Shaker Education

The United Society of Believers in the Second Coming of Christ, commonly known as the Shakers, came to British North America in 1774 from Manchester, England. Mother Ann Lee, the founder, and a small group of followers established their first community near Albany, New York, the following year. The basic tenets of the Shakers were spiritualism, millennialism, common property, celibacy, and pacifism.

During the last two decades of the eighteenth century and the first two of the nineteenth century, the Shakers were successful in converting several thousand people to their sect. They were aided by the broad sweep of the Second Great Awakening and the widespread attention given to millennialism. Entire families converted, bringing a large number of children into newly founded communities located first in the New England region and then spreading into Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky. At their peak, the Shakers had eighteen major communities and perhaps as many as 10,000 believers.

The large number of Shaker children required that thought be given by the church leadership to the issues of childrearing in societies characterized by the rigid separation of the sexes. Mother Ann, herself illiterate, died in 1784 and left few details as to the care of children other than the general admonition that they were to be loved and raised in the tenets of Shaker pietism. Married couples who entered the Shaker life were separated. Babies at their mothers' breasts stayed with their mothers until they were weaned and then were placed in common nurseries under the supervision of unrelated caregivers. By age five or six, children were separated into either the girls' order or the boys' order, where they occupied separate quarters under adult supervision. The caregivers of these orders were selected with great care in order to provide behavior models. A communal society with a commitment to pacifism necessitated teaching cooperative social behaviors. Quarrels had to be settled quickly, conflicts resolved, and harmony achieved. To the Shakers, this was part of a concept known as “Gospel Order.”

Work was a central tenet in the Shaker belief system. Mother Ann's most famous dictum to her following was “Put your hands to work and your hearts to God.” This gospel of work led to survival of the communities in the difficult years and to prosperity in their latter years. Children were given chores and tasks to perform commensurate with their abilities. Their physical workload was reduced during the winter months when they attended school.

The Shakers adopted policies about formal schooling very similar to the German pietists, who generally regarded an eighth-grade education as sufficient. Too much formal learning could lead to intellectualism, which was injurious to spiritualism. As the American Common School crusade swept New England and the Northwest Territorial states, the Shakers had enough people in their various communities to establish local public schools in accordance with state directives. These schools were taught by Shakers who themselves had received some education before conversion, and the Shaker school districts followed the state laws in regard to teacher licensure, the curriculum, the school calendar, and the mandate for periodic visitation by [Page 714]external school authorities. In the early decades, the students in these schools were almost exclusively Shaker children. As the Shaker population began to decline in the mid-nineteenth century, district boundary lines were sometimes extended to include children who lived near the community in order to preserve the schools and make them financially possible.

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