Along with the farmers and artisans who settled in New England with their families during the Great Migration came nearly 150 university-trained colonists. Nearly all had studied divinity. These men became the first ministers in Massachusetts and Connecticut, and a brisk “seller’s market” existed for them. Larger churches began stockpiling candidates by hiring newly arrived Cambridge and Oxford graduates as assistants or teachers in anticipation of the retirement of their senior ministers. But New England puritans could not forever remain dependent on the graduates of English universities.
In 1636 the Massachusetts General Court appropriated ?400 to found “a schoole or colledge.” Two years later, just as the first freshmen gathered in Cambridge, John Harvard, a recent arrival who had died of tuberculosis, left the college ?800 and his library. After a shaky start, during which students conducted a hunger strike against a sadistic and larcenous headmaster, Harvard settled into an annual pattern of admitting a dozen or so fourteen-year-old boys, stuffing their heads with four years of theology, logic, and mathematics, and then sending them out into the wider world of New England. In 1650 Harvard received from the General Court the charter under which it is still governed.
Immediately below Harvard on the educational ladder came the grammar schools, where boys spent seven years learning Latin and Greek “so far as they may be fitted for the Universitie.” Boston founded the first—the Boston Latin School—in 1636. Massachusetts and Connecticut soon passed education acts that required all towns of any size to establish such schools. Not every New England town that was required to maintain a school actually did so. Those that did often paid their teachers poorly. Only the most dedicated Harvard graduates took up teaching as a career. Some parents kept their children at their chores rather than at school.
Yet the cumulative effect of the puritan community’s educational institutions, the family and the church as well as the school, was impressive. A majority of men in mid-seventeenth-century New England could read and a somewhat smaller percentage could also write. By the middle of the eighteenth century, male literacy was almost universal. In Europe only Scotland and Sweden had achieved this happy state so early. Literacy among women also improved steadily, despite the almost total neglect of formal education for girls.
Spreading literacy created a thriving market for the printed word. Many of the first settlers brought impressive libraries with them, and large numbers of English books were imported throughout the colonial period. The first printing press in the English colonies was founded in Cambridge in 1638, and by 1700 Boston was producing an avalanche of printed matter. Most of these publications were reprints of sermons; ministers required only the smallest encouragement from their congregations to send off last Sunday’s remarks to the local printer. But if ministers exercised a near monopoly of the printed word, they did not limit their output to religious topics. They also produced modest amounts of history, poetry, reports of scientific investigations, and treatises on political theory.
By the early eighteenth century the intellectual life of New England had taken on a character potentially at odds with the ideas of the first puritans. In the 1690s Harvard acquired a reputation for encouraging religious toleration. According to orthodox puritans, its graduates were unfit for the ministry and its professors were no longer interested in training young men for the clergy. In 1701 several Connecticut ministers, most of them Harvard graduates, founded a new “Collegiate School” designed to uphold the puritan values that Harvard seemed ready to abandon. The new college was named after its first English benefactor, Elihu Yale. It fulfilled its founders’ hopes by sending more than half of its early graduates into The ministry. Nonetheless, as became all too clear at commencement ceremonies in 1722 when its president and six tutors announced themselves Anglicans, Yale quickly acquired purposes well beyond those assigned it by its creators.
The Image Colonial Families: Adult and Child Reading at Www. myhistorylab. com
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