For more than 200 years educational developments in New England spilled across America. We look back and wonder why and how our current educational system fell away from that New England synthesis. The mainstream Puritans who poured into Massachusetts Bay Colony between 1630 and 1660 brought with them university graduates and educated clergymen. These valued their books. Their sheer numbers influenced their religiously more radical Pilgrim neighbors in nearby Plymouth Colony to become more bookish themselves. 

Early New England education moved through three main phases. 
 

• From about 1620 to 1650, the sheer challenge of migrating, building houses, defending against Native Americans, farming and hunting left little time to think about education. 
• In the second phase Puritan parents were universally acknowledged to have primary, virtually exclusive responsibility for educating their own children. 
• In the third  phase, the Congregationalist churches quietly began to lead in formal instruction of the young.  An infant became the object of a home and church partnership within two weeks of birth. That is when her or his father brought the baby to church for baptism. The church urged parents to speak frequently with their children about religion, for example, while dressing and feeding them.

These were systematic manuals of Christian doctrine presented in the form of questions and answers. Martin Luther had called for vigorous religious education of young children and, to show how to do it, published his primer of religion in 1520. Catholics responded with the Council of Trent’s Roman Catechism of 1566. John Calvin prepared catechisms as did the Germans Caspar Olevianus and Zacharias Ursinas with their Heidelberg Catechism. But the book which became  the paramount teaching document of early New England was the Calvinist Shorter Catechism of the Presbyterian Churches, compiled by an Assembly of Divines at Westminster (1645-1652).

At one time In British colonial America two thirds of adult churchgoers were committed not to Anglican, Catholic or Lutheran standards but to variations of Calvinism. Presbyterians, most Congregationalists and some Baptists all honored the Shorter Catechism. New England also produced many local adaptations. The famous “New England Primer” of 1691 was one such.  It was very compact: 2.5 inches by 4 inches. Like the Shorter Catechism, the New England Primer contained 107 questions and answers on God, Jesus, salvation, church, Ten Commandments  and the Lord’s Prayer.

Late in the reign of the first Queen Elizabeth, 40 years and more before the New England migrations, Puritan thinkers were already calling the family a school of obedience and religion, a little church, a wee  commonwealth. Religion would not work, they argued, unless the male head of household firmly catechized his wife, children and servants.  Without fathers who catechized  and families which were also churches and schools, the young would be lost for Christ and reform.  Later, the official English hierarchy, especially William Laud,  Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury, fought this tendency. In the mother country many Puritan clergymen therefore learned to function underground. Their proscribed activities included semi-secret  catechizing of the young in their homes.

In New England Puritans fleshed out religious blueprints without resident Anglican bishops peering over their shoulders. As late as 1642 most New England churches still looked to private homes to do all the catechizing. But Puritan clergy with prior catechizing experience in Laud’s England had arrived in Massachusetts from the beginning. They were willing to continue in the New World their pioneering work with the young in England. Initially the clergy’s role in instructing children was clearly and officially secondary to that of parents. Churchmen noted with alarm that some fathers were falling down on the job of instructing. Congregations therefore passed ordinances reminding fathers of their duty. Churches also began to oversee home training and encouraged clergy to visit parents at home to assist fathers and to make recommendations for improvement. But the duty to provide elementary education began at home. When it came to religion, the Puritan home was always the first line of defense against Satan.

By the late 1660s New England’s first fervor was waning and new ideas and practices made steady inroads. Churches then strengthened education outside the home. For the non-Puritan King Charles II was firmly on the throne. The lord bishops and the Church of England had been restored to legal pre-eminence. Presbyterians and Congregationalists alike found themselves newly on the defensive. To defend their position, the New England churches increasingly made use of their educated clergy as prime deliverers of elementary education to the young. The Puritan home gradually gave its children over to an outside force for formal education. Over time, Puritan children also belonged less and less to the church itself. Nonetheless, religious instruction of the young both at home and in church remained rocklike in New England through the entire 18th century. 

This home-church-village fortress of New England values proved so strong that it long survived inroads by the later, ever more secular common schools, community schools, public schools and government schools. Only by the 1960s had an American national  educational atmosphere emerged downright hostile to what young Puritans had once learned from their Shorter Westminster Catechisms. We are now reaping the consequences of this steady devaluation of the sacred in education.
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{NOTE:  FREELY DERIVED FROM FIRST 50 PAGES OF JAMES AXTELL, THE SCHOOL UPON A HILL: EDUCATION AND SOCIETY IN COLONIAL NEW ENGLAND. NY. Norton. 1974. 1976 paperback}
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