Chapter 1: The Young Republic Needs Teachers

In early America, the education and schooling of the children of colonists were two different phenomena, occurring separately, together, or not at all. Depending on where children lived and their race, social class, and gender, they might be taught at home by their parents or elders, tutored by people who might be students themselves, attend lessons given by a neighbor woman in her own home, sent abroad to a school in England, or, as in the case of most poor White farm children and enslaved Black children, have no formal education at all. Where they existed, schools were likely sectarian and concerned as much or more with piety and virtue than with intellectual or academic learning. There were great regional differences in the content, form, and oversight of education.