17 Historical Foundations of Education in the United States: Colonial America to Reconstruction
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Historical Foundations of Education in the United States: Colonial America to Reconstruction
You may have heard comments implying that education in the United States is not political, separate from religion, and accessible to everyone. The reality is that from its early existence in the New World in the 1600s, it was indeed political, religious, and accessible only to a select few. These traits continue to influence the evolution of education in the United States today.
In this chapter, we will explore how historical foundations have shaped the trajectory of education in the United States.
Chapter Outline
Historical Foundations
Education as we know it today has a long history intertwined with the development of the United States. In this section, we will follow historical events through key periods of U.S history to see the forces that left lasting influences on education in the United States.
Introducing The NPR Podcast The Promise a limited-run series about life in public housing, smack in the middle of a city on the rise — stories of a neighborhood in flux, a community defined by its struggles and the growing divide threatening its very existence. You will listen to this podcast throughout the text as an illustration of many key ideas we will discuss.
Season 2: Episode 1 – A Tale Of Two Schools
Colonial America
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Public education as we know it today did not exist in the colonies. In the First Charter of Virginia in 1606, King James I set forth a religious mission for investors and colonizers to disseminate the “Christian Religion” among the Indigenous population, which he described as “Infidels and Savages.” His colonial and educational mission would impact settlement and education in America for centuries. Next, we will explore how education began evolving in Puritan Massachusetts and the Middle and Southern Colonies during the colonial period.
Puritan Massachusetts
Puritans in Massachusetts believed educating children in religion and rules from a young age would increase their chances of survival or, if they did die, increase their chances of religious salvation. Puritans in Massachusetts established the first compulsory education law in the New World through the Act of 1642, which required parents and apprenticeship masters to educate their children and apprentices in the principles of Puritan religion and the laws of the commonwealth. The Law of 1647, also referred to as the Old Deluder Satan Act, required towns of fifty or more families to hire a schoolmaster to teach children basic literacy. Because of similar religious beliefs and the physical proximity of families’ residences, formal schooling developed quickly in the commonwealth of Massachusetts. Connecticut, New York, and Pennsylvania followed in Massachusetts’ footsteps, passing similar laws and ordinances between the mid- and late-seventeenth century (Cremin, 1972).
During this time, children learned to read at home using the Holy Scriptures and catechisms (small books that summarized key religious principles) as educational texts. The primers that were used “contained simple verses, songs, and stories designed to teach at once the skills of literacy and the virtues of Christian living” (McClellan, 1999, p. 3).
The importance of faith, prayer, humility, rewards of virtue, honesty, obedience, thrift, proverbs, religious stories, the fear of death, and the importance of hard work served as major moral principles featured throughout the texts. When Indigenous people were depicted or mentioned in texts, they were portrayed as “savages and infidels,” needing salvation through English cultural norms.
Another form of education occurred in dame schools. Where available, some parents sent their children to a neighboring housewife who taught them basic literacy skills, including reading, numbers, and writing. Because families paid for their children to attend dame schools, this form of education was mainly available to middle-class families. Teaching aids and texts included Scripture, hornbooks, catechisms, and primers (Urban & Wagoner, 2009).
More expensive than dame schools, Latin grammar schools were also available. The first Latin grammar school was established in Boston in 1635 to teach boys subjects like classical literature, reading, writing, and math at what we would consider the high school level today in preparation to attend Harvard University (Powell, 2019).
The Middle and Southern Colonies
In Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia, town or village schooling was not as common. Their populations were sparser, and they focused more on economic opportunities for survival than religion. Education was considered a private matter and a responsibility of individual parents, not the government. Schooling was seen as a service that should be paid by the users of that service, creating a stratified system of education where wealthy families had access to schooling and others did not. Wealthier parents often sent their children to English boarding schools or paid for private schooling in the colonies. Wealthy families also sent their children to parson schools, operated by a highly educated minister who opened his home to young scholars and often taught secular subjects. Education for the poor was usually limited to the rudiments of basic literacy learned in the home or occasionally at church.
Charity schools, often referred to as “endowed ‘free’ schools” (Urban & Wagoner, 2009), were occasionally established when an affluent individual made provisions in his or her will, including land, to construct and manage a school for the poor. In addition, field schools were occasionally built in rural areas. Named after the abandoned fields in which they were built, these schoolhouses offered affordable education to students. The teacher’s salary came from fees students’ families paid, and teachers often boarded with a local family while serving a field school. These schools were also called rate schools, subscription schools, fee schools, and eventually district schools (Urban & Wagoner, 2009).
In Colonial America, education in the mid-Atlantic and southern colonies was heavily stratified and remained out of reach for most inhabitants. New England Puritans worked hard to establish schools. Fear, anxiety, and the struggle for survival lent urgency to their quest for cultural transmission, which helps us understand their desire for formal schooling. Table 3.2 summarizes the main forms of schooling in Colonial America.
Table 3.2: Forms of Schooling in Colonial America
New England |
Middle and Southern Colonies |
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American Revolutionary Era
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After the American Revolution, our new country was establishing its systems and identity. Many key Founders believed public education was a prerequisite in a republic. Three groups had distinct post-revolutionary plans for education and schooling, all of which were intended to serve as part of the founding process: Federalists, Anti-Federalists, and the lesser known Democratic-Republican Societies.
Federalists
Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, and John Adams, among other Federalists, focused on building a new nation and a new national identity by following the new Constitution, which consolidated power in a new federal government. The Federalists supported mass schooling for nationalistic purposes, such as preserving order, morality, and a nationalistic character, but opposed tax-supported schooling, viewing it as unnecessary in a society where elites rule.
Noah Webster was one of the great advocates for mass schooling, and the purposes for which he supported schooling included teaching children not just “the usual branches of learning,” but also “submission to superiors and to laws [and] moral or social duties.” Smoothing out the “rough manners” of frontier folk was very important to Webster. Furthermore, Webster placed great responsibility among “women in forming the dispositions of youth” in order to “control…the manners of a nation” and that which “is useful” to an orderly republic (Webster, 1965, 67, 69-77). Webster’s treatise on education and his spellers (like his 1783 American Spelling Book) were intended to develop a literate and nationalistic character to shape useful, virtuous, and law-abiding citizens with strong attachments to Federalist America.
Anti-Federalists
Anti-Federalists, on the other hand, were opposed to a strong central government, preferring instead state and local forms of government. The Anti-Federalists believed that the success of a republican government depended on small geographical areas, spaces small enough for individuals to know one another and to deliberate collectively on matters of public concern. Anti-Federalists feared concentrated power.
Thomas Jefferson was an Anti-Federalist. An aristocrat whose genteel lifestyle was bolstered by his violent oppression of enslaved people, Jefferson put forth proposals to educate all white citizens in the state of Virginia. Jefferson proposed a system of tiered schooling. The three tiers were primary schools, grammar schools, and the College of William and Mary. The foundation of his tiered schooling plan included three years of tax-supported schooling for all white children with limited options for a few poor children to advance at public expense to higher levels of education. While he suggested very limited educational opportunities for women, no other key Founder advocated giving high-achieving scholars from poor families a free education. Religion was not a core curricular area in the primary and grammar schools. However, his plans were viewed as too radical by his aristocratic peers, and they correspondingly rejected his state education proposals.
Democratic-Republican Societies
The third group of post-revolution political activists formed several clubs broadly described as the Democratic-Republican Societies during the 1790s. Members of these political clubs included artisans, teachers, ship builders, innkeepers, and working class individuals. They generally supported universal, government-funded schooling, not simply to secure allegiance and order, but also to develop democratic citizen virtue and venues for deliberative learning and opportunities for dissent. The Democratic-Republican Societies viewed education as a means to prepare active citizens for new civic roles, and they considered the government responsible for providing positive benefits to individuals to realize a more fulfilling citizenship through venues such as education.
Table 3.3 summarizes the key differences among these three political groups and how they related to their views of education.
Table 3.3: Federalist, Anti-Federalist, and Democratic-Republican Stances
Federalists |
Anti-Federalists |
Democratic-Republican |
| Support strong central government via the new Constitution | Support a decentralized system of governing: states and local governance | Support a decentralized system of governing: states and local governance |
| Maintain social and economic status quo | Accept limited structural change in order to develop economic and political independence among individuals | Accept structural changes in order to develop economic and political independence among individuals |
| Support publicly funded school systems to develop and maintain strong inner moral values based on Christianity and patriotic adherence to the nation-state; order and harmony are emphasized | Support public school systems detached from religious institutions and a greater focus on the use of individual reason; preparation for limited political participation at the local level; three years of primary schooling available to all white children at public expense with opportunities for male scholars from poor families to advance | Support universal public schooling throughout the United States at public expense; curriculum expected to focus on some form of critical analysis of the status quo and preparing citizens to be active in democratic governance |
Early National Era
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During the early- to mid-nineteenth century, the United States was expanding westward, and urbanization and immigration intensified. This period of history was defined by the emergence of the common school movement and normal schools, though conflicts over the organization and control of education continued. This period also saw the advent of higher education.
The Common School Movement
Common schools were elementary schools where all students–not just wealthy boys–could attend for free. Common schools were radical in their status as tax-supported free schooling, but their conservative-leaning curriculum addressed traditional values and political allegiance. Schooling offered increasing opportunities for families’ children, especially working-class families, by teaching basic values including honesty, punctuality, inner behavioral restraints, obedience to authority, hard work, cleanliness, and respect for law, private property, and representative government (Urban & Wagoner, 2009). Horace Mann, Massachusetts’s first Secretary of Education and Whig (formerly Federalist) politician, was the leader of the common school movement, which began in the New England states and then expanded into New York, Pennsylvania, and then into westward states.
The Development of Normal Schools
With the rise of common schools, Horace Mann then turned to how female teachers would be educated. For Mann, the answer was to create teacher training institutions originally referred to as normal schools. A French institution dating back to the sixteenth century, école normale was the term used to identify a model or ideal teaching institute. Once adopted in the United States, the institution was simply called a normal school.
The first normal school in America was established in Lexington, Massachusetts in 1839 (now Framingham State University). They were primarily used to train primary school teachers, as middle and high schools did not yet exist. The curriculum included academic subjects, classroom management and school governance, and the practice of teaching. Teacher credentialing began and was regulated by state governments. Moreover, this contributed to the professionalization of teaching, and normal schools eventually became colleges or schools of education. Many normal schools eventually became full-fledged liberal arts and research institutes. Catherine Beecher was the first well-known teacher of the time and one of the normal schools’ first teachers.
Because the teaching profession was being feminized, administrators and policymakers viewed this as an opportunity. Men were exiting the profession, and women were typically paid much less, allowing more women to be hired for less money to educate the growing ranks of students as common schools spread westward. Furthermore, once the profession was feminized, teaching became perceived as a missionary calling rather than an academic pursuit. While male policymakers insisted women were better nurturers and more suited to teaching morality and correct behavior in children, framing the discourse of teaching around a calling helped rationalize lower pay for women and fewer advancement possibilities.
Conflicts in the Common School Movement
The common school movement was not without its conflicts. Whigs (formerly Federalists), including Horace Mann, sought to establish state systems of schooling in order to create standardization and uniformity in curricula, classroom equipment, school organization, and professional credentialing of teachers across state schools. Democrats, however, often supported public schooling but feared centralized government, thus opposing the centralization of local schools under the common school movement. The battle between Whigs and Democrats during the nineteenth century represents one of the initial conflicts related to public schooling.
Another important conflict related to the common school movement was the clash between urban Protestants and Catholics. Typically from Protestant backgrounds, common school reformers continued to use the Bible as a common text in classrooms without considering the potential conflict this could generate in diverse communities. Horace Mann advocated using only generalized Scripture in order to prevent offending different sects. However, what appeared to Protestants as a generalization of Christian text was actually very insulting to Catholic immigrants, who were becoming the second largest group of city dwellers at the time. Protestants realized that it was best to reduce the religious content in the common school curriculum, but unhappy Catholic leaders created their own private parochial schools. This conflict generated a greater theoretical acceptance of the separation of church and state doctrine in publicly-funded common schools, though in practice, common schooling continued to infuse Protestant biases for over a century.
Common schools also faced conflict in Southern states, including Jefferson’s Virginia, until after the Civil War. Planters had no interest in disturbing the status quo by educating poor whites or enslaved people. Driven by Southern aristocracy, education continued to be viewed as a private family responsibility and class privilege. In fact, many southern states prohibited educating enslaved people and passed state statutes that attached criminal penalties for doing so, such as the ones below.
| Excerpt from a 1740 South Carolina Act:
Whereas, the having slaves taught to write, or suffering them to be employed in writing, may be attended with great inconveniences; Be it enacted, that all and every person and persons whatsoever, who shall hereafter teach or cause any slave or slaves to be taught to write, or shall use or employ any slave as a scribe, in any manner of writing whatsoever, hereafter taught to write, every such person or persons shall, for every such offense, forfeit the sum of one hundred pounds, current money.
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Excerpt from Virginia Revised Code of 1819:
That all meetings or assemblages of slaves, or free negroes or mulattoes mixing and associating with such slaves at any meeting-house or houses, &c., in the night; or at any SCHOOL OR SCHOOLS for teaching them READING OR WRITING, either in the day or night, under whatsoever pretext, shall be deemed and considered an UNLAWFUL ASSEMBLY; and any justice of a county, &c., wherein such assemblage shall be, either from his own knowledge or the information of others, of such unlawful assemblage, &c., may issue his warrant, directed to any sworn officer or officers, authorizing him or them to enter the house or houses where such unlawful assemblages, &c., may be, for the purpose of apprehending or dispersing such slaves, and to inflict corporal punishment on the offender or offenders, at the discretion of any justice of the peace, not exceeding twenty lashes. |
Enslaved people have often been depicted in American history textbooks as passive toward their owners. This is a misrepresentation of history. African Americans escaped, committed espionage on plantations, negotiated statuses, and occasionally educated themselves behind closed doors. For enslaved people, education and knowledge represented freedom and power, and once they were emancipated, they continued their relentless quest for learning by constructing their own schools throughout the South, even with minimal resources. Unlike many free whites, African Americans placed an exceptional value on literacy due to generations of bondage.
CRITICAL LENS: WORDS MATTER
You will notice in this chapter that we use the term “enslaved person” instead of “slave.” Part of critical theory involves questioning existing power structures, even in word choice. Recently, academics and historians have shifted away from using the term “slave” and have begun replacing it with “enslaved person” because it places “humans first, commodities second” (Waldman, 2015, para. 2).
Even while slavery continued throughout the South, segregation continued in the North. One of the first challenges to segregation occurred in Boston, Massachusetts. Benjamin Roberts attempted to enroll his five-year-old daughter, Sarah, in a segregated white school in her neighborhood, but Sarah was refused admission due to her race. Sarah attempted to enroll in a few other schools closer to her home, but she was again denied admission for the same reason. Mr. Roberts filed a lawsuit in 1849, Sarah Roberts v. City of Boston, claiming that because his daughter had to travel much farther to attend a segregated and substandard black school, Sarah was psychologically damaged. The state courts ruled in favor of the City of Boston in 1850 because state law permitted segregated schooling. This case would be cited in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1898 and in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.
Post Civil War and Reconstruction
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Following the Civil War, significant restructuring of political, economical, social, and educational systems in the United States occurred. Schooling continued to be viewed as a necessary instrument in maintaining stability and unity. During this era, education was shaped by increasing influence of the federal government, the beginning of education in the South, the Morrill Acts, and Native American boarding schools.
Increasing Influence of the Federal Government
Elazar (1969) asserted that “crisis compels centralization” (p. 51): when the nation undergoes a calamity, it eventually leads to the federal government exercising extra-constitutional actions on its own will or as a result of demands made by state and local governments. The post-Civil War Era provides one example of this effect. The U.S. Congress established requirements for the Southern states to reenter the Union. Radical Republicans, as they were identified after the Civil War, believed that the lack of common schooling in the South had contributed to the circumstances leading to war, so Congress required Southern states to include provisions for free public schooling in their rewritten constitutions.
Of course, southern states followed through with the requirements and drafted language supporting schools, but they created loopholes like separate and segregated schools. Black schools received substantially lower funding than White schools, creating yet another form of institutionalized racism that would have long-lasting consequences for African American communities.
The Beginning of Education in the South
Following the Civil War, nearly four million formerly enslaved people were homeless, without property, and illiterate. In response, Congress created the Freedmen’s Bureau (officially referred to as the U.S. Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands). Supervised by northern military officers, the Freedmen’s Bureau distributed food, clothing, and medical aid to formerly enslaved people and poor Whites and created over 1,000 schools throughout the southern states. The Freedmen’s Bureau effectively lasted only for seven years, but it represented a massive federal effort that provided some benefits.
In addition to Freedmen’s schools, Yankee schoolmarms also headed south as missionaries to help educate formerly enslaved people. They sought mutual benefits: to educate the illiterate and simultaneously secure themselves in the eyes of God. As missionaries, female teachers learned that their work was a calling to instill morality in the nation’s students, and this calling was pursued for the good of mankind instead of financial gain. This same missionary status fueled both the migration of teachers westward following national expansion, and the thousands of schoolmarms that migrated to the South to educate formerly enslaved people who, they believed, had to be redeemed through literacy, Christian morality, and republican virtue (Butchart, 2010).
However, African Americans were preemptively educating themselves. Formerly-enslaved people knew the connection between knowledge and freedom. Ignorance was itself oppressive; knowledge, on the other hand, was liberating. Literate African Americans were often teaching children and adults alike and creating their own one-room schoolhouses, even with limited resources. By 1866 in Georgia, African Americans were at least partially financing 96 of 123 evening schools and owned 57 school buildings (Anderson, 1988). The African American educational initiatives caught Northern missionaries off guard:
Many missionaries were astonished, and later chagrined…to discover that many ex-slaves had established their own educational collectives and associations, staffed schools entirely with black teachers, and were unwilling to allow their educational movement to be controlled by the ‘civilized’ Yankees.” (Anderson, 1988, p. 6)
In addition, industrial schools were built in the South for Black Americans. Southern policymakers, northern industrialists, and philanthropic groups partnered to establish industrial schools focused on vocational or trade skills. Southern policymakers benefitted because industrial schools resulted in segregated higher education, which further limited access to equality. Northern industrialists benefited because they gained skilled laborers. Philanthropists believed they were giving Black Americans access to education and jobs.
Two African American leaders in the late nineteenth century had different perspectives on newly-developed industrial schools. Booker T. Washington was born an enslaved person in 1856 and grew up in Virginia. He attended the Hampton Institute, whose founder, General Samuel Armstrong, emphasized that “obtaining farms or skilled jobs was far more important to African-Americans emerging from slavery than the rights of citizenship” (Foner, 2012, p. 652-653). Washington supported this view as head of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. In his famous 1895 “Atlanta Compromise” speech, Washington did not support “ceaseless agitation for full equality”; rather, he suggested, “In all the things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress” (Foner, 2012, p. 653). Washington feared that if demands for greater equality were imposed, it would result in a white backlash and destroy what little progress had been made.
W.E.B. Du Bois viewed the situation differently. Born free in Great Barrington, Massachusetts in 1868, Du Bois was the first African American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard University. He served as a professor at Atlanta University and helped establish the NAACP in 1905 to seek legal and political equality for African Americans. He opposed Washington’s pragmatic approach, considering it a form of “submission and silence on civil and political rights” (Urban & Wagoner, 2009, p. 176).
Critical Lens: The “Value” of Education
The opinions of Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois are prevalent in today’s options for education after high school. Some believe that technical schools have a place in society for those who do not choose to, or who are not able to afford, four-year colleges. In essence, that the four-year college experience is not needed to be a contributing member of society. Others believe that one must attend college to expand understanding for future, more “professional” careers. Who is right in these scenarios? What influences where students choose to learn in post-secondary education? It is important to critique the implicit biases we hold regarding others’ educational choices.
Native American Boarding Schools: Cultural Imperialism and Genocide
Using its military, the federal government created a number of Native American boarding schools throughout the country. The first and most famous of these was the Carlisle School, founded in Pennsylvania in 1879. The federal government convinced many Native American parents that these off-reservation boarding schools would educate their children to improve their economic and social opportunities in mainstream America. In reality, this experiment was intended to deculturalize Indigenous children. Supervisors at the boarding schools destroyed children’s native clothing, cut their hair, and renamed many of them with names chosen from the Protestant Bible. The curriculum in these schools taught basic literacy and focused on industrial training, intended to sort graduates of these boarding schools into agricultural and mechanical occupations. A total of 25 off-reservation boarding schools educating nearly 30,000 students were created in several western states and territories, as well as in the upper Great Lakes region. Based in ethnocentrism, or the belief of the White, Protestant mainstream culture that they were superior to other cultures, these boarding schools relied on a harsh form of assimilation, a fundamental feature of common schooling.
K. Tsianina Lomawaima’s work straddles Indigenous Studies, anthropology, education, ethnohistory, history, legal analysis, and political science. Her scholarship on federal off-reservation boarding schools is rooted in the experiences of her father, Curtis Thorpe Carr, a survivor of Chilocco Indian Agricultural School. Here she discusses the question, Why Boarding Schools?
Conclusion
Education in the United States has a complicated past entrenched in religious, economic, national, and international concerns. In Colonial America, Puritans in Massachusetts knew education would teach children the ways of religion and laws, vital to survival in a new world. Meanwhile, the Middle and Southern Colonies viewed education as a commodity for the wealthy families who could afford it. After the American Revolution, Federalists, Anti-Federalists, and Democratic-Republican Societies all had different perceptions of how schools should be organized to support our newly-established independent nation. In the Early National Era, common schools, normal schools, and higher education grew as education became more widely established. Following the Civil War, the federal government was increasingly involved in education.
Critical Lens: Indigenous Boarding Schools in the News
In the summer of 2021, the dark history of Indigenous boarding schools made headlines as Canadian authorities discovered unmarked graves and remains of children[1] killed at multiple boarding schools for Indigenous children. In July 2021, the U.S. launched a federal probe[2] into our own Indigenous boarding schools and the intergenerational trauma they have caused. These boarding schools are one way that education has been used to oppress and deculturize a particular group of Americans.