New England Primer, The

For more than 150 years The New England Primer, often called “the little Bible of New England,” served as the principal textbook for millions of colonists and early Americans. First compiled and published circa 1688 by Benjamin Harris, a British journalist who emigrated to Boston, it gained popularity not only in New England but also throughout colonial America and parts of Great Britain with estimates of copies sold from 6 to 8 million by 1830. Less than 100 pages in length, this early textbook proved significant in both reflecting the norms of Puritan culture and propagating those norms into early American thought. In The New England Primer, Harris provided a tool of reform that promoted literacy, proliferated compulsory education, and solidified a Calvinist ethic in colonial America.

The historical milieu in which the primer emerged contributed to its rise to prominence. In 1630 a group of Puritans settled the Massachusetts Bay area with the goal of developing a society based on biblical principles as embodied by the English Reformation. The doctrine of the priesthood of the believer motivated Puritans to teach reading to all citizens so that they could know and follow the Christian scriptures. As early as 1642, Massachusetts law required literacy instruction to all children, servants, and apprentices. The 1647 Old Deluder Satan Act—in order to ensure that “learning may not be buried in the grave of our forefathers”—required every township of 50 households to hire a teacher. Towns twice that size were mandated to set up schools that would prepare students for Harvard. With only the hornbook and Bible available in most schools, New England was ready for a textbook that would be affordable, portable, and compatible with the predominant worldview.

Borrowing principles from Comenius's Orbis Pictus and his own Protestant Tutor, Harris incorporated crude woodcut illustrations and religious content to teach reading skills and to encourage rote memorization of Calvinist doctrine. Graduated literacy instruction began with the alphabet, simple letter combinations, and syllables, increasing to complex sentences intended for rote memorization. Themes of sin, death, punishment, salvation, and respect for authority were displayed through alphabetic rhymed couplets, poems, prayers, and scriptures. The theme of punishment, for instance, was exhibited in the rhyming couplet for the letter F: “The idle fool/Is whipt at school.” Such themes for a child's textbook may seem morbid in light of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's notions of childhood innocence, but they would not seem so to Puritan [Page 662]families who embraced the doctrine of infant corruption caused by the original sin of Adam.

The primer was reproduced by a variety of publishers, resulting in 450 editions by 1830. Adaptations were printed for various geographic regions and ethnic groups, such as the 1781 Indian Primer printed in both Mohawk and English languages. With each new edition came content changes, though the core elements of the pictured alphabet and catechism remained constant. The couplet for the letter A never changed—“In Adam's fall/We sinned all,” but many of the others were modified to reflect evolving political or religious beliefs. For instance, independence from Britain saw the alteration of “Our king the good/No man of blood” to “The British king/Lost states thirteen” and later to “Queens and kings/Are gaudy things.” One of the most blatant political alterations was made in 1776 when an image of King George III was simply relabeled with the name of John Hancock.

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