FOCUS How were European educational ideas, institutions, and processes transported to North America during the colonial period? How were these ideas, institutions, and processes continued or changed over time? Have educational ideas from the colonial era shaped your educational experience? If so, consider including them in your educational autobiography.
The Early National Period
127
in all three regions. Both girls and boys attended primary schools, but Latin grammar schools and colleges were reserved for males. Women’s education was limited to primary schools, where they learned the basics (reading and writing) to fulfill their familial and religious responsibilities. Many, especially men who controlled educational institutions, believed that women were intellectually incapable of higher studies. The colonial school system reflected a European class orientation. Although primary schools provided basic education, they were not agencies of upward social mobility. The Latin grammar schools and colonial colleges educated only a small minority of males from the favored classes. During the nineteenth century, frontier egalitarianism, political democratization, and economic change would erode these European-based educational structures to create the American system of universal public education. In the late colonial period, the 1760s and 1770s, the population of Britain’s American colonies grew as their economies prospered. Businessmen in the commercial cities of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Charleston, as well as settlers on the frontier, especially the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, began to resist increased taxation by the British government. Their resistance to taxation without their consent led to the American Revolution which began in 1776.
5-2 The Early National Period On October l9, l78l, the surrender of the British General Cornwallis to a combined American and French army at Yorktown brought the War for America’s independence to an end. In the Treaty of Paris in l783, Great Britain recognized the independence of its former colonies. Although the battles were over, the United States faced the momentous challenge of constructing a new nation out of thirteen victorious but cantankerous former colonies.
5-2a Articles of Confederation and the Constitution
land grant A grant in which the income from a section of federal land is used to support education.
During the early years of independence, the United States was a confederation of thirteen independent and sovereign states loosely tied together in The Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union of 1781. The Confederation’s government had jurisdiction over the Northwest Territory, an area of more than 260,000 square miles that included the present-day states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and part of Minnesota. Marking the initial effort of the United States government in education, the Northwest Land Ordinance in 1785 reserved income from the sixteenth section in each township in the Territory for the support of education as “necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind.” The Northwest Ordinance set the precedent for using federal land grants for education in the nineteenth century. The US Constitution, which was ratified in 1788 and became the law of the land, did not specifically address education. The Tenth Amendment’s “reserved powers” clause (which reserves to the states all powers not specifically delegated to the federal government or prohibited to the states by the Constitution) left responsibility for education with the individual states. The New England tradition of local school control also contributed to a state and local system rather than a national school system in the United States. During the early national period, leaders such as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Rush, and Noah Webster developed proposals for schools in the new republic. Their proposals recommended that schools in the United States (1) prepare Americans for the duties of republican citizenship; (2) provide the utilitarian and scientific skills and subjects needed to develop the nation’s vast expanses of frontier land and abundant natural resources; and (3) eliminate European attitudes in order to construct a uniquely American culture.6 6 Jacqueline S. Reinier, From Virtue to Character: American Childhood, 1775–1850 (New York: Twayne of Macmillan, 1996), p. xi.
Copyright 2017 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
