Languages in Colonial Schools, Eastern

Virginia and New England

The original purpose of the colonization by English speakers of what is now roughly equivalent to Virginia in the late 1500s was economic gain. Only after work had begun on developing the land and infrastructure and learning how to survive in this new environment did women and tenants follow and families form to create a need for formal education in Roanoke and in a second settlement, Jamestown, also in Virginia. Over time, the purpose shifted from a search for gold to providing food for survival, and there was no clear understanding of a relationship between education and either of these purposes.

In the Virginia colonies, the trappings of community life—including families, government, and religion—contributed to a vision of using education to convert the children of Indians and settlers to the English language and culture. The vision was not realized, but it indicated recognition of an English colonial experience that would depend on self-sufficient agricultural and trading communities, the planting of families, and the development of English institutions that would educate families.

Intent on learning from the failures of the Virginia colonies, John Winthrop set out to establish a Puritan plantation in New England that would be profitable and of service to the church and the commonwealth. The Pilgrims came in 1620 for religious freedom, to preserve their cultural identity, and to convert others to their way of life. Education was conducted by the family and the churches, rather than by a school or college. Both the Puritans and the Pilgrims came to the colony as a community, but the Puritans also brought with them a vision of a community that modeled Christian charity. Within this mission, the education of the sons played an important role in transmitting an English-speaking intellectual heritage and serving as an agency for the pursuit of an English cultural ideal.

New Amsterdam

In 1624, the Dutch established New Amsterdam in what is now Manhattan, the Hudson River Valley northward to what is now Albany, New York, and western Long Island. New Amsterdam was a commercial trading post, and Dutch-speaking inhabitants were apparently more occupied, at least early on, with survival and building thriving businesses than with educating their children. By 1638, the first elementary school was established, and in 1652, the first formal instruction in the classics was introduced. The Dutch were the most numerous but there were speakers of other languages in that colony, including the English, French-speaking Belgians, Swedes, Finns, French, Portuguese, and Africans. Though government, education, architecture, and churches were characteristically Dutch, official communication was normally in more than one language.

...