Schoolhouse blues

Early education in New England -- such as it was

by Sally Cragin

Illustration by Lennie Peterson

As unpredictable as the day-to-day weather in Tritown can be, some markers are immutable. While McIntosh, Gravenstein, and Baldwin apples turn ruby-red on their low-hanging branches, local children, their parents, and educators prepare for the return to school.

Like every other educator and inmate of the Tritown school system Delia Ellis Bell the Partial Yankee (there was a questionable great-great-grandmother) has mixed feelings about the onset of classes. Though as a substitute teacher, she's in a slightly different position, one she likens to her colonial foremothers. "Which means I need to fake it in a number of different disciplines," she tells Hollis the Mountain Man one afternoon. She had been called in to the elementary school that morning to take over for a male teacher in his 40s who ruptured his Achilles tendon chasing a rogue dodge ball. ("I tell you Hollis," she says with a hint of self-importance. "It's just a matter of years before they start talking about metal detectors at the doors.") So she'd spent an hour on reading, writing, and arithmetic. "Now called `Language Arts,' `Manual Production Methods,' and `Numerical Skills and Comprehension,'" she scoffs.

"Bring back the good old days," Hollis mutters in accord, dunking his doughnut in a cup of decaf (now that $erena the Waitress is pregnant, she's willing to make concessions to customers who may have been lured away by the Whole Donut and its bizarre smorgasbord of coffee flavors). "If I'd been the fifth generation, instead of the tenth, I could have just stayed home and worked on stuff, instead I spent too many years in school."

Delia sighs. She remembers Hollis fidgeting behind her seat throughout her early education. It was a blessed day when he started taking vocational-school classes across town, leaving the back of her seat unkicked for once. So she has pursued a higher education, but look what it gets her? As much as she enjoys the unpredictability of being a "hired ruler" in Tritown's classrooms, she's starting to resent her lack of security. She gets called at least several times a week to fill in, but maybe she needs a larger perspective. Besides, she's midway through an advanced degree in education, and she's got another independent study coming up. What better way to get a grade than to spend some time in the past? The Tritown Historical Society is one of the few nearby places that acknowledges the world beyond Tritown. Regional history books abound, so Delia decides to spend an afternoon studying up on early education.

What she finds makes her proud to be a New Englander, and just a little queasy about the status of females in her beloved home region. Though the middle colonies as well as the Bay colony opened public schools early on, posterity suggests New Englanders had a special claim on the importance of education. Harvard College was founded just 16 years after the Mayflower docked, and the Puritan culture, with its emphasis on Bible reading, ensured widespread literacy. Yet less than 50 percent of 17th-century women who owned property were able to read and write -- most signed contracts with a cross. Still, the Puritan era did produce a byproduct of education: creative writing and poetry. Think of Anne Bradstreet, America's first female poet.

Yet Bradstreet had been driven out of Massachusetts, and her case was not atypical. For most girls, the domestic arts were those stressed in school, which might meet for a few weeks in the winter. As Delia reads, she feels a slow chill creeping up her spine. If not for an accident of calendar and birth, she might be one of her silent sisters, writing her story with a needle instead of a pen, plying stitches on a bit of cambric -- instead of furiously writing on a pad of legal paper.

In Fitchburg, for example, the town fathers decided they didn't need to bother about education until around 1764, when they set aside three pounds (about $10) for school. Classes were held in Thomas Cowdin's tavern (!) and William Chadwick's corn barn that winter. (Chances are the children preferred classes in the barroom -- aside from the prospect of more warmth, Cowdin's wife, Hannah, liked children and was an avid baker.) But education was a luxury, especially for females, save those with extraordinary parents.

While he was in London, Ben Franklin wrote to his daughter Sally: "Go constantly to church, whoever preaches. For the rest, I would only recommend to you in my absence, to acquire those useful accomplishments, arithmetic and bookkeeping. This you might do with ease, if you would resolve not to see company on the hours set apart for those studies." Notable colonials from the South took a more liberal view of what constituted education for their sisters and daughters, and though skills that would improve their ability to run a household were crucial, so too were the arts that would enhance life in the social sphere. Virginian Thomas Jefferson was very specific when he wrote to his daughter Patsy, and his advice clearly shows his own interests in French culture:

"With respect to the distribution of your time, the following is what I should approve: From 8 to 10, practice music. From 10 to 1, dance one day and draw another. From 1 to 2, draw on the day you dance, and write a letter next day. From 3 to 4, read French. From 4 to 5, exercise yourself in music. From 5 till bedtime, read English, write, etc. . . . Informe me what books you read, what tunes you learn, and inclose me your best copy of every lesson in drawing."

Some communities instituted "dame schools," which provided a way for widows and single women to earn their keep by educating children, but the prevailing custom was for girls to be educated primarily in their home. If you came from a family that placed an emphasis on erudition, so much the better. Abigail Smith Adams, the mother and wife of two presidents, never went to school, but she acquired a remarkable education simply by dint of being a member of a large family in Weymouth with an impressive library. Her minister father had histories and sermons, as well as bound copies of Joseph Addison's The Spectator, a collection of erudite essays that no educated home of the day would have lacked. But had minister Smith and later Richard Cranch, who married Abigail's sister Mary, not encouraged the girls to learn, chances are this notable First Lady might have left behind more samplers than letters. Later in her life, Abigail Adams acknowledged the debt she owed to her brother-in-law: "He it was who put proper Bookes into my hands, who traught me to love the Poets and to distinguish their Merrits."

As Delia reads, she begins to feel the slow blush of chagrin spread over her cheeks. Who was she to disparage `Language Arts,' `Manual Production Methods,' and `Numerical Skills and Comprehension'? Especially when she is in a position to influence and, yes, even inspire the young.

Which is more than she could do with Hollis these days. Then again, if his lot had been that of a Fitchburg boy two centuries earlier, he would have been damn happy in the Cowdin tavern, that's for sure.

Sally Cragin's ancestors include Mary Jane Cragin, the natural history and mathematics teacher at Wheaton Female Seminary in the 1860s.

---

The Tales From Tritown archive

---