Eighteenth Century Education and the Challenge to Tyranny - Liberty Fund

February 2025 — Education

Eighteenth Century Education and the Challenge to Tyranny

The Pamphlet Debate on the American Question in Great Britain, 1764-1776

The Pamphlet Debate on the American Question in Great Britain, 1764-1776, selected by Jack Greene, makes available in modern digitized form a trove of eighteenth-century books and pamphlets that directly addressed what became known in metropolitan Britain as the American Question.

With Friends Like These….

John A. Ragosta

February 3, 2025

America had “friends” in Britain before and during the Revolution. In fact, Thomas Jefferson’s initial draft of the Declaration of Independence was edited by the Continental Congress to avoid offending any of those friends. (Jefferson had suggested that the Declaration “renounce forever these unfeeling brethren” in England who regularly reelected a Parliament that imposed on the colonies and allowed the dispute to become a war.) Ultimately, so goes the conventional wisdom, necessity and our English friends encouraged the peace treaty that ended the war. Others have gone further, suggesting that these friends were “prophets whose ideas might have prevented the revolution if anyone had listened to them.”[1]

But our friends in Britain did not necessarily embrace or fully understand the principles and ideologies that drove patriots. Famously, William Pitt, Lord Chatham and “friend of America,” opposed taxing America on policy grounds while believing that Parliament’s sovereignty was absolute, and through his 1778 death, Pitt remained firmly opposed to independency.

The two featured pamphlets at A Call to Liberty in February 2025 present the views of some of America’s friends and remind us that often even our “friends” fundamentally misunderstood the problem. With friends like these, perhaps the war really was inevitable.

Jonathan Shipley’s February 1773 sermon to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts was broadly reprinted in America – Philadelphia, Boston, New York, elsewhere – and is a good example of the work of American friends. The 1775 New England Almanack referred to Shipley as the “Patriotic Bishop,” and in 1782 Benjamin Franklin would describe Shipley as “America’s constant friend.” 

The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts was created in 1701 with a professed purpose of bringing Christianity, in particular Anglicanism, to Native Americans. The ostensible point of the annual sermon was to address the efficacy of the Society’s proselytizing. In 1773, Shipley reported, without seeming too distressed about it, that for the previous 70 years the “preaching of the gospel has been of small efficacy amongst the Indians.” So, Shipley suggested that instead the Society refocus its attention on proselytizing Euro-American colonists. But that proposal presented the growing conflicts with the colonies as a matter of significant concern to the Society.

Several months before the Tea Act was adopted and almost a year before the Tea Party, but with the colonies still simmering in the aftermath of the Townshend Duties, Boston Massacre, the Gaspee Affair, and other apparent or perceived slights, Shipley expressed sympathy for the colonists. He was concerned that Britain’s behavior would further harm relations and interfere with the Society’s mission.

Shipley argued that efforts to discipline the colonies would only increase tensions, and he recommended forbearance. Punishing the colonies for their protests was the brainchild of “factious men” who did not have the interests of Britain at heart. Rather, Britain should remember its friendly, and profitable, relationship with the colonies.

When things are on so reasonable a footing, if there should happen to be any errors in government, they will soon be corrected by the friendly disposition of the people; and the endeavours to separate the interest of the colonies from that of Great Britain will be received with indignation, that is due to the artifices of factious men, who wish to grow eminent by the misfortunes of their country.

All of which explains the understanding that the bishop was America’s friend.

But there is also something discouraging in Shipley’s argument. He clearly saw America as a child of Britain that should be grateful for what he perceived as the great indulgence that Britain had shown throughout the colonial period. Rather remarkably, for example, he concludes that Britain “has always been ready to encourage their [American] industry.”

Without explanation, he asserts that “those equitable principles on which it [the British Constitution] was formed, an equal representation, (the best discovery of political wisdom) and a just and commodious distribution of power, which with us were the price of civil wars, and the reward of the virtues and sufferings of our ancestors, descend to them [Americans] as a natural inheritance, without toil or pain.” Americans should be grateful for British magnanimity. But he never explains how Americans enjoyed “equal representation” in Parliament’s decisions concerning taxes, trade restrictions, or other matters. 

While he objected to taxing the colonies, his concern was practical rather than legal. Shipley argued that any other nation would have treated the colonists “as the livestock on a lucrative farm,” evidencing his understanding of the colony-metropole relationship, but that Britain was generous, expecting only “the mutual benefit arising to distant countries from the supply of each other’s wants.” He seems unconcerned that Britain insisted on an exclusive right to purchase raw materials from the colonies while demanding that the colonies purchase finished goods from the island. He warned that “the more we exact from our subjects, the less we shall gain from them,” but this, too, evidences a focus on British profits.

Repeatedly, this well-known and important “friend” either ignored or misunderstood the essential issues of law and principle that were precipitating the crisis. 

This was perhaps most clear in his entreaty: “To countries so closely united it is needless, and even dangerous, to have recourse to the interpretation of charters and written laws.” He urged Americans that such arguments encourage “jealousy, and intimate an unfriendly disposition….” Let Americans “respect the power that saved them;…” 

But as Bernard Bailyn and others have explained, those critical constitutional principles and ideologies were at the heart of the rising conflict. While modern commentators lauding Shipley’s efforts insist that the question of taxing authority was a “phantom issue,” Americans at the time understandably thought otherwise.[2]

After adoption of the Coercive Acts – the Intolerable Acts to Americans – Shipley was at it again. In 1774, the bishop prepared a speech ostensibly to deliver in the House of Lords in opposition to the Coercive Acts: “A Speech Intended to have been Spoken on the Bill for Altering the Charter of the Colony of Massachusetts-Bay.” But with the “melancholy assurance, that not a word of it will be regarded,” he decided to publish it instead. This work was even more broadly distributed in America.

Shipley explained that the Boston Tea Party was the culmination of growing tensions precipitated by British actions. He struck an American chord when he insisted that it was a “strange idea we [British] have taken up, to cure their [American] resentments by increasing their provocations;…” The justification of Parliamentary sovereignty was, for Shipley, a chimera; he urged his colleagues to reject a “vain phantom of unlimited sovereignty.”

Shipley correctly saw how the Coercive Acts would be received in America. He was especially opposed to the Massachusetts Government Act that abrogated the colony’s 1691 charter. In language that sounded a Lockean whisper of what would become constitutional doctrine, he explained that changing a people’s government without their consent is “the highest and most arbitrary act of sovereignty,…” Were this effort accepted in America, the implication was “a most total and abject, slavish dependency in the inferior state.” Rather, the Act would unite the colonies as never before. “Every other colony will make the case its own.”

Our friend insisted that “[t]he true object of all our deliberations on this occasion, which I hope we shall never lose sight of, is a full and cordial reconciliation with North America.” With that goal, he saw the Townshend Duty on tea as a trifle: “A matter so trivial in itself as a three penny duty upon tea, but which has given cause to so much national hatred and reproach, ought not to be suffered to subsist an unnecessary day.” 

Once again, though, Shipley studiously avoided the underlying legal and ideological issues, merely concluding that “[i]f it was unjust to tax them, we ought to repeal it for their sakes; if it was unwise to tax them, we ought to repeal it for our own.” But this logic satisfied no one on either side of the Atlantic.

The Bishop’s own reasoning should have convinced him of the futility of seeking to avoid the issues. He accepted that “[a]rbitrary taxation is plunder authorized by law,” and that the power to tax implied all other powers. He was clear, though, in his refusal to engage the issue. “I do not now enquire whether taxation is [a] matter of right;…” He hoped for a return to those days when Americans willingly provided British requisitions, and “[t]he matter of right was neither disputed, nor even considered.” 

Some historians have suggested that avoiding the underlying legal issues and principles was one of the strengths of Shipley’s sermon and pamphlet. While the dispute over rights “generated considerable support for American Independence among the more radical Americans, Irish, and English, it offered little to those in 1773-1774 who were hoping for reconciliation.”[3]

This view may have things exactly backwards. While evading the issue of rights resulted in the repeal of the Stamp Act in 1765, the immediate adoption of the Declaratory Act – insisting upon Parliament’s authority in “all cases whatsoever” – meant that the issue was simply postponed. And as history demonstrated, it festered. The conflict would not be resolved until the question of rights was resolved.

In comparison to Shipley, the “friend” who authored the second featured pamphlet had a better understanding of America, but this 1775 pamphlet published under the pseudonym “Sincerus” – “Plain English: A Letter to the King” – seems to have made little impression in Britain or America.[4]

The pamphlet begins with a wickedly cutting backhanded compliment to monarchy, suggesting that most kings have “not been so wicked as worthless; not so malicious as indolent,…” In a tone reminiscent of Thomas Paine, Sincerus lectures King George that it is absurd to think that British America will forever remain subservient to the small island and warns that “the more unrelenting and violently they are now pursued, the sooner will” independency follow. General Thomas Gage’s offer of pardons while at the same time threatening martial law was simply counterproductive. The author suggests that Gage and General Johnny Burgoyne should be ordered home and referred to a “physician of Bedlam” if they think America will be easily conquered militarily.

Among his sarcastic and caustic jabs at the king and ministry, Sincerus does evidence a better understanding than Shipley of the principles at stake: “However small, and seemingly no account, the duty imposed upon tea, it was visibly designed as an introduction to the taxing America as you pleased.” The author berates those who insist that America has no authority in such matters: “To tell a people, who complain of a galling yoke, that they are not authorized to judge whether it is a galling yoke or not, is a jest.”

Yet, the author’s sharp tongue targets America equally. “The act respecting the religion of Canada is in itself perfectly right and just, notwithstanding the clamours it has raised among the foolish and narrow-soul’d both of Britain and America.”

In the end, perhaps it doesn’t matter, since so little heed was apparently paid to the pamphlet.

All of which is to suggest a more careful review of the influence of America’s “friends” in Britain is called for. While their modern cheerleaders speculate that they might, had they been listened to, allowed Britain to avoid the conflict, it seems equally likely that if Britain and America did not resolve the underlying legal and principled disagreements, the conflict was inevitable.

[1] Irving H. King, “Dr. Jonathan Shipley, Defender of the Colonies, 1773-1775,” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church, 45:1 (March 1976), 25-30, 25.

[2] G. Jack Gravlee and James R. Irvine, “Scriptural and Political Arguments in Bishop Shipley’s Rhetoric of Mutual Self-Interest,” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church, 45:4 (December 1976), 387-400, 396.

[3] G. Jack Gravlee and James R. Irvine, “Scriptural and Political Arguments in Bishop Shipley’s Rhetoric of Mutual Self-Interest,” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church, 45:4 (December 1976), 387-400, 389.

[4] The author is unknown; some speculate that it was Johann Jakob Moser, a German jurist. This piece seemed to garner very little attention in America.

A Classically Educated Founding

Elizabeth Amato

February 3, 2025

“You will ever remember that the End of study is to make you a good Man and a useful Citizen.” In 1781, John Adams penned this piece of fatherly advice to his 14 year old son, John Quincy, to stick with his studies and to understand the purpose of his education. In his day, Adams’ advice would have been regarded as a commonplace observation. It was widely understood that education was for the sake of character formation and the active life—being good and doing good.

John Adams, however, is no commonplace thinker. Adams, who studied Aristotle’s Politics carefully, silently omits to elaborate that there is always a tension between the virtue of a good man and the virtue of the good citizen (Book 3, chapter 4). To the extent that the laws and customs of a regime are corrupt, then the wider divergence between the good man and the good citizen. The good man, if his regime is particularly corrupt, might be despised and disparaged. Given his role in bringing about the Declaration of Independence, Adams appreciated just how difficult it is to discern what the good man should do when confronted with abuses of power. The men who crafted the Declaration were prepared by their education to think moderately and decently about politics and to take prudent action, honorably and with resolve.

The founders saw themselves as jointly heirs to the wisdom of the ancients and beneficiaries of modern political philosophy’s advancements in political science. They were guided by a humane and liberal education. The Declaration is evidence of how the founders blended together, in a uniquely American fashion, lessons and insights from both ancient and modern sources.

As a group, founders were well-educated. Many had received their early schooling through some combination of education at home, tutors, and private academies. About half of the signers attended college either in the colonies or studied abroad. With eight alumni, Harvard supplied the most signers including John Adams, John Hancock, and Eldridge Gerry. As befitting the scion of a prominent Virginian planation-owning family, Richard Henry Lee attended Wakefield Academy in England and then toured the continent to complete his education. Before immigrating to the colonies, John Witherspoon and James Wilson were educated at Scottish universities. Others received professional training as lawyers, doctors, and ministers. Some had received training in their trade as merchants and business owners. Not all of them had received formal education. George Taylor, one of the less well-known signers from Pennsylvania, had been an indentured servant from Ireland who eventually owned an ironworks business. Famously, Benjamin Franklin was self-educated and a proud advocate for self-improvement and life-long learning.

The traditional colonial curriculum included rhetoric, grammar, Latin and Greek, theology, the Bible, poetry, literature, and history. The curriculum was heavily weighted toward classical authors; college entrance exams required students to translate passages. The founders were conversant with classical historians such as Herodotus, Plutarch, Livy, Sallust, Tacitus, and Thucydides, orators and statesmen like Demosthenes and Cicero, and philosophers such as Plato, Epictetus, and Seneca. Nor did they neglect the classical poets such as Homer, Horace, Terrence, and Ovid. Thomas Jefferson was rapturous about the joys and benefits of reading Homer and other authors in their original languages. On the other hand, Benjamin Rush regretted the time he spent studying dead languages.

The ancients instructed the founders about classical republicanism, the virtues that sustain it and the vices that undermine it, why ancient republics failed, causes of class and factional unrest, political regimes and types of rule, rule of law, and public duty and honor. How the Declaration presents tyranny—calling King George III a tyrant who was “unfit to be the ruler of a free people—owes much to the founders’ deep familiarity with classical analyses of tyranny. Tyranny is classically understood to be the deviant form of kingship in which the tyrant rules for private advantage instead of the common good of the people. The founders saw themselves as belonging to a long tradition—one in which they were engaged in the long struggle for self-government and liberty against tyranny stretching back to ancient Rome and Athens.

As importantly, founders learned how to think like statesmen with prudence and moderation for the sake of the common good and for the sake of caring for their characters. Plutarch, the Greek historian-biographer, provided them with numerous character studies of great men of ancient Rome and Greece (as well as some eminent women like Cornelia and Portia). The founders delighted in his stories of Romans and Greeks not only for his superb analysis of human nature but also for the pleasure of reading. Plutarch’s Lives served as a common, cultural reservoir from which they drew freely to make comparisons and contrasts among themselves in order to praise, blame, or insult. If a founder mentions Cato, Caesar, Antony, or the like, chances are that they are drawing on Plutarch.

Plutarch is often associated with the “great man” theory of history, which claims that historical events are caused by a few heroic men. But it is more accurate to say that Plutarch taught that history may be caused by scoundrels, artful and enterprising men, or fickle mobs, and that efforts of men of character may be misunderstood, despised, or rendered null by misfortune and accident. Human endeavor, fame, and fortune are ephemeral but the only real and lasting thing a person can care for is their character. Plutarch taught the founders endurance, perseverance, and how to stay the course when times get tough, as they inevitably will, in politics. Thorough his profiles, Plutarch emphasizes how easily during good times, it is easy for mediocre individuals to govern tolerably well but that “the truly noble and resolved spirit raises itself, and becomes more conspicuous in times of disaster and ill” (from “Eumenes” in John Dryden’s translation).

Cicero was a favorite of the founders or “Tully” as he was affectionately known (a nickname derived from his nomen, family name of Tullius). His book On Duties was practically a handbook for aspiring statesman to learn how in nearly every circumstance to discern the honorable course of action. His teachings on morality, duty, justice, law, and friendship arose from his humane statesmanship. Cicero practiced, as much as any of us are able, what he preached. He combined the life of the mind with the gentleman’s responsibility to act honorably and virtuously in public affairs.

Cicero believed that good men should participate in politics lest the scoundrels win. Only public affairs offered the “courageous and great spirt” the scope and arena in which to do great deeds and be benefactors to one’s political community. Philosophers debated whether the contemplative life was preferable to the active life of public service. Mindful of the merits and charms of the life of leisure, Cicero, nevertheless, praises the active life as more noble. By leisure, Cicero means refined and elegant study in which one withdraws from the cares of the world to pursue the life of the mind. The life of the philosopher, Cicero says, might be ok some people who have great ability or an impediment, like poor health, to enter public affairs. But he is rather suspicious that many people prefer the life of leisure for the wrong reasons such as “fear[ing] labors and troubles, in addition to…the ignominy and infamy of offense and defeat.” For those with talent for leadership, they ought to throw themselves into public service as the more choice worthy “for in no other way can either a political community be ruled or greatness of spirit revealed.” It is often said that a man’s character is revealed in his actions. More precisely, a man of character takes action in order to reveal to himself and to others the magnanimous virtues within himself.

From the moderns, the founders gained much insight into their present historical, legal, and political circumstances. Many founders, especially those with legal training, were well-schooled in English Whig theorists such as Edward Coke and Algernon Sidney who defended the traditional rights of Englishmen, protected by common law, and the limits on sovereignty going back to the Magna Carta. They were deeply versed in the conflicts over sovereignty at the heart of the English Civil War and the Restoration. In addition, modern thinkers, such as John Locke, Montesquieu, Cesare Beccaria, Jean-Jacques Burlamqui, Francis Hutcheson, James Harrington, and Adam Smith, supplied them with insight into social contract theory, right to revolution, natural rights, constitutionalism, and origins of political legitimacy.

Having a firm foundation in their history, laws, traditions, and political institutions, the founders embraced many liberal political principles. The Declaration judiciously relies on John Locke’s ideas about social contract theory and right to revolution. Liberalism, at its best, enables individuals, who might have otherwise deep disagreements, to find and cheerfully share common ground on sturdy, if lower, ground. Notwithstanding differences in their colonies’ histories, economics, and geography, the men who crafted the Declaration agreed on what makes for legitimate government (consent of the governed) and the ends of government—the protection of natural rights belonging to all individuals as gifts from their Creator.

Locke’s deistic doctrine of natural rights is thickened with Christian insights regarding the transcendent responsibility that every person has to seek happiness. Unlike Locke, the Declaration lists “the pursuit of happiness” as among a person’s “unalienable” rights. In so doing, it recognizes that that an individual has a responsibility to pursue truth and happiness, which cannot be subordinated to the state or reduced to merely private life. In his Second Treatise, Locke never uses the phrase. Instead, Locke speaks of the protection of “lives, liberties, and estates,” which he summarizes as “property” (§123), as the chief responsibility of government.

The Declaration retains a public dimension to the pursuit of happiness. Since an individual has responsibilities that transcend the state and the state’s claim on his loyalty and law-abidingness are circumscribed. The Declaration appeals to “divine Providence” and ends with a “mutual pledge” of “our lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.” Life and property are subordinated to the claim of “sacred Honor.” As Thomas Mowbray in Shakespeare’s Richard II said after he refused to carry out Richard’s order, “Mine honor is my life.”

Montesquieu was perhaps the most admired modern thinker among the founders because of how he seamlessly drew modern teachings from ancient lessons. He insisted that human laws ought to be “adapted in such a manner to the people for whom they are framed.” The love of universal law and reason were much in vogue during the Enlightenment, but Montesquieu kept the founders grounded and gave theoretical justification to what their experiences in their diverse colonies and towns taught them. Human beings are meant to use their reason to craft laws for their particular places and circumstances. If you look through the list of grievances, many of them have to do with the King bulldozing over the established practices and free institutions that had sprung up in the colonies. His tyranny is connected to his indifference to particularity and to the genius of the colonists to govern themselves.

Montesquieu reiterates the ancient insight that the virtues and habits that sustain free and republican government are precarious. He observes there was a point of no return for Rome in which decadence had so worn away civic virtue and public-spiritedness that all she could do was shake her chains–“if she struck some blows, her aim was at the tyrant, but not at the usurpation.” Images like this one stuck with the founders as they weighed with “prudence” if they should avail themselves of the right to throw off “the forms [of government] to which they are accustomed.” The ancients, on the whole, were rather dour on the prospects for improvements in the political arts. Montesquieu, on the other hand, has a modern’s confidence in institutions and other advances “the science of politics” to provide remedies for the weaknesses of political orders. One does not sign the Declaration without hope and plenty of nerve that it is possible for peoples to abolish their government, establish a new one, and “lay its foundations on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

Writing the Declaration of Independence was an audacious and risky gambit as the men who crafted knew. In a letter to John Adams written decades later, Benjamin Rush reminisced, almost fondly, about “the solicitude and labors, and fears, and sorrows and sleepless nights of the men who projected, proposed, defended, and Subscribed the declaration of independence.” What in their education prepared the men at the Second Continental Congress to craft the Declaration is no idle question. The Declaration contains an implicit charge to its latter-day heirs to evaluate their government and to be jealously on guard against abuses of power and in defense of liberty. Writing after the founding generation had passed, Abraham Lincoln wondered how to sustain the love of liberty the revolution gave birth to once the “giant oaks,” as he called the men of the revolution, were no longer with us. Perhaps we ought to examine their education for a clue about how to prepare ourselves and posterity to sustain these principles for another 250 years.

Religion, Education, and Colonial Liberty

Josh Herring

February 3, 2025

Since 1776, America has enjoyed dramatic increases in financial wealth, global influence, and military strength. By contrast, in the field of education, the story is primarily negative. The last century has seen American education hollowing itself out. Embracing the principles, methods, and content-neutrality of John Dewey has been a mistake. While various movements seek to repair the damage (homeschooling, educational approaches rooted in religious traditions, and the growing classical renewal movement), none has yet risen to more than 5% of educable children. Every year, test scores decline. No matter how one examines the picture of American education across the 20th and 21st centuries, a negative picture emerges. Looking back to the founding era reveals a helpful contrast. Modern education, with content neutrality, career focus, compulsory education laws, is not the only way Americans have inducted the next generation into their intellectual inheritance.

In the colonial era, there was not a single educational system, but hundreds of communities that developed different institutions—grammar schools, private preparatory models, colleges—for specific purposes (primarily ministry at the college level, equipping future farmers with the ability to read, and so on). As the colonies took shape, and eventually became states, their different religious identities shaped the education offered. To make a coherent comparison between the founding era and the present requires generalization; there are exceptions to the claims made below, but a general description highlights differences between contemporary approaches and those employed in previous centuries. 

Rather than state or federal departments of education, formal institutions of education were established by towns when they reached a certain size, or supported by voluntary associations. These schools focused on minimum skills: every child should be able to read, write, and calculate. But school came second to agricultural needs. Education had a direct connection to Christian theology, especially in Puritan New England. The New England Primer’s line for the letter “a”: “In Adam’s fall / we sinned all,” and the original motto of Harvard College—Veritas Christo et Ecclesiae, Truth for Christ and the Church—illustrate this reality. 

As American culture shifted, so did educational desires. ”…the general effect of the Revolution and the new democratic ideology produced a widespread interest in and demand for popular education, which was to bear fruit in the nineteenth century.” Massachusetts is the easiest state in which to see the new model; building upon centuries of development, Massachusetts began developing a centralized approach to education in the 1840s. Horace Mann, as Secretary of Education, also shifted much of the religious language to minimize the explicitly theological claims of American education, while leaving intact an expectation for public virtue. Christopher Dawson notes that in the 19th century “the state governments became increasingly aware of their educational responsibilities and gradually evolved an efficient and universal system of public education.” By the 20th century, the modern American education system had developed. State departments of education partnered with schools of education and textbook companies to produce educational standards and objectives. The old vision of education, that the human person was formed through encountering knowledge, was rejected for Dewey’s approach: every child needed the skills necessary for functioning in a democracy. Those skills might change, and schools should adopt whatever curriculum would help students experience the determined skillset. The progressive era built new education systems using the power of an expansive state resulting in compulsory education laws being adopted across the United States by the late 1950s. This historical narrative reveals that education has often looked different; that difference highlights the possibilities of changing the status quo yet again. 

Early in the American experience, attempts began to include formal education in the growth of towns. Massachusetts passed the Old Deluder Satan Act in 1647, requiring all townships to establish a grammar school upon reaching fifty families in size. The rationale was overtly religious in nature: “It being one chief project of that old deluder, Satan, to keep men from the knowledge of the Scriptures, as in former times keeping them in an unknown tongue…” Each town should teach all children to read and write “that Learning may not be buried in the graves of our fore-fathers in Church and Commonwealth, the Lord assisting our endeavors…” Puritans settlers felt the need to transmit the knowledge and skills of education to the next generation. They were not alone in such a desire. Missionary societies in England formed in the 18th century, and in some cases they paired supporting teachers and schoolmasters alongside missionaries. 

In 1773, Jonathan Shipley delivered a sermon to the Society for Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Lands. His sermon was published with the Society’s annual report. Shipley describes the purpose of the society as “instructing distant countries in religious truths to promote the peace and happiness of mankind.” They began with a focus on “conversion of the Indians,” but early efforts were unsuccessful. Of greater success was establishing missions near English colonies. These colonies were primarily focused on survival; in such a state, Shipley suggests, colonists could not also support religion or education:

Now knowledge of all kinds will probably be rare amongst men who are entering into the first rudiments of society; and while their attention is bent on procuring the necessaries of life, it is not to be expected that they should be either diligent or successful in the improvement of religious knowledge. Here therefore the instructions that are conveyed to them by the liberality of this Society may be of essential and durable service.

Having a society that would help supply attention to the cultivation of the mind and the religious sensibilities would contribute to the strength of the Commonwealth: “That sober and reasonable sense of duty, which has been taught under our direction to a few scattered villages, may give its character hereafter to the religion and morals of a powerful state.” Shipley saw the Society imparting truths that would become part of the new civilization on the American continent. Such truths, taught through the twin agencies of pulpit and lectern, unify the global elements of the English world: “By what bond of union shall we hold together the members of this great empire, dispersed and scattered as they lie over the face of the earth?” Throughout his sermon, Shipley stresses the union formed between mother England and the American colonies by religion and education. 

By the preaching of Shipley’s sermon, the Society had been gathering, fundraising, and supporting missionary and educational efforts for seventy years. They existed, as their charter explained, “for the receiving, managing, and disposing of the contributions of such persons as would be induced to extend their charity towards the maintenance of a Learned and an Orthodox Clergy.” Forming a “Learned” and “Orthodox” clergy in future generations required building an educational ecology that the colonies could not yet sustain on their own economic activity; for ministers who could acquire languages and “rightly divide the word of truth” to exist in future decades, the colonies needed schools and schoolmasters who would prepare the next generation of divines. The Society funded missionaries, pastors, teachers, and headmasters all with an eye towards cultivating Christian faith in the colonies. Both those in ministry and those in the teaching profession add value to a new civilization, but neither generate sufficient income to practice their professions without help. The Society existed to meet that need. In 1772 the society distributed “six thousand eight hundred and eighty one pounds, nine shillings, and ten pence” in “salaries, gratuities to missionaries, and for other incidental charges, and for books sent by the Society to North America.” The Society supported teachers and headmasters in Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, the Bahamas, Africa’s Gold Coast Region (now Ghana), and Barbados. 

Funding education is always a significant question, and the Society illustrates a recognition by Englishmen that the colonies required financial help to propagate knowledge. Modern proponents of centralized education might be apoplectic about what is missing from this description of 18th century education: centralized government, formulaic educational standards and objectives, a stated goal to provide education to everyone. These elements were not present in colonial or early republic days. Instead, looking at the quality of writing from the 18th century reveals a well-read populace who had access to the level of education they desired or needed. Education pursued for self-interest results in a more educated populace than compulsion. 

The outcome of self-interested pursuit of knowledge is best demonstrated through the biography of Nathanael Bowditch (1773-1838). Bowditch was the son of a lower-middle class family in New England; he attended grammar school, and then apprenticed to a chandler. After his apprenticeship, he went to sea. Upon learning that navigation was the route to becoming an officer, he taught himself how to navigate. He got into trading, and realized that if he knew more languages he could communicate more effectively. His method: get a New Testament in the desired language, and learn the language through translation and comparison with an English New Testament. In this way, Bowditch taught himself French, Portuguese, and Latin (so that he could read Newton’s Principia). Upon becoming an officer, he discovered errors in the standard book of navigational tables. Bowditch authored his own book of navigational tables, replacing the standard English volume with an authoritative American work.[1] Bowditch illustrates the core of early American education: the essentials are accessible, and those who desire more have the ability to acquire more knowledge and greater skills propelled by their own interest. 

In 1775, an anonymous author, pennamed Sincerus, published Plain English: A Letter to the King in Rhode Island. The pamphlet reflects the revolutionary mood of 1775—it references taxes on tea, the Stamp Act, and quartering troops in American homes. Beyond being representative of the time, Plain English expects an educated audience The author alludes to the Bible and Jonathan Swift, offers a political critique of George III, and grounds his argument on an understanding of human nature. Sincerus is the voice of the frame, but the core of the pamphlet, and its funniest moments, are offered by a “blunt American.” This American is set forth as the rude voice who will speak truth to the king, allowing Sincerus to adopt a pretense of politeness. Below is one representative paragraph from the blunt American: 

Your charge of rebellion is as ridiculous as that of ingratitude. Your princes must have been weak and ignorant men, if, in granting charters for settlements in North America, they could suppose that England would for ever maintain, even in any degree, a supremacy over a country of so wide an extent, and still much weaker and more ignorant to imagine that, when so vast a tract of land should become well peopled, its numerous inhabitants would suffer themselves to be trampled upon, and made a property, by the occupiers of this pitiful island. In acting as we do, we discover no greater a share of pride than it is well known is inherent in all men, however latently so in those of a dastardly disposition. Would you yourselves, had you been formed by the foreign descendants of your ancestors, now you are become a potent nation, to be still governed by their prince and parliament, supposing such a prince and parliament to exist? If you say yes, you lie again. But, even granting your assertion true, you avoid the imputation of a rebellious temper only by confessing yourselves to be nincompoops.

The anonymous author assumes that the reading public will follow his argument, understand his literary frame, track his allusions, and enjoy his sarcastic tone. Sincerus aims not at an educated elite, but rather the ordinary American colonist. Here is evidence of the success of the early American education model. Imagine a pamphlet with complex sentences written in the style of the above published in USA Today; would the average reader follow the argument? Would the graduate of a typical American public education be able to write such an argument? 

The sesquicentennial is a great opportunity to reflect on the nature of America, and the many ways America has changed since 1776. In terms of education, the situation has become more complex. Modern public education democratized that which previously existed for elites. Such a comparison raises the questions of tradeoffs—has centralizing and mandating education resulted in an increase in learning? 2024 was marked by several states creating new systems of school choice; increasing freedom and options may well be a “progressive retrogression,” to borrow a phrase from Dorothy L. Sayers. Looking back creates the possibilities of seeing the way forward. And in this case, the way forward is a return to freedom in American education.

[1] The best version of this story is Jean Lee Latham’s Carry On, Mr. Bowditch (Clarion Books, 2003), 1956 winner of the Newbery Award.

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