Literacy in American Culture

Literacy in Colonial British North America

The voluntary emigrants from England and the coerced emigrants from Africa who came to British North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries brought values and traditions from their former homes, including ideas about literacy and schooling. Although most of the European colonists were from the British Isles, they still brought different conceptions about the purpose of their life in the New World, just as they differed in Britain about the accessibility and availability of literacy.

The starkest contrast was between the settlers of Massachusetts and the settlers of Virginia. The difference in attitudes was exemplified by the declarations and actions of the leaders of the Virginia and Massachusetts Bay colonies, respectively.

Virginia's governor, William Berkeley, coining from the conservative English tradition that viewed scholarly skills among the poor to be a threat to social stability, famously noted in a report to the colony's overseers [Page 473]in Britain his supreme joy that schools for the poor and a printing press were nonexistent in Virginia.

In contrast, New England colonial leaders valued literacy for all because of the great importance placed on direct access to the word of God. For the leaders of New England and their followers, the Bible, literally, was the embodiment of truth and God. In support, the civil government in Massachusetts in 1642 required parents and masters to take responsibility for instructing children and servants to read. Five years later, the General Court passed a law requiring every town of fifty families to create a basic school where reading and writing were taught. Towns of one hundred families were compelled to set up a more advanced grammar school. The “Old Deluder Satan Act,” as this legislation came to be known, focused on the need for widespread literacy to support religion and to foster a godly kingdom here on earth.

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