Hello, let's look at the growth of reading and writing in the colonies. Trend data compiled by the historian Kenneth Lockridge show male literacy rates rising in colonial New England from 60% in 1660 to 70% in 1710, to 80% in 1760, and in some counties, reaching almost 90% by 1790. In the mid-Atlantic and southern colonies, male literacy in the non-slave population stood at roughly 67% throughout the 18th century. Not bad when compared to England's male literacy rate of 60% in the same century. Not good when compared to New England's considerable literacy advantage. Lockridge's findings begged the question, what motivated the colonists to learn to read and write, and calculate? In 17th century New England, religious orthodoxy was the most powerful incentive for reading. For the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, later the Province of Massachusetts, the King James Bible charted the course of a life well-lived according to God's ordinances. A life manifested by faith and the practice of piety, righteousness, sobriety, honesty and industriousmess in one's daily life. A deeply fixed Calvinist tenet of New England Protestantism affirmed that believers had to be able to read and interpret the Bible for themselves, dispensing altogether with the Latinate Bible and Catholic priests or other intermediaries. Literacy, at least the ability to read passages in the Bible, was essential to membership in the colony. The Old Deluder Satan Act of 1647 admonished the Puritans in Massachusetts that anyone purporting to be an authority on the scriptures was likely to be the old deluder himself in the disguise of a priest or righteous intermediary. Supplementing the Bible on colonial bookshelves were devotional works, such as popular sermons, manuals of conduct, and exemplary biographies. Christian piety was a very big deal. A related spur to literacy was the expectation that colonists would understand the laws of the colony. In today's parlance, they would attain civic literacy. Puritan legislators in Massachusetts passed an education law in 1642 that charged parents with responsibility to ensure their children's ability to read and understand the principles of religion and the capital laws of this country. Connecticut passed a similar law in 1655. Home, farm and shop were educative sites where colonial children learned farm management, craft and domestic skills through firsthand contact with actualities, to borrow an apt phrase from John Dewey. The home was also a site of focused literacy training, where many parents, siblings and local elders systematically taught young children to read. Occasionally, a New England goodwife would teach reading in her kitchen for a small fee. This arrangement was called a dame school. What spurred literacy in the middle colonies and the south where the religious motivation was more subdued in comparison with Puritan New England? Primarily, the answer is commercial activity. This is not to say that the religious sects in the middle colonies and the south, for example, Quakers in Pennsylvania, Catholics in Maryland, Anglicans in Virginia, didn't influence literacy. It's just that these alternative sects didn't put the same fear of hellfire and brimstones into the colonists as motivation the same way the Bible-thumping Puritans did. Historians use the term composite farms to describe the going, growing number of semi-subsistence rural homesteads that produced for the needs of the farm family, as well as for the exchange of the farm surplus for consumer goods. Rum, cloth, salt, buttons, hats. Which were sold by village shopkeepers and often originated in the bustling port town of the colonies, and even beyond, in the West Indies and Europe. By the mid-18th century, composite farms of New York's Hudson River Valley, the hinterlands of Pennsylvania and Virginia's Shenandoah Valley were producing wheat for North American coastal cities, the West Indies, and Europe. In the South, agriculture had long been tied to these same markets. Tobacco production for European markets dated to 1620 in the Chesapeake region. And the agricultural products of the Carolina low country, rice, sugar and indigo, were staples of the British colonial carrying trade by the early 18th century. By the mid-18th century, composite farms in South Carolina's upcountry were involved in tobacco and indigo production. The middle colonies in the south were engaged in translocal market production and advanced the role of New England, where composite farming was generally restricted to local marketplaces until the American Revolution. Not until after 1780 would the regions' farmers begin to transport goods en mass to Boston and the national market. The point about literacy is that some fluency in reading, writing and arithmetic was necessary for commercial activity that was increasingly translocal. Contracts, letters and orders had to be written and read, accounting ledgers had to be maintained, and so forth. Even in New England, where the reins of Puritan governance were loosened in the 18th century, the prospect of success in commercial life, not religion, increasing supplied the motive for colonists to pursue a basic education. Throughout the colonies, a variety of schools rose in the 17th century to meet the needs of individuals launching into commercial activity. Only in the south was schooling laggard. In our next episode, we take up the institutions of colonial education, beginning with the Puritans and the religious foundations of 17th century schools, then looking at schools of the 18th century when they were a practical, secular means for entry into commercial life. [MUSIC]
