Harvard and the Education Tradition

In October of sixteen thirty-six, the Massachusetts Bay Colony's General Court voted four hundred pounds to establish a school. The vote came just six years after the first Puritan settlers arrived and while the colony was still clearing forest, fighting disease, and trying to survive the winter. The priority was remarkable. A sixteen forty-three publication about the college stated that one of its purposes was to advance learning and to perpetuate it to posterity, dreading to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches when our present ministers shall lie in the dust.

John Harvard was a minister from Charlestown who died of tuberculosis in sixteen thirty-eight, two years after the school was founded. He left half his estate and all his library, around three hundred twenty volumes, to the new institution. The college took his name.

Harvard was not the only school Massachusetts founded early. By sixteen forty-seven, the colony had passed what became known as the Old Deluder Satan Act, requiring every town of fifty households to maintain a grammar school and every town of one hundred households to establish a Latin school preparing students for university. Massachusetts was building a public school system before there was a Massachusetts.

The tradition continued. Horace Mann of Franklin, Massachusetts became the first secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education in eighteen thirty-seven and spent twelve years transforming American public schooling. He insisted on teacher training, graded classrooms, and longer school years. He visited Prussian schools and brought their methods home. What he built in Massachusetts became the template for American public education nationwide.

The Puritans were wrong about many things, but they were not wrong about this: a community that cannot read cannot govern itself.