Early Roots of Modern American Education

The early roots of modern education stretch back to ancient Israel, where it was believed that education was a divine command, and to Greece and Rome, where learning was considered central to the formation of character and an essential motivator for responsible citizenship. During the middle ages, the clergy found itself preserving scholarship while also trying to spread Christianity. During the Renaissance, Greek humanist philosophy was rediscovered, and education began to be disassociated from the church. In colonial America, however, the Puritans continued to view education as a religious duty as they founded institutions like Harvard and Yale. As the country moved into the nineteenth century, however, economic prosperity began to shift education into the secular sphere as a way to increase prosperity and create equality among citizens. The Founding Fathers, influenced by the works of John Locke, furthered this secularization in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

Keywords Colonies; Dark Ages; Education; Enlightenment; Humanists; In Loco Parentis; Middle Ages; New World; Protestantism; Renaissance

History of Education > The Early Roots of Modern American Education

Overview

The Greek and Roman ideas about education, which were largely neglected in the West as the Dark Ages descended over Europe after the collapse of the Roman Empire in the 5th century, were rediscovered as the works of classical antiquity. Dutifully preserved in the Muslim world, they were reintroduced to Europe during the 13th and 14th centuries, paving the way for what came to be called the Renaissance. At that time, the largely secular educational ideas of Cicero and others were blended with the prevailing Christian piety and spread abroad by the dissemination of books and pamphlets written by English humanists such as Erasmus. Some evangelical Protestants, such as William Bradford, ventured to the New World in the seventeenth century, bringing Jewish ideas of education with them, and hoping that they would form a bulwark against the barbarism of the as-yet untamed American frontier.

The history of modern education stretches back to ancient times, and is comprised of many different cultural and intellectual influences, such as:

• The spiritual inheritance from the ancient Jews.

• The classical inheritance from Greece and Rome, which was never completely snuffed out in Europe after the collapse of the Roman Empire, but glowed ever more brightly as more and more texts reentered Europe from the Islamic world during the Renaissance, beginning in the 13th and 14 centuries A.D.

• Over a millennium of Christian scholarship dating back to Justin Martyr in the 2nd century A.D., on through Augustine in the 5th century, Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century, and Erasmus in the 16th century.

• The social, political, cultural and economic realities to which the first European Americans had to adapt themselves as colonization began during the great Age of Exploration.

All of these influences came together to lay the groundwork for the educational system Americans know today.

Ancient Education Concepts

Education, which one might loosely define as the effective transmission of important and useful information from one person to another, began before the invention of writing. We know this because the evolution of modern human beings from our hominid ancestors depended on the development of cooperation within social groups. As these social groups became more complex, and a division of labor became the norm, it became ever more important to share information and educate those of a new generation in the beliefs, stories, habits and - most importantly - the skills of the elders.

The ancient Jews, whose religion would become foundational to Western Civilization, believed in the presence of a personal god who gave commandments that his people should follow if they desired the greatest amount of joy in this life. The Jews, setting a precedent that was followed straight through the founding of the American colonies, established a link between education and religious duty (Shupak, 2003). According to the book of Deuteronomy, Jews were to become literate so that they could teach God's law to their children, thus retaining His favor. God tells the Jews, for example, to "Teach [my words] to your children, talking about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up" (Deut. 11:19, NIV). From the outset, the ancient Jews valued education as an act of worship, and this cultural value became an inheritance of Western Civilization through the spread of Christianity. It is also important to note the democratization of education in ancient Israel: all were to be educated in the ways of God.

Education in Ancient Greece & Rome

In the more secular civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome, where talk of the gods was more of a parlor game, education was also prized, but for quite different reasons than it was in ancient Israel. In Greece the reasons were pragmatic: the male elite were to be educated so that they could rule their city-states and maintain proper order:

…[C]itizenship…was a degree to be attained to only after proper education… This not only made some form of education necessary, but confined educational advantages to male youths of proper birth. There was of course no purpose in educating any others….Education in Greece was essentially the education of the children of the ruling class to perpetuate the rule of that class (Cubberly, 2004, p. 24).

This elitism moderated somewhat as city-states such as Athens become more prosperous and the club of citizens expanded, and teachers such as Socrates, Plato and Aristotle took on eager philosophy students and founded schools. The true contribution of the Greeks to modern education was their emphasis on -- even their insistence that -- education was important in creating involved citizens who would enjoy basic human freedoms of speech, the press and religion. Rather than placing an emphasis on education as a religious duty, it inverted the Jewish equation somewhat by making education the bulwark against oppressive ideologies imposed from without. The Greeks believed that only when free could a person become truly human, and they could only be free if they were educated to become citizens who would make contributions to lives beyond their own.

The Romans, living on the cusp of the Christian era, sought to expand upon Greek ideas. Cicero wrote that oratory, a lucrative skill prized by many Roman males, presupposed a broad liberal arts background. Concerned that Roman education was making men too intellectually myopic, he helped to articulate the idea that the goal of education was a well-rounded person with a thirst for knowledge that remained with him for life. According to Pascal (1984),

Education to the Romans had a broader context, going beyond the Greek arete, a concern for academic excellence, to a Ciceronian humanitas, education as a way to train not just through systematic instruction, but also as a means of achieving an understanding of human dignity and worthiness. The moral perspective, the stress on values was, according to Cicero, the mark of an educated man (Pascal, 1984, pp. 351-352).

For Cicero, the noble, mind-expanding and civilizing possibilities of education come through, and these concepts were readily adopted by leading Americans of the Enlightenment such as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. Unlike the Jews, and later the Christians, the Romans and Greeks had little use for any education that indulged in supernatural speculations which would not help them live more virtuously in this life.

Influence of Early Christianity

From a far flung corner of the Roman Empire there emerged a new force: Christianity. The early Christians were initially a persecuted minority accused of atheism because they didn't worship the Roman gods. Soon well-read Christian converts like Justin the Martyr - and later Augustine of Hippo - claimed inheritance rights over the classical heritage from Greece and Rome, as well as the first books of the Bible, which they (somewhat disparagingly) referred to as the Old Testament. While it seems likely that Jesus himself and most of his early followers were barely literate, and Jesus left no writings of his own, as Christianity spread throughout the Roman Empire in the second and third centuries A.D., it began to win converts like wealthy Romans living in the cities. These educated Romans became, in time, educated Christians, thus helping to create an intellectual synthesis between Greek and Roman ideas on one hand, and Judeo-Christian ideas on the other. Cicero might have been right that education had moral and ethical ends, but those ends were redefined using Christian categories of sanctification, justification and salvation.

As the Roman legions withdrew from Europe and the Empire collapsed in the fifth century, Christian bishops, as de facto community leaders, found themselves in the curious role of preserving both the rule of law and some level of learning and scholarship, all the while trying to spread their message that a better world, both temporally and spiritually, was ahead. None of these tasks was easy, and the church was by no means entirely successful, but soon the greatest scholars of the age - the Alcuin of York, Venerable Bede, Anselm of Canterbury -- were found in the monasteries that dotted Europe. In the Middle Ages, as Europe slowly began to recover politically, culturally, economically and even spiritually from the end of the Roman Empire, these and other church leaders began to found religious schools. The Jewish idea of education as worship was again in the ascendancy.

The Renaissance

As the Renaissance began in the 13th and 14th centuries, and the works of classical antiquity were reintroduced into Europe through trade with the Muslim world, many of the church intellectuals of the age, including Erasmus of Rotterdam, began to argue that a return to the humanism of Cicero and other ancients would be a useful corrective to the corruption and theological sloth they detected in the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy. Speaking about Erasmus, one scholar wrote:

His humanism is not limited in its functions to the field of education but tries to encompass the whole organism of human society, which it seeks to mould into a better and more harmonious shape (Caspari, 1947, pp. 78-79).

Others outside of leadership positions in the church, many inspired by reading ancient religious skeptics such Epicurus and Lucretius for the first time, deemphasized the role of religion and argued that education should have entirely secular means and ends. This sacred-secular fault line ran through pedagogical (and even political) debates during America's founding period, and it continues up through current debates over spending taxpayer money for religious school vouchers.

Education in Colonial America

By the time the first permanent British settlement in America was established in the Jamestown in 1607, the European settlers were coming from a continent ravaged by decades of religious war between Catholics and Protestants, the disruption of centuries-old educational systems and great political upheaval. By learning lessons from the past, the American colonists hoped to prove that a new sort of society was possible and sustainable. On board the ship in 1630 that would take him and his fellows to the New World, John Winthrop, Puritan founder of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, wrote that the fledgling community would be a city upon a hill:

The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world. We shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God, and all professors for God's sake. We shall shame the faces of many of God's worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us till we be consumed out of the good land whither we are going (Winthrop, 1630).

Education in the colonies, from the outset, was placed in the hands of ministers, churches and church-affiliated organizations - not unlike the situation that prevailed in Europe during the Dark and Middle Ages. The Puritans (as well as the other Protestant and Catholic English colonists up and down the east coast of America) saw education as the primary responsibility of the nuclear family. Some of the wealthier immigrants brought books (even entire libraries) with them from England to use in education. The services of private tutors, particularly in the plantation culture of the Southern colonies, were secured to imbue upper class males with a sound understanding and appreciation of the Western heritage, with a special emphasis on the Bible. Wealthier Americans - those who wanted trained ministers in the family -- also banded together to create institutions of higher learning such as Harvard (founded 1630) and Yale (founded 1701). Across all geographical regions of the colonies, those of the lower classes learned the basics and were apprenticed in a trade that, in all likelihood, was also the trade of their fathers and grandfathers (Morris, 1953, pp. 554-555).

Early Education Laws

From a more practical standpoint, the Christian leaders of the American colonies took into account the need for education to supply a skilled and devout work force to help the colonies enter into a mutually beneficial economical relationship with England. Acting upon these impulses, in 1642 Massachusetts passed a law fining parents for neglecting the education of their children, and a 1647 law required all towns with more than 50 or more families to pay for a teacher of reading and writing. Those with at least 100 families were required to establish a Latin grammar school. All other New England states but Rhode Island had passed similar laws by 1689. By 1700, only several generations after the colonies were founded, the literacy rate for males across New England had climbed to a staggering 95 percent (Morris, 1953, p. 555).

The trend toward universal education began in the British colonies almost from the outset. New England, governed by evangelical Protestants who believed that faith came by reading as much as by hearing, viewed education - particularly literacy -- as being of eternal significance. The Puritans believed that all humans were equally sinful - a democracy of depravity - and thus no child should be deprived of the chance to read and respond to the gospel's call to salvation. They also believed that as human beings understood more about the world, and indeed the universe itself, the more it would redound to the glory of God.

American Education in the 18th Century

As the seventeenth century became the eighteenth, the colonists came to see themselves as having common interests, and they began to press for more and more concessions from England. Slowly and subtly, the strictly religious motivations for the American educational system were balanced with the more humanistic motivations that would have been familiar to the Greeks and Romans, such as patriotism, courage and virtue. Kessler (1992) notes that Alexis de Tocqueville saw just such a shift when he wrote "Democracy in America" in the 1830s:

De Tocqueville … shows that most Americans of his day were more concerned with material comfort and prosperity than with any spiritual benefit attributable to faith (, 448). This shift in priorities can be seen in the lessons schoolchildren learned about wealth and property. Puritan public schools were Biblically oriented and, while Tocqueville doesn't say so explicitly, they probably taught that property was a gift from God to be used for His purposes . In Tocqueville's America, children learned that labor created property, that wealth was labor's just reward, and that property owner-ship entailed no moral obligations. Their first lesson in economic justice was not that theft is sinful, but that respect for the property of others is the best way to secure one's own possessions (, 550-51) (Kessler, 1992, p. 778).

Moreover, the Puritan philosophy of education was secularized and transformed by later generations of American educators into a tool for social progress and the reinforcement of American democratic ideals. Horace Mann, brother-in-law of Nathaniel Hawthorne and a man more than any other responsible for the creation of the American public education system, saw this clearly: "Education, then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of men,-the balance-wheel of the social machinery" (Mann, 1848).

many existing private and parochial schools where they could express their religious views more freely. In one sense, the split between public and religious education that is still seen in America today has its roots in an ancient tension between the Jewish view that education is at heart a religious or missionary enterprise, and the Greek and Roman view that education's purpose is to create citizens prepared to work together for progress in a diverse world.

John Locke, the Enlightenment & American Education

The Enlightenment was an intellectual movement that began in Europe in the seventeenth century. Inspired by the scientific advances of Copernicus, Galileo and Newton, the thinkers of the Enlightenment believed that reason, secular values and science were the most reliable paths to knowledge about ourselves and the world. As the German philosopher Immanuel Kant put it, "Sapere aude! Dare to know! is therefore the slogan of the Enlightenment" (Kant, 1784).

Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1692) and On Working Schools (1697). Locke's influential book The Reasonableness of Christianity, as Delivered in the Scriptures (1695), shows Locke grasping for a common thread of moral agreement among warring Christian factions. A century later, Thomas Jefferson echoed those sentiments:

Reading, reflection and time have convinced me that the interests of society require the observation of those moral precepts only in which all religions agree (for all forbid us to steal, murder, plunder, or bear false witness), and that we should not intermeddle with the particular dogmas in which all religions differ, and which are totally unconnected with morality (Jefferson, 1809).

In "The Thoughts," Locke argued that the young men of privilege should be educated to reason and become "young gentlemen," while in "Working" he argued that others should be taught the value and dignity of hard work. Locke's educational program for wealthy young boys included reading, writing, French and Latin.

Locke's ideas on education and representative government were brought to America by Benjamin Franklin in the 1740s and had an enormous influence on leading revolutionaries such as Washington, Jefferson and Madison. Americans drafting the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were keen to ensure that there was a separation of church and state that would encourage liberty of conscience, political stability and, as one was so led, a personal piety. For many of the Founding Fathers, religion was a private matter that was not to be privileged in the educational system or in the marketplace of ideas.

Education in the American colonies was seen as the primary responsibility for the nuclear family, and this was declared so by statute. Eventually, as the colonies grew in size and complexity, and as religious ideals yielded to the economic and social realities in the New World and the forces of the Enlightenment, this responsibility shifted to schools acting in loco parentis. Later, those disenchanted with the secular turn of the public schools began to rely on private or religious schools to educate their children.

Terms & Concepts

Colonies: In the American context, the original thirteen British settlements in what would later be called the United States.

Dark Ages: The time in Europe between the collapse of the Roman Empire in the 5th century A.D. to approximately the 10th century A.D.

Enlightenment: An intellectual movement that began in Europe in the 17th century whose advocates believed that reason, secular values and science were the most reliable paths to knowledge about ourselves and the world.

Humanists: A group of European Christian thinkers in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance who believed that Christian belief and practice could benefit from dialog with the writers of classical antiquity. Later humanism lost its Christian component.

In Loco Parentis: Latin for "in the place of a parent," typically applied to teachers and school officials.

Middle Ages: A period of time in Europe from approximately the 10th century to the 13th century, between the Dark Ages and the Renaissance, when the power of the Christian church was at its height.

New World: A term used to describe the continents of South and North America as they were discovered by Europeans beginning in the fifteenth century.

Protestantism: A branch of Christianity, started by Martin Luther in the 16th century, in which members can deny the need for any human mediators between God and the individual.

Renaissance: A period of time in Europe, beginning in the 13th century and extending for several centuries, during which there was a rebirth of knowledge derived from and inspired by rediscovered classical sources.

Bibliography

Caspari, F. (1947). Erasmus on the social functions of Christian humanism. Journal of the History of Ideas, 8 pp. 78-106.

Cremin, L. A. (1970). American education: The colonial experience, 1607-1783. New York: Harper Torchbooks.

Cubberley, E. P. (2004). The history of education. Reprint, Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing.

Jefferson, T. (1809). Letter to James Fishback. Cited in J.P. Foley, ed., The Jefferson cyclopedia. New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1900, p. 593.

Kant, I. (1784). An answer to the question, What is enlightenment? Retrieved September 9, 2007, from the University of Pennsylvania http://www.english.upenn.edu/~mgamer/Etexts/kant.html

Kessler, S. (1992). Tocqueville's puritans: Christianity and the American founding. The Journal of Politics, 54 , 776-792. Retrieved September 8, 2007 from EBSCO Online Database Academic Search Premier. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=9211167418&site=ehost-live

Mann, H. (1848). Report to the Massachusetts Board of Education. Reprinted in D. Ravitch, The American reader. (pp. 149-153). New York: Harper, 2000.

Mirel, J. (2011). Bridging the "widest street in the world" reflections on the history of teacher education. American Educator, 35, 6-12. Retrieved December 15, 2013, from EBSCO Online Database Education Research Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=62252523&site=ehost-live

Morris, R. B., ed. (1953). Encyclopedia of American history. New York: Harper & Brothers.

Pascal, N.R. (1984). The Legacy of Roman Education. The Classical Journal, 79 , 351-355.

Prochner, L. (2011). 'Their little wooden bricks': A history of the material culture of kindergarten in the United States. Paedagogica Historica, 47, 355-375. Retrieved December 15, 2013, from EBSCO Online Database Education Research Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=64852843&site=ehost-live

Pulliam, J.D., and Van Patten, J.J. (2013). The history and social foundations of American education. Tenth edition, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.

Schneider, J. (2012). Socrates and the madness of method. Phi Delta Kappan, 94, 26-29. Retrieved December 15, 2013, from EBSCO Online Database Education Research Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=79723725&site=ehost-live

Shupak, N. (2003). Learning methods in ancient Israel. Vetus Testamentum, 53 , 416-426. Retrieved September 8, 2007 from EBSCO Online Database Academic Search Premier. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=10723976&site=ehost-live

Winthrop, J. (1630). A model of Christian charity. Retrieved September 8, 2007, from the University of Virginia http://religiousfreedom.lib.virginia.edu/sacred/charity.html.

Suggested Reading

Boone, R.J. (2006). Education in the United States: Its history from the earliest settlements. Reprint, Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing.

Dejong, D.H. (1993). Promises of the past: A history of Indian education in the United States. Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing.

Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and education. New York: Macmillan. Accessed September 9, 2007, from Worldwide School http://www.worldwideschool.org/library/books/socl/education/DemocracyandEducation/toc.html

Johnson, J. A., & Gollnick, D. M., eds. (2004). Introduction to the foundations of American education. Boston: Allyn & Bacon.

MacDonald, V-M, ed. (2004). Latino education in the United States: A narrated history from 1513- 2000. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Nash, M. A. (2005). Women's education in the United States, 1780-1840. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Nock, A. J. (1932). The theory of education in the United States. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company.

Rury, J. L. (2005). Urban education in the United States: A historical reader. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.