The new academies

Disdainful of the challenging intellectual values, the secondary schools continued in their Classical tracks. By the 18th century, however, their tradition was playing out, especially among the rising nabobs of the marketplace. When the old schools failed to respond to their demands for an education calculated to prepare their sons for everyday living, they resorted to private schooling. From such endeavour emerged the academy. The first school of strictly native provenance, it made its advent in 1751 in Philadelphia (the Philadelphia Academy), the work in the main of Benjamin Franklin. What differentiated it from its Classical antecedent was its promotion of “useful learning,” to wit, the vernacular, modern languages, history, geography, chronology, navigation, mathematics, natural and applied science, and the like.

The first academies addressed themselves solely to boys, but time saw them vouchsafe instruction to girls in a “female department,” which in turn gave way to the “female academy,” whose curriculum reflected debates of the time about female education. Fine arts, domestic subjects, and training for occupations open to women were included, though some female educators stressed intellectual attainment rather than practical learning.

Private ventures always, academies generally were not loath to solicit outside assistance—some, indeed, as in New York, enjoyed a public subsidy. Whatever their special character, to their very end they maintained their original purpose of bringing education into closer consonance with “the great and the real business of living,” as Phillips Academy of Andover, Massachusetts, phrased it when, in 1778, it held its first sessions.

The middle colonies

The religious uniformity that marked the Puritan theocracy was missing in the middle colonies. From New York through Delaware there flourished a host of sects whose scriptural interpretations were diverse—often, in fact, in collision. Nor was there even the tie of a common language, for the settlers came from many lands. Divergent in religion and language—the bedrock in those times of elementary schooling—the middle colonists could not accommodate themselves, as did the Puritans, to a single school teaching reading and religion to all the children of the neighbourhood. Instead, they depended on parish or parochial schools, each of them free to teach by its own denominational lights. True, for a time New Netherland, with its established Dutch Reformed Church, maintained some town schools, but, after the English seized the colony (renaming it New York), such endeavours ceased. Pennsylvania, linguistically and denominationally the most heterogeneous of the colonies, began its educational history by ordering the erection of public schools and the instruction of children. But the ordinance fell prey to powerful sectarian antagonisms, and in 1701 the colony essayed to make peace by sanctioning the establishment of parochial schools.

Like the New Englanders, the middle colonists aspired to establish colleges, but, with no friendly lawmakers to sustain them, they found their task heavily hobbled, and the mid-1700s were upon them before their hopes materialized with the advent, in 1746, of the College of New Jersey (Princeton). There followed King’s College (Columbia) in 1754, the College and Academy of Philadelphia (Pennsylvania) in 1755, and Queen’s College (Rutgers) in 1766. Common to these schools was their stress on the ancient languages, metaphysics, and divine science. At the same time, however, one discerns signs of a new liberalism. Both Rutgers and Columbia announced their interdenominationalism. Pennsylvania offered courses in physics, and in 1765 it became the first colonial college to sponsor systematic instruction in medicine.

The Southern colonies

Unlike New Englanders, Southerners resided not in villages but on widely scattered plantations. For years, town life was impossible and so, per consequence, were town schools. But even had their establishment been feasible, the odds against them were staggering, since the ruling classes, like their analogues overseas in England, were averse to schooling the young under governmental direction. Instead, they regarded education as a personal concern, the affair of parent and church rather than of the state. Left thus to their own devices, Southerners schooled their young to suit their taste, the rich resorting to tutors and private schools and the rest scratching out an education as best they could. Time saw the appearance of a number of free schools serving those who were neither rich nor poor. For the offspring of the low-down and unregarded folk, Virginia enacted its law of 1642. An echo of England’s Poor Law, it provided for the “relief of such parents whose poverty extends not to give them [the children] breeding.” For this purpose it ordered the creation of a “workhouse school” at James City to which each county was to commit two children of the age of six or over. There, besides being reared as Anglicans, they were to be “instructed in honest and profitable trades and manufactures as also to avoid sloth and idleness.” Amended several times, the statute became the model for similar legislation throughout the South.

The first Southern college was founded in Virginia in 1693. William and Mary College was chartered to propagate the “Liberal Arts and the Christian Faith,” with particular stress on preparing young men for the Anglican pulpit. As the 18th century swept on, the secular interest that had invaded Harvard appeared in Virginia, and there ensued a waning of the earlier religious motivation. In 1779, led by Thomas Jefferson, the college trustees refurbished the school with chairs in medicine, mathematics, physics, moral philosophy, economics, law, and politics. The chair in divinity was discontinued as “incompatible with freedom in a republic.”

Newfoundland and the Maritime Provinces.

Newfoundland was, during most of this period, under British control, and, though there were settlers even before the 17th century, the island was not considered a settlement colony. Other than for naval training and fishing advantages, the British government had no concern for Newfoundland. Thus, policies were constructed with regard to the rights and advantages of British seamen, while implicitly, as well as in overt regulations, settlement was obstructed and restricted. Destruction from the running French-British military conflicts further discouraged development. These conditions of economic and political diminution of the settlement from outside were aggravated by the usurious conduct of merchants and the corruption of officials and by the national and religious divisions among the inhabitants themselves.

With such substantial problems of mere survival in Newfoundland, it is not surprising that the luxury of formal education was almost absent during this period. Some accounts verify that informal, unorganized efforts were made on an occasional basis to convey minimum schooling to settlers’ children, but the only organized effort was that of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPGFP). The SPGFP founded or aided a school in Bonavista in 1722 and in St. John’s in 1744 and sponsored schools in more than 20 settlements between 1766 and 1824. Religion was undoubtedly more important than education as such to the society, but its provision of reading materials as well as the mere act of establishing some kind of school filled a notable void in the Newfoundland settlement. Other charitable societies—such as the Society for Improving the Condition of the Poor in St. John’s, the Benevolent Irish Society, the Newfoundland School Society (later the Colonial and Continental Church Society), the Wesleyan Society, the Sisters of the Presentation, the Sisters of Mercy, and the Irish Christian Brothers—carried the charity-school work into the 19th century and maintained a thread of education through the colonial “dark ages.”

For a time after 1763, the Maritimes were all one colony—Nova Scotia—but Prince Edward Island was separated in 1769 and New Brunswick in 1784. This area comprised a heterogeneous population of French Acadians, English Protestants and others from Europe, Highland Scots, and loyalists from the United States. Each of these groups carried attitudes more or less favourable to education, and the regionalization of these attitudes, together with other conditions, influenced the differential development of education in the area. At the end of the 18th century, for example, New Brunswick, with a high loyalist population promoting political and educational development, probably ranked highest among the Maritime colonies in educational interest.

The first relatively organized attempt at common schooling in the Maritimes was made by the SPGFP, closely connected to the Church of England. The society opened both weekday and Sunday schools, and it might be said that it fostered teacher training in stipulating qualifications for its teachers. Other than SPGFP schools, education in the Maritime colonies was carried on by itinerant teachers and in scattered private-venture schools. Schools for separate ethnic or religious groups were discouraged by the Anglicans, but consistent pressure for such schools did succeed at least temporarily—for example, in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, and in Sydney, on Cape Breton Island. A school for Blacks was established in Halifax in 1788.

Upper schools were established only toward the end of the 18th century in the Maritimes. As they were established singularly and recruited from a social class rather than from a lower school, there is no clear line of demarcation among the various types as there would be later in an integrated system. Basically, they were Anglican and Classical, although the private schools, advertising to as wide a clientele as possible, often included some breadth, extending into practical studies. Probably the most influential of the early attempts were the two Latin grammar schools founded in 1788 and 1789 at Windsor and Halifax, Nova Scotia. The former became associated with King’s College, established in Windsor at the same time. Thomas McCulloch’s Academy at Pictou, Nova Scotia, and the College of New Brunswick at Fredericton, both founded around the turn of the century, were also early exemplars of higher education.