My interest in researching this question stems from reading the reminiscences of Horace Mann, the mid-nineteenth century leader of the public school movement.  Born in 1796 on a farm in Massachusetts, Mann wrote of his own early educational experiences that “until the age of fifteen, I had never been to school more than eight or ten weeks in a year.”  Mann was a free White boy living in the state universally recognized as being in the forefront of elementary education. Furthermore his parents raised him as a Calvinist, the form of Protestantism most associated with literacy and the reading of the Bible. And he badly wanted to further his education. So why was his elementary schooling doled out in such small doses and dragged out over such a long period? Did some pedagogical theory explain this system or did other factors come into play? 

After studying early American population statistics, legislation on education, poor relief arrangements, and school records, two factors stood out to me—demographics and finances.

The Demographics of the Situation

Today in the United States, most jurisdictions require children up to the age of 16 or even 18 to attend school full-time, typically for 180 days. Americans often express shock anytime young teens are discovered working full-time in businesses.  Of course, those under 16 amount to only about 18% of the total population. Would a society require the same school term and eschew putting children to work, if that share of the young stood at about 50%?   Probably not. Yet such a proportion did exist during the eighteenth century in North America, and during that time pressure mounted for the younger generation to not just read and recite Christian material but also write and do basic arithmetic.   

Historically, most readers might associate child labor with the Industrial Revolution. But in America, agriculture organized at the household level dominated the U.S. economy until almost the twentieth century, and children constituted an important part of the workforce. Most boys and girls labored for their parents or a master, not in a factory owned by a corporation. Releasing them all to attend full-time an elementary school, where they would spend their days learning to read, write, and practice arithmetic, would mean interferring with the authority of household heads.

On the North American mainland, enslaved persons of African or mixed race descent, who comprised a fifth or so of children, were excluded from any legislative rulings mandating education. In the West Indies, part of British America until the American Revolution, the proportion of youth enslaved reached such high proportions that primary schooling barely existed, and even on mainland plantation areas, that exclusion presented instructional challenges. Indigenous communities often viewed colonial primary schools and their teachers as subverting their own language and cultural traditions. Finally, through most of the eighteenth century, the perceived need for children to learn handwriting and arithmetic mainly pertained to boys. High fertility prevailed in early North America, and girls provided important domestic services in their households for their mothers, who might experience ten or more pregnancies during their marriage. Girls of European descent were taught in separate school sessions, often during the summer, and schoolmistresses put the emphasis on reading and needlework. This situation only began to change for the generality in the last decades of the century.

But as discouraging as these facts may seem for the majority of North American children, Horace Mann was not a girl, nor enslaved, nor Indigenous, and he lived in New England not in a plantation community. So what explains the skimpy educational allotment he received?

The Financial Situation

The eighteenth century addition of cursive handwriting and arithmetic to reading as the desired skills to be transmitted to free boys and then girls in a primary school environment notably increased the cost of education. The latter two skills demanded classrooms, textbooks and stationery supplies. Children could learn to read and recite the catechism and Bible from parish clerks in their churches or from one of their parents, but seldom the other two skills. Children had to go to school, often a distance away, and that journey meant taking time from their field or domestic work and employment from a third party that supplemented their family’s income.

Schooling was tuition-based, and heads of households had the responsibility for paying the teacher and covering the cost; sometimes the payment was handled as a township tax, but more often these expenses were paid directly. For the children of parents who could not afford the expense or would not pay, churches solicited charitable funds, but unlike in Europe, where endowments for schools dated back for centuries and could be repurposed for primary education, most Americans believed charity began at home and that parents should finance their own children’s education.

Consequently, the poor relief records that I examined indicate that children of indigent parents most commonly obtained schooling through the indenturing of their labor to a master until they reached adulthood, 16-18 for girls and 21 for boys.  Because of high mortality, many families suddenly fell into poverty if a father or a mother or both died. Sometimes the county authorities put the children out for service, and other times parents or a parent found a master or mistress in the community who needed labor.  In exchange, this system required the new master to take over support of the child by providing him or her with shelter, food, and clothing as well as a specified amount of instruction—boys sometimes received instruction up through arithmetic and girls usually learned reading and needlework. Other indentures instead set aside a time period for schooling, never more than one quarter a year (13 weeks), and usually in the winter, which in an urban area could also be in the evening.  In effect, these children self-funded their education through their labor services.

Educational Sprawl

Horace Mann never seemed to have been indentured, but he did have to earn outside wages and perform labor services at home. After his father died, his mother struggled to make ends meet. If, as he claimed, he only went to school for 8-10 weeks a year, it is likely that his parents either could not afford to spend more on his tuition or needed his labor for the rest of the year. Other factors may also have played a role. Children in rural areas had more difficulty accessing their schoolhouses during bad weather, which kept them home more than students in cities. Additionally, farmers, more than workers in other occupations, viewed what they called “ornamental” learning suspiciously and had greater reluctance to increase the time devoted to their children’s education. Census data revealed these trends. I found in a one-of-a-kind school census from 1798 for New York state that children living in more newly-settled, low-density, high-fertility agricultural areas attended school for a significantly fewer number of days than did children living in more urban and less agricultural counties. All in all, the average attendance in those counties ranged from 9-13 weeks, not too different from Mann’s recollection and very near the one quarter of a year found in many of the poor relief records.

The most distinctive feature of the primary schooling offered in this period was its short duration but long extent. Because of the need for child labor, few boys or girls enrolled for a full academic year or the equivalent of three quarters, and even fewer attended even 90% of the time.  Because the majority of North American households engaged in agriculture, boys could be utilized for  fieldwork and animal husbandry most months. However, having only a quarter year of schooling meant that children had to constantly re-learn material the following year before they could be presented with new lessons. I found no pedagogical justification put forward for this educational sprawl. Youth often kept returning to a school or moving to a city where evening schools existed, even in their late teens, for instruction in handwriting and basic arithmetic that they must have felt would improve their chances in life.

Demographic circumstances played a big role in determining the amount of primary schooling early American children received versus how much labor they performed, and that reminds us of the relationship between years of schooling and the age structure of a society. But it also should be noted that  the burden of hard agricultural labor in place of education did not fall equally on all segments of the population.  Neither the throwing off of a colonial power and more representative institutions, nor Protestantism, nor local autonomy in school decisions produced an egalitarian system.

The Extent and Duration of Primary Schooling in Eighteenth-Century America by Carole Shammas