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The Transformation of Massachusetts Education, 1670–1780
Jon Teaford
Journal:

History of Education Quarterly / Volume 10 / Issue 3 / Fall 1970

Published online by Cambridge University Press:

24 February 2017, pp. 287-307

Print publication:

Fall 1970
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In March 1711, Cotton Mather declared that, “A lively Discourse about the Benefit and Importance of Education, should be given to the Countrey.” “The Countrey,” he asserted, “is perishing for want of it; they are sinking apace into Barbarism and all Wickedness.” Mather was convinced that formal education was being neglected in eighteenth-century Massachusetts, and for two centuries after Mather's death historians accepted his verdict. As early as 1835, Lemuel Shattuck described the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries as a “dark age” of learning. Later historians used similar phrases. By the close of the nineteenth century, Edward Eggleston wrote the epitaph for early eighteenth-century education, “a period of darkness and decline.”

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