities to produce an educated clergy”(Cohen, 302). The Puritans put into place a system of education that included dame schools, public supported schools, and laws to back up their endeavors in education. The textbook Foundations of American Education puts forward that “New England colonists sustained a vigorous emphasis on education even in the hostile new environment” (Webb, 152). It even says that these colonies had literacy rates higher than literacy rates found in England (Webb, 152).
Education was important to the Puritans for another reason as well. The Puritans were effectively cut off from Europe and even each other and had to rely on what they had with them. Technology simply did not exist to move quickly from one place to another. A hundred years later in the time of Ben Franklin, travel was still slow. In his Autobiography, Benjamin Franklin writes of traveling three hundred miles to New York and taking three days to get there (17). With the colonies so new in the early seventeenth century and the lack of easy travel between them, the colonies really had to rely on themselves and sometimes it was extremely hard. Bradford writes of the terrible conditions that the early settlers faced; he writes “that which was most sad and lamentable was, that in two or three months’ time half of their company died” (251). This gives evidence that there wasn’t much traffic between Europe and the New World. His remarks also show that whatever the colonists needed the colonists would have to supply themselves. As a result they were afraid that they not have a steady flow of ministers and preachers to teach the Puritan Doctrines (Johnson, 298). Jonathan Mitchell who lived in 1663 provides other evidence of the separation from Europe and the fear that the colonists would lose their culture. Cremin quotes him as saying: “We in this country being far removed from the more cultivated parts of the world, had need to use utmost care and diligence to keep up learning and all helps to education among us, lest degeneracy, barbarism, ignorance and irreligion do by degrees break in upon us” (177). In response to this fear and need, schools were organized for the purpose of training new clergy. Examples of such institutions include Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (Johnson, 298).
Religion was steeped in all levels of education not just the institutions of higher education. Puritans believed that “children were born in sin and iniquity, innately depraved. Moreover, they would spontaneously go from bad to worse, were possessed of the devil” (Bayles, 44). It was because of these beliefs in a “bad-active nature of man” that education became discipline, a way to “break the natural spirit of a child” and to “save his soul from eternal damnation through education” (Bayles, 45). The two most common tools for teaching basic education were the Hornbook and the New England Primer. The Hornbook was used in teaching children to read by starting them out on the Lord’s Prayer (Hornbook). The Primer contained poems about martyrs and had pictures of people burning at the stake for heresy, as well as an abridged Puritan catechism and much more (New England Primer). The tools of education also kept the Puritan church at the center of life by providing moral lessons such as “In Adams Fall We Sinned all” and “The Idle Fool Is whipt at School” (New England Primer).
Some of the Puritans’ theories of administering education came from Martin Luther’s revolt against the Catholic Church. Luther put forward that “universal priesthood of man” meant that all people should be able to “receive the word of God for himself”, thereby creating the need for everyone to be educated enough to read the Bible (Bayles, 45). The manifestation of these beliefs can be seen in public policy through the education laws of 1642 and 1647 in the settlement of Massachusetts. These two laws “laid the foundations for required schooling and public responsibility for education” and were the first compulsory education laws (Bayles, 45). The 1642 law stated that men should be chosen every town to make sure that parents and masters were teaching children “to read & understand the principles of religion & the capitall lawes of this country” (Johnson, 297). There were severe consequences for failure to comply. The children of any parent or master who failed to provide the necessary instruction would be removed from that household and apprenticed to new master that would provide the proper instruction (Webb, 152). The second law passed in 1647 stated:
It being one chiefe proiect of y ould deluder, Satan, to keepe men from the knowledge of y Scriptures…It is therefore orded [ordered], ye evy [every] township in this jurisdiction, aft y Lord hath increased y number to 50 household, shall then forthw appoint one w [with] in their towne to teach all such children as shall resort to him to write & reade…& it is furth ordered y where any towne shall increase to y numb [number] of 100 families or househould, they shall set up a grammar schoole, y m [aim] thereof being able to instruct youth so farr as they shall be fited for y university (Johnson, 297).
Thus we have the mission statement of schools, to thwart the attempts of Satan, as well as how schools were to be organized, a town of 50 families would hire a teacher and a town of 100 families would set up a school. This was the beginning of compulsory education in America and it was founded for religious goals.
The Puritans had religion permeating as much of their education system as possible. This was a result of the wild and untamed land in which they found themselves and also due to the isolation from Europe and each other that they endured. They had to start from scratch and build their own civilization, they chose to focus on religion and the system of education they developed heavily reflected that. They relied on religious education to protect them from the evil designs of Satan and his minions that lived in the forests. The colonists endured isolation from civilization, relying on the skills they brought with them to survive in between ships from Europe. The Puritans set up a strong school system to preserve literacy and provide a source of clergy. Materials used in teaching students were full of religious content, extolling the virtues of God and loyalty to the church. To back up their system of education, the Puritans passed the first compulsory education laws in the new world. The factors of a wild, untamed world and isolation guided the early evolution of education for the Puritans to become an extension of their Church.
Bayles, Ernest E., “Sketch for a Study of the Growth of American Educational Thought and Practice.” History of Education Quarterly Sept. 1961: 43-49.
Bradford, William, “Of Plymouth
Plantation.” The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Paul Lauter. 2nd ed.
Massachusetts: D.C. Heath and Company,
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Cohen, Ronald D., “Puritan Education in Seventeenth Century England and New England.” History of Education Quarterly Fall 1972: 301-306.
Cremin, Lawrence A. American Education The Colonial Experience 1607-1783. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1970.
Franklin, Benjamin. The Autobiography. Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography. Ed. J.A. Leo Lemay and P.M. Zall. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1986. 1-146.
Gould, Philip, “William Bradford 1590-1657.” The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Paul Lauter. 2nd ed. Massachusetts: D.C. Heath and Company, 1994. 245-246.
Harris, Sharon M., “Mary White Rowlandson 1637?-1711.” The Heath Anthology of Literature. Ed. Paul Lauter. 2nd ed. Massachusetts: D.C. Heath and Company, 1994. 340-342.
Johnson, James A., Victor L. Dupuis, Diann Musial, Gene E. Hall, and Donna M. Gollnick. Introduction to the Foundations of American Education. 11th ed. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn and Bacon, 1999.
Rowlandson, Mary White, “A Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson.” The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Paul Lauter. 2nd ed. Massachusetts: D.C. Heath and Company, 1994. 343-366.
Webb, L. Dean, Arlene Metha, and K. Forbis Jordan. Foundations of American Education. 3rd ed. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc, 1996.
New England Primer. 1777. 21 Feb. 2002. http://my.voyager.net/~jayjo/primer.htm.
“Hornbooks.” Really Neat Books. Blackwell Museum. 24 Feb. 2002. http://www.cedu.niu.edu/blackwell/books.html.