The New-England Primer
The New-England Primer, the principal textbook for millions of colonists and early Americans. First compiled and published about 1688 by Benjamin Harris, a British journalist who emigrated to Boston, the primer remained in use for more than 150 years.
Although often called “the little Bible of New England,” The New-England Primer gained popularity not only in New England but also throughout colonial America and parts of Great Britain; an estimated six to eight million copies had been sold by 1830. Less than 100 pages in length, this early textbook proved significant in both reflecting the norms of Puritan culture and propagating those norms into early American thought. In The New-England Primer, Harris provided a tool of reform that promoted literacy, proliferated compulsory education, and solidified a Calvinist ethic in colonial America.
Development and original content
The historical milieu in which the primer emerged contributed to its rise to prominence. In 1630 a group of Puritans settled the Massachusetts Bay area with the goal of developing a society based on biblical principles as embodied by the English Reformation. The doctrine of the priesthood of the believer motivated Puritans to teach reading to all citizens so that they could know and follow the Christian scriptures. As early as 1642, Massachusetts law required literacy instruction to all children, servants, and apprentices. The 1647 Old Deluder Satan Act—in order to ensure that “learning may not be buried in the grave of our forefathers”—required every township of 50 households to hire a teacher. Towns twice that size were mandated to set up schools that would prepare students for Harvard. With only the hornbook—a sheet containing the letters of the alphabet, mounted on a wooden frame and protected with thin transparent layers of horn—and the Bible available in most schools, New England was ready for a textbook that would be affordable, portable, and compatible with the predominant worldview.
Borrowing principles from John Amos Comenius’s Orbis Sensualium Pictus and his own Protestant Tutor, Harris incorporated crude woodcut illustrations and religious content to teach reading skills and to encourage rote memorization of Calvinist doctrine. Graduated literacy instruction began with the alphabet, simple letter combinations, and syllables, increasing to complex sentences intended for rote memorization. Themes of sin, death, punishment, salvation, and respect for authority were displayed through alphabetic rhymed couplets, poems, prayers, and scriptures. The theme of punishment, for instance, was exhibited in the rhyming couplet for the letter F: “The idle fool / Is whipt at school.” Such themes for a child’s textbook may seem morbid in light of the 18th-century Swiss-born philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s notions of childhood innocence, but they would not seem so to Puritan families who embraced the doctrine of infant corruption caused by the original sin of Adam.
Adaptations
The primer was reproduced by a variety of publishers, resulting in 450 editions by 1830. Adaptations were printed for various geographic regions and ethnic groups, such as the 1781 Indian Primer printed in both the Mohawk and English languages. With each new edition came content changes, though the core elements of the pictured alphabet and catechism remained constant. The couplet for the letter A never changed—“In Adam’s fall / We sinned all,” but many of the others were modified to reflect evolving political or religious beliefs. For instance, independence from Britain saw the alteration of “Our king the good / No man of blood” to “The British king / Lost states thirteen” and later to “Queens and kings / Are gaudy things.” One of the most blatant political alterations was made in 1776 when an image of King George III was simply relabeled with the name of John Hancock.
The influence of the Great Awakening—a religious revival in the American colonies in the 1720s, ’30s, and ’40s—brought about several changes to the primer. For example, the couplet for the letter C was amended from “The cat does play / And after slay” to “Christ crucify’d / For sinners dy’d.” The Great Awakening’s influence shifted the primer’s emphasis from God’s wrath to God’s love and contributed to the addition of more prayers and hymns, such as Isaac Watts’s “Cradle Hymn.” As moral education became more secularized, the emphasis on punishment and sin softened. For example, in later versions, consuming fire as a punishment was replaced with the threat of having treats taken away. Literacy as a means to finding eternal salvation was replaced in one 1790 version as a path to financial security, and in an 1819 edition the rhyme for K expressed the value of play—“ ’Tis youth’s delight / To fly their kite.”
Various adaptations included the Lord’s Prayer, the Apostles’ Creed, the Ten Commandments, the Westminster Shorter Catechism, John Cotton’s Milk for Babes, and the common children’s prayer “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep.” Also present in some editions was an account of John Rogers’s martyrdom accompanied by a woodcut of his burning at the stake while his wife and children watched. The catechetical drill included some of the following questions: “What is the chief end of man?” “What is the first commandment?” “What is faith in Jesus Christ?” Later secular questions were included, such as “Who saved America?” and “Who betrayed America?”
Assessment
Though criticized for depicting children as depraved and for using God as a metaphor to manipulate submission to the political and religious authority of New England, the primer made a lasting impact on the moral landscape of America. Of the millions printed, fewer than 1,500 copies remain, the earliest having been published in 1727. This relatively low number of surviving texts indicates the constant use the primer received and the impact its principles had on the development of American values. The multiple editions of existing copies serve as a valuable record chronicling the changes in early American philosophy of education.
Samuel James Smith