Middle Atlantic Colonies

town school The eighteenth- and earlynineteenth-century New England elementary school that educated children living in a designated area and was the common school’s predecessor.

hornbook A single sheet of parchment containing the Lord’s Prayer, letters of the alphabet, and vowels, which is covered by the translucent, flattened horn of a cow and fastened to a flat wooden board. It was used in colonial primary schools. The Town School The New England colonists re-created the European dual-track system, establishing primary town schools for the majority of students and Latin grammar schools for upper-class boys. The New England town school, a locally controlled institution, educated both boys and girls from ages 6 to 13 or 14. Attendance could be irregular, depending on weather conditions and the need for children to work on family farms. The school’s curriculum included reading, writing, arithmetic, catechism, and religious hymns. Children learned the alphabet, syllables, words, and sentences by memorizing the hornbook, a sheet of parchment covered by transparent material made by flattening cattle horns. The older children read the New England Primer, which included religious materials such as the Westminster Catechism, the Ten Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Apostle’s Creed.2 Arithmetic was primarily counting, adding, and subtracting.

The New England town school, often a crude log structure, was dominated by the teacher’s pulpit-like desk at the front of the single room. Seated on wooden benches, pupils memorized their assignments until called before the schoolmaster to recite. Most teachers were men, some of whom temporarily taught school while preparing for the ministry. Others took the job to repay debts owed for their voyage to North America. Very few elementary teachers were trained in educational methods, and they often relied on corporal punishment to maintain discipline.

The Latin Grammar School Upper-class boys attended Latin grammar schools, which prepared them for college entry. These boys generally had learned to read and write English from private tutors. Entering the Latin grammar school at age 8, the student would complete his studies at age 15 or 16. He studied such Latin authors as Cicero, Terence, Caesar, Livy, Vergil, and Horace. More advanced students studied such Greek authors as Isocrates, Hesiod, and Homer. Little attention was given to mathematics, science, or modern languages. Usually college graduates, the Latin masters who taught in these schools were better paid and accorded higher social status than elementary teachers. (For the importance of Latin in Western culture, see Chapter 3, The World Origins of American Education.)

Established in 1636, Harvard College was founded on the Puritan belief that future ministers and other leaders needed a thorough classical and theological education. The applicants were typically young men from the wealthier and more favored families. To be admitted to the College, the applicants had to demonstrate their competency in Latin and Greek. The four-year curriculum reflected the Puritan belief that ministers and other leaders needed a liberal arts education, with an emphasis on the classics. Harvard taught grammar, logic, rhetoric, mathematics, geometry, astronomy, ethics, philosophy, and natural science. Especially important for future ministers were Calvin’s theology, Hebrew, Greek, and ancient history.

5-1b middle atlantic colonies

Although the other colonial regions—the Middle Atlantic colonies and Southern colonies —shared a common English culture with New England, they exhibited significant differences in the provision and maintenance of schools. The settlers in the Middle Atlantic colonies—New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania—were more culturally pluralistic than the homogenous Puritans of Massachusetts and Connecticut. The Dutch had settled New Netherlands, which later became New York; the Swedes had settled Delaware, and some Germans located in Pennsylvania. The Middle Atlantic colonies’ ethnic, language, and religious diversity influenced education. While Puritan New England created uniform town schools, the different churches in the Middle Atlantic colonies established parochial schools to educate children in their own religious beliefs and practices.

2Melissa Freeman and Sandra Mathison, Researching Children’s Experiences (New York: Guilford Publications, 2009), pp. 1–17. Also, see Jennifer E. Monaghan, Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007).