Episode 05 told the story of five founders and how each of them, individually, was educated. This episode asks a different question. Most colonial children were never going to be founders. They were never going to see a college at all. This is about the room where almost everyone actually learned, who ran it, what it cost, and what it was for.
By the late 1600s, two colonial regions had built two of the most documented primary education systems in British North America, and they did not agree with each other. Puritan New England built schools to produce literate, doctrinally sound readers of scripture, disciplined into classical learning from an early age. Quaker Pennsylvania built schools to produce practically useful, morally upright citizens, with the poor explicitly included by contract, not just by charity. Both regions are represented here by real, named men who actually ran a schoolroom, not by general description.
Ezekiel Cheever taught school in colonial America for seventy years, in New Haven, Ipswich, and Charlestown before becoming headmaster of Boston Latin School in 1670, a post he held until his death in 1708 at age ninety-four. Many of Boston's leading citizens passed through his classroom, including a young Cotton Mather, who delivered his funeral sermon and later published it as a short book titled Corderius Americanus.
The classroom itself is documented in detail by historians working from period sources: a smoky room lit by high, small windows, boys seated on long fixed benches with fixed desks in front of them, the school open mornings from seven to eleven in summer and eight to eleven in winter, afternoons from one to five. Cheever wore a black skullcap and a long pointed white beard; students learned to read his temper by how fast he stroked it. The birch rod hung nearby, the standing instrument of discipline.
It was noted, that when Scholars came to be Admitted into their Colledge, they who came from the Cheeverian Education, were generally the most unexceptionable.
Mather, his own former pupil, was explicit about how long Cheever's reach had run.
He that was my Master, Seven and Thirty Years ago, was a Master to many of my Betters, no less than Seventy Years ago.
View the original 1708 printing at the University of Michigan →
Cheever's own teaching notes, compiled and printed after his death by his assistant and successor Nathaniel Williams as Cheever's Latin Accidence, became the standard introductory Latin grammar across New England for over a century. The method behind it was recitation: students memorized, recited aloud individually to the master while others worked independently, and were corrected, or disciplined, on the spot.
One year after Cheever was already an established master in Boston, Philadelphia's Provincial Council faced the same basic problem, who would teach the town's children, and solved it differently. In 1683 the Council recorded its agreement with Enoch Flower, "an inhabitant of said town, who for twenty years past has been exercised in that care and employment in England." His terms survive in the council's own minutes, an itemized price list for literacy itself.
| To Learn | Cost |
|---|---|
| To read English | 4 shillings, by the quarter |
| To read and write | 6 shillings, by the quarter |
| To read, write, and cast accounts | 8 shillings, by the quarter |
| Full boarding, diet, washing, lodging, and schooling | 10 pounds, for one whole year |
View the full book at the Internet Archive →
Six years later, the Philadelphia Friends meeting recorded a different kind of arrangement entirely, this time with schoolmaster George Keith.
Friends being to encourage a school in this town... have agreed with George Keith to assure him a certain salary of 50 pounds per year... The said George also promiseth to teach the poor (which are not of ability to pay) for nothing.
Free education for children whose families could not pay was not charity offered separately from the school. It was a term of Keith's employment contract, alongside his salary.
William Penn explained his own preference for what children should actually study, in a letter to his wife and children written before a dangerous voyage. It was not Latin and Greek he wanted first.
I recommend the useful parts of mathematics, as building houses, or ships, measuring, surveying, dialing, navigation; but agriculture especially is my eye. Let my children be husbandmen and housewives; it is industrious, healthy, honest, and of good example.
Cheever's Boston Latin School existed to produce boys who could translate Tully and Xenophon and pass a live Latin examination at Harvard's door. Flower's and Keith's Philadelphia schools existed to produce readers, writers, and reckoners, useful citizens at a price scaled to what a family could actually pay, with the poor written into the contract rather than left outside it. Neither model is being judged here against the other. Both are documented, in the schoolmasters' own surviving terms.
Despite their differences, both kinds of schoolroom ran on the same basic mechanism. There were no age-based grades. Younger and older children sat in the same room and advanced by what they could actually do, not by how old they were. The dominant teaching technique was recitation: a master called students forward individually to recite memorized material aloud while the rest of the room worked independently at their own pace, an arrangement that let one adult manage a room of children at wildly different levels at once. Correction, and discipline, happened on the spot, in front of the room.
"He that was my Master, Seven and Thirty Years ago, was a Master to many of my Betters, no less than Seventy Years ago; so long ago, that I must even mention my Fathers Tutor for one of them."