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The Transformation of Massachusetts Education, 1670–1780

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Jon Teaford
Jon Teaford*
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin
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Extract

In March 1711, Cotton Mather declared that, “A lively Discourse about the Benefit and Importance of Education, should be given to the Countrey.” “The Countrey,” he asserted, “is perishing for want of it; they are sinking apace into Barbarism and all Wickedness.” Mather was convinced that formal education was being neglected in eighteenth-century Massachusetts, and for two centuries after Mather's death historians accepted his verdict. As early as 1835, Lemuel Shattuck described the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries as a “dark age” of learning. Later historians used similar phrases. By the close of the nineteenth century, Edward Eggleston wrote the epitaph for early eighteenth-century education, “a period of darkness and decline.”

Type
Education in Colonial New England I
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 10 , Issue 3 , Fall 1970 , pp. 287 - 307
Copyright
Copyright © 1970 History of Education Quarterly 

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References

Notes

1. Mather, Cotton, Diary (New York: 1957), II, 51.Google Scholar

2. As quoted in Lincoln, William, History of Worcester, Massachusetts (Worcester, 1862), p. 248.Google Scholar

3. Eggleston, Edward, The Transit of Civilization (New York, 1901), p. 235. Similar views are expressed by Martin, George H., Evolution of the Massachusetts Public School System (Ney York, 1902), p. 69; and Walter Small, Early New England Schools (Boston, 1914), p. 57.Google Scholar

4. Shipton, Clifford K., “Secondary Education in the Puritan Colonies,” New England Quarterly, VII (1934), 661.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5. Middlekauff, Robert, Ancients and Axioms: Secondary Education in Eighteenth-Century New England (New Haven, 1963), pp. 8–9.Google Scholar

6. Ibid., p. 195.Google Scholar

7. Ibid., pp. 114–15.Google Scholar

8. Brinsley, John, A Consolation for Our Grammar Schooles (New York, 1943), p. 52.Google Scholar

9. Mulcaster, Richard, The First Part of the Elementarie (London, 1582), p. 55.Google Scholar

10. Brinsley, John, Ludus Literarius (Liverpool, 1917), p. 13.Google Scholar

11. Ibid.Google Scholar

12. There is evidence that early American schoolmasters shared Brinsley's attitude toward elementary instruction in English reading and writing. Both Ezekial Cheever, New Haven's first schoolmaster, and his successor, Bowers, complained of having to devote too much time to instructing abecedarians. See Eliot Morison, Samuel, Puritan Pronaos (New York, 1936), p. 97.Google Scholar

13. Records of Massachusetts Bay in New England (Boston, 1854), II, 6.Google Scholar

14. Records of Massachusetts, II, 203.Google Scholar

15. According to Samuel Eliot Morison: Boston (1636), Charlestown (1636), Salem (1637), Dorchester (1639), Cambridge (1642), Roxbury (1646), Watertown (1651), Ipswich (1651), Morison, Pronaos, pp. 96–97.Google Scholar

16. Middlekauff, , p. 33.Google Scholar

17. Massachusetts Acts and Resolves, (Boston, 1869), VII, 593.Google Scholar

18. Shipton, , “Secondary Education,” N.E.Q., VII (1934), 653; Middlekauff, p. 35.Google Scholar

19. Chelmsford (1721, 1724, 1726, 1742), Billerica (1721, 1724, 1727), Weston (1737), Stoneham (1737), Littleton (1748), Groton (1748), Stow (1749, 1758), Westford (1750), Framingham (1750), Hopkinston (1757), Sherburn (1761), Newton (1762).Google Scholar

20. Computed from the figures recorded in Sibley's Harvard Graduates, volumes VI, VII, and VIII.Google Scholar

21. Boston News-Letter, Sept. 30, 1726, quoted by Vera Butler, Education as Revealed by New England Newspapers Prior to 1850 (Philadelphia, 1940), p. 271.Google Scholar

22. Bailyn, Bernard, Education in the Forming of American Society (Chapel Hill, 1960), pp. 81–82.Google Scholar

23. Most frontier towns, however, did not have 100 families and therefore were not required to maintain a grammar school. In 1765, only one of the six towns of Berkshire County had over 100 families.Google Scholar

24. Rank of the towns according to wealth computed on the basis of the provincial tax assessments recorded in the Massachusetts Acts and Resolves. Google Scholar

25. Acts and Resolves, II, 1028.Google Scholar

26. Ibid., III, 584.Google Scholar

27. The information on Framingham gathered from Hamilton Hurd, D., ed., History of Middlesex County (Philadelphia, 1890), pp. 616–35.Google Scholar

28. Middlekauff, , pp. 35–36.Google Scholar

29. Based on the census figures found in Collections of American Statistical Association (Boston, 1847), I, 148–56.Google Scholar

30. Middlekauff, , p. 40.Google Scholar

31. Small, New England Schools, pp. 30–31.Google Scholar

32. Ibid. Google Scholar

33. Newton, , Sherburn, , Medford, , Stow, , Holliston, , Tewksbury, , Pepperell, , and Acton. This is a tentative estimate based on town and county histories and town records. Not enough information was obtainable on Reading, Hopkinton, or Groton to know whether they maintained grammar schools or not.Google Scholar

34. Based on the census of 1776. The census of 1776 did not count the number of families. The average number of people per family in Middlesex County in 1765 had been 5.66. Therefore I have assumed that towns having over 566 inhabitants in 1776 had 100 families or more. According to my survey the delinquent towns were: Tewksbury, Holliston, Medford, Acton, Shirley, Townsend, Stow, Dunstable, and Dracut. Not enough information was obtainable on Groton, Reading, Hopkinton, and Wilmington.Google Scholar

35. Acts and Resolves, XVIII, 196.Google Scholar

36. For example, Braintree dismissed its grammar school master on April 24, 1775, and Topsfield did likewise on May 9, 1775. Leominster maintained a grammar school from 1765 to 1775, but in the latter year, the townspeople cut the school appropriation from 40 pounds to 12 pounds and voted to eliminate all classical instruction. Neither Braintree, Topsfield, nor Leominster were reprimanded by the court or Provincial Congress for their neglect of grammar schooling.Google Scholar

37. Boston Town Records, (Boston, 1881), VII, 36.Google Scholar

38. Ibid., VII, 171.Google Scholar

39. Ibid., VII, 240.Google Scholar

40. See, for example, Boston Town Records, VII, 164; and Boston Town Records, XII, 108.Google Scholar

41. Middlekauff, Robert believes that the writing schools were designed to teach young children prior to their entry into grammar school. He writes, “Boston's citizens took satisfaction in their hierarchy of schools. It was one in which the functions and the constituencies of two kinds of schools remained distinct. At the first level, in the writing schools, young boys learned to read, write, and cypher; at the next, in the grammar schools, their older brothers, themselves graduates of the writing schools, studied Latin and Greek.” (Middlekauff, p. 54).Google Scholar

42. Based on the list of students found in C. Colesworthy's, D. John Tileston's School (Boston, 1887), pp. 49–55, and on the birth records as found in volume 24 of A Report of the Record Commissioners of the City of Boston (Boston, 1894).Google Scholar

43. Boston Selectmen's Records (Boston, 1881), VII, 288. Also the following entry appears in the Boston Town Records for May 8, 1741: “We have made enquiry into the Circumstances of the North Writing School, which consists of about Two Hundred and Eighty Scholars, A Master and Usher…. We don't find that any Children of the Town have been refused, that could Read in the Psalter….” (Boston Records, XII, 279).Google Scholar

44. Eliot Morison, Samuel, Life and Letters of Harrison Gray Otis (Boston, 1913), p. 6.Google Scholar

45. Brinsley, p. 27.Google Scholar

46. Ibid., p. 32.Google Scholar

47. Boston News-Letter, March 21, 1709, quoted by Butler, Education as Revealed by Newspapers, p. 218.Google Scholar

48. At least 113 advertisements announcing the opening of new private schools appeared in Boston newspapers from 1700 to 1775.Google Scholar

49. Boston News-Letter, Jan. 17, 1734, quoted by Robert Seybolt, The Private Schools of Colonial Boston (Cambridge, 1935), p. 16.Google Scholar

50. Papers relating to the History of the (Episcopal) Church in Massachusetts (n.p., 1873), p. 230, quoted by Shipton, “Secondary Education,” N.E.Q., VII (1934) 660.Google Scholar

51. Attendance figures for 1765–1767 found in Robert Seybolt's Public Schools in Colonial Boston (Cambridge, 1935), p. 64.Google Scholar

52. Hurd, Middlesex County, pp. 259–60. There are numerous examples of rural towns providing instruction in writing and arithmetic beyond the dame school level. On March 2, 1713, the townspeople of Framingham voted, “Lieutenant Drury and Ebenr Harrington to be school masters to instruct the youth of Framingham in writing; and the selectmen are appointed to settle school dames in each quarter of the town, which masters and mistresses are to continue until August next.” (Hurd, Middlesex County, pp. 635–36). In the town of Leominster in the years 1751 and 1752, the people voted to choose a committee of three “to provid sum meat persons for winter and summer schooling, six weeks for a writing-school and the rest to be laide out for school dames.” (Hurd, History of Worcester County [Philadelphia: 1889], p. 1216). In the year 1756, Leominster appropriated funds “to be expended for paying a master to keep a writing-school three months during the winter and the balance for hiring school dames as the selectmen should direct” (Hurd, Worcester County, p. 1216). The town of Bedford in 1758 a “writing school” in the center of town four months and a “women's teaching-school” six months in the quarters of the town (Hurd, Middlesex County, p. 824). At the time of his death in 1771, Captain Ephraim Brigham left Marlborough a permanent fund of 111 pounds, the interest of which was to be “annually expended in hiring some suitable person to keep a school in the middle of the town, to teach young people the arts of writing and cyphering” (Small, p. 236).Google Scholar

53. See, for example, advertisements in the following issues: Essex Gazette, July 21, 1772; Feb. 15, 1774; Oct. 25, 1774; and Essex Journal and New Hampshire Packet, Oct. 25, 1776.Google Scholar

54. Lincoln, Worcester, p. 249.Google Scholar

44. Ibid., pp. 249–50.Google Scholar

56. Ibid., p. 250. (I thank Professor Richard D. Brown for calling my attention to this item.)Google Scholar