Welcome back. When we talk about reforming education in the US and elsewhere, we often are talking about reforming schools. Who should teach? Who should attend? How do we make sure they're working and so on. It makes sense at one level, more and more of humanity passes through them for longer and longer periods. So if we're to discuss efforts to reform U.S. education, we'll undoubtedly talk a lot about schools. Right? Yet here's where history can lend a distinct perspective, particularly now when so many dramatic changes are happening and how we educate ourselves. Some even question schooling's role. Certainly it's nature. There were long spells of history when the institution of the school did not have such a prominent role. Education was quite important to people, but schools, not so much. One such spell occurred when the Puritans inhabited the English colonies in North America and then the early republic. How did they educate themselves? To understand this said Harvard historian Bernard Bailyn in a groundbreaking essay written 50 years ago, "We need first to view education "not only as a formal pedagogy, but as the entire process by which a culture transmits itself across the generations." Consider how that happens. Parents teach, religious institutions teach, workplaces teach, community organizations teach, newspapers teach and so on. Schools are a part of the story, sure, but if we're back in colonial times, only a part and less significant certainly than family, church and community. So the history of education reform just got a whole lot messier. We're just getting started, but it also makes our inquiry a whole lot more interesting. How we reform schools even today is often about how we decide to transmit our culture, our society, across generations. That's why we get so passionate about it. And some would claim we face a transformative environment now, where the role of the school itself is in question. Education reform then becomes how we adjust the mix of educating agencies to address our new world with perhaps a changing role for schools. Now for Professor Bailyn, here's where history helps especially if you can understand "the moments of true origination." Time is when as he put it, "the words we use and the institutions we know are notably present, but are still enmeshed in older meanings and different purposes." One such moment occurred in the colonies in the early republic. Here Bailyn describes "the first in some ways the most important transformation that has overtaken education in America." He sees fundamental impressions that this made on US schools is still evident today. So let's head back to that early period across the Atlantic coast with particular emphasis in the colonies occupying today's northeastern U.S. region. What was going on? In post Reformation England, printing and literacy had spread, especially the middling classes whose offspring would emigrate to the North American colonies from England and Northern and Western Europe. Indeed, one 16th Century writer Thomas Nash even complained that "every gross brained idiot is suffered to come into print." That was 400 years before blogs were invented, so imagine. Children were raised in an instinctive intuitive process of child-rearing closely tied to community and religious life. Now, then imagine that you survive the stench, the disease and weather perils of the boat ride over to the colonies, settled in this strange new territory, strange and new to you at least, and of course begin to implant your familiar institutions, your habits, your norms, community life, you try to recreate the world you knew in some way. For many this meant patriarchal kinship communities with youth taught to read and write, socialized to adulthood, even taught their trade by family and friends. Aided by the explicit moral instruction of the local church, and likely a short spell of instruction and something we'd recognize today as a primary school. But the colonists were not in anything like the world they were in before, that they struggled to recreate it. In many respects, it seems they were remarkably successful yet such a dramatically different environment did challenge some central tenets of how children were educated in European countries they had left behind. Leaving says Bailyn, "Some permanent marks on U.S. Education." For example, without the support of other established institutions as they had in England, local churches, universities etc., especially in towns and urban areas, the colonial family seems to have taken on added importance as an educator. Many were alarmed at what they saw as a moral crisis among the young as well. Were worried about their ability to raise their children in the faith of generations. And for all their patriarchal trappings, turned increasingly to women to play a role in educating and catechizing the children in this new world. The forbidding new surroundings challenged parental authority, where youth might adapt more easily than adults. Bouts of starvation and disease could shatter a traditional family discipline, even believes in divine providence. Available land could loosen the bonds of family allegiance, you could just leave. The demands of adapting to harsh new physical environment might distract families from religion and home education. Imagine that the challenges to the moral order of your community, your world of values under threat. What do I do? I want my kids to become good adults, to be in God's graces, eventually join his heavenly kingdom. What's the alternative? Imagine what might happen. Young people rejecting the moral paths taken for so many generations "the rude sun striking the father dead," chaos would result. To face this moral threat, colonists including through laws increasingly turned to schools to complement an already increased burden that families felt in educating youth, especially for proper moral upbringing, an echo we still hear so often today. But the new environment also challenged the natural order of educating youth to work. You might learn your trade at home or often with a friend or a relative as an apprentice in their shop. The master tradesman to would assist in your moral upbringing with his own rules and guidelines serving in loco parentis put the apprentice away from home. This was in Bailyn's words "a mutual network of extensive obligations." As the colonies grew, labor grew more scarce. Youth were more in demand. The legal servitude the master could insist upon, the apprentices now had more options. They could leave, they could find another placement if life was too strict, or the promised benefits not realized. For example, at age 17, a disgruntled Benjamin Franklin who was to become the greatest printer of the American colonies threw down his apron, bolted from his apprenticeship to his overbearing brother James in Boston, and headed down to Philadelphia to seek his fortune. In the northern colonies especially, we see young Americans and their families responding to shifting conditions, shaping their own educational paths with new institutions arising, new roles for old ones. Adapting, evolving to support new paths with repeated breaks between one generation and the next. Lacking sufficient state monies or independent benefactors in this hardscrabble world, schooling depended upon those who would pay. Repeated acts of donation creating a deep tradition of local dependency, a lack of self-direction. The old moorings were loosening, ancient traditions of bonded servitude weakened dramatically even as chattel slavery grew in the south. Here it is also critically important to note that English colonies also had a greater religious, cultural, and ethnic heterogeneity than northern and western Europe. More and distinct groups of colonists, religious and cultural jostled for their place in the colonies at early Republic, including a variety of infidels, pantheists even, defiant sectarians, varied nationalities, royalists and revolutionaries and various "backsliders into savagery." And beyond the mix of colonists, the Native Americans represented ethnicities, world views, ways of life totally alienated to the colonists. As good Christians, many communists felt compelled to proselytize, to educate their native brethren and other wayward souls. School education was now per Bailyn, "an instrument of deliberate group action, preserving or advancing group identities, norms and values.". Now, while we may view such efforts as tragic or farcical or horrific, especially when conjoined to the spread of European diseases for Native Americans, there's no doubt of the earnestness of many their conviction and fervor and the resulting transformation of education into a tool of indoctrination, persuasion, transmission of culture. As we move forward in this module, we will see how US education was transformed, reformed if you will, during the colonial period in early republic. Let's turn now to some of the immediate outcomes of education in the 17th and 18th Century starting with literacy.
