Early American leaders agreed that the survival of democracy depended on an educated population. John Adams reminded his teenage son John Quincy that “the end of study is to make you a good man and a useful citizen.” Thomas Jefferson believed that general education would “enable every man to judge for himself what will secure or endanger his freedom.”

What would schools teach? The nation’s founders made that clear in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which set the conditions for frontier lands to become new states. “Religion, morality and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.”

Where Children Learned

Education changed little from the Revolutionary War to the 1840s. Wealthy children were taught at home by tutors. Poor children often received no schooling at all. But most children, especially in New England, went to village schools. Residents paid taxes to build a one-room schoolhouse and hire a teacher. Parents contributed additional money for firewood, textbooks, and other necessities.

Children sat on benches along the sides of the room, with the teacher’s desk at the front and a stove in the middle. Pictures, maps, and blackboards were extremely rare. Sometimes there were dozens of students at different levels of learning. (There was no system of first grade, second grade, and so on.) The teacher had to keep all the children busy. If students misbehaved, the teacher could hit them with a rod, ruler, or lash.

Most students were boys. Some girls attended village schools, but girls often learned to read and write at home, if at all. The youngest girls might attend “dame schools,” which were run by older women.

Few schools were in session as long as they are now. Usually the school year started around Thanksgiving and ended the following spring, when planting began.

What They Learned

In Protestant New England, religion and morality were part of almost every reading, writing, and arithmetic lesson. Students learned to read from the Bible and from textbooks loaded with moral messages. Noah Webster’s Elementary Spelling-book was one widely used textbook. Here is one reading lesson:

As for those boys and girls that mind not their books, and love not the church and school, but play with such as tell lies, curse, swear and steal, they will come to some bad end, and must be whipt till they mend their ways.

(For more examples of 19th-century schoolbooks, see Enrichment Essay Topic 10, Primary Sources on American Education in the 19th Century.)

After reading, students sharpened their quill pens, made ink from black powder and water, and worked on their penmanship. There was no lined paper in those days, so the first lesson, when students had paper, was to draw straight lines across the page. Then the teacher had students write sayings like “Contentment is a virtue.”

Spelling followed reading. The teacher spelled out words, and the students recited them back.

Then it was on to arithmetic. Math problems were often presented with references to the Bible. One typical problem asked, “Adam was 930 years old when he died, and 130 when Seth was born. How old was Seth when Adam died?”

The Decline of Village Schools

In the 1820s and 1830s, the Second Great Awakening swept the country. During this time of religious enthusiasm, many new Protestant sects were born, and they had different views of the Bible. To them, the morality taught in village schools was bland and ineffective.

An even bigger challenge to village schools came from immigration. Roman Catholics arrived in America mainly from Ireland and Germany. They soon discovered that American schools used the King James translation of the Bible, which was Protestant. Catholic parents had three unhappy choices. They could try to change America’s traditional method of education. They could send their children to a school that taught Protestant beliefs. Or they could not send their children to school at all.

Horace Mann and other reformers solved these problems by creating free public schools. The public schools stuck to basic moral lessons like the Ten Commandments while avoiding religious ideas that caused conflict. Although some strong believers disliked Mann’s compromise, they found it hard to refuse free public education.

Improving Education for Women

Both boys and girls attended public schools, but girls and women had fewer educational opportunities than their male counterparts. Most teachers believed that a woman’s role was to be a wife and mother. Girls were generally not encouraged to go to high school or college unless they planned to be schoolteachers. Nor were they encouraged to study such subjects as history, mathematics, or the sciences.

Women reformers worked to change this situation. As early as 1814, teacher Emma Willard opened a boarding school in Vermont where girls learned mathematics, philosophy, history, and other subjects. In 1821, the city of Troy, New York, gave Willard money to start the Troy Female Seminary. Now called the Emma Willard School, it boasts of being the first school in the country to give girls the same educational opportunities as boys.

Another reformer, Mary Lyon, believed passionately that women needed and deserved higher education as much as men did. In 1834, she retired from teaching to start a college that would offer women the same kind of education that was available in men’s colleges. Lyon worked hard to gather support and raise money. Three years later, she opened the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. Located in Massachusetts, Mount Holyoke became a model for other women’s colleges. Today, Mount Holyoke College educates women for positions of leadership in society.

The work of reformers like Willard and Lyon created new educational opportunities for girls and women. Still, men continued to dominate many occupations and fields of study. In the second half of the 20th century, a new women’s movement championed true equality for women in both educational and occupational opportunity.

Enrichment Activity

Answer these questions:

1.	Why did early American leaders believe education was so important?
2.	How would you describe schools from the time of the Revolution to about 1840?
3.	What was Horace Mann’s solution to disagreements about the teaching of morality and religion?
4.	In what ways did educational opportunities grow for females in the years before 1850?