Massachusetts School Laws - Framing and Provisions of The Acts

Framing and Provisions of The Acts

The 1647 legislation specifically framed ignorance as a Satanic ill to be circumvented through the education of the country's young people. It required every town having more than 50 families to hire a teacher, and every town of more than 100 families to establish a "grammar school". Failure to comply with the mandate would result in a fine of £5. The grammar school clause was intended to prepare students to attend Harvard College, whose mission was to prepare young men for the ministry.

The rationale for the law reflected the Calvinist Puritan ethos of the time and in particular the influence of the Reverend John Cotton, who was a teacher in the First Church of Boston and one of the Massachusetts Bay Colony's most influential leaders. The Puritans sought to create a literate population to ensure that, as the law put it, "ye ould deluder, Satan" could not use illiteracy to "keepe men from the knowledge of ye Scriptures." Their religious beliefs emphasized the view that personal knowledge of the Scriptures was an essential requirement for temporal living and eternal salvation. The statute also endorsed the principle that the interpretation of the Scriptures should be done under the aegis of proper authority, namely the Puritan leaders, in order to avoid "false glosses of saint seeming deceivers".

A further piece of educational legislation was passed in 1648, addressing and extending the schooling requirements set out in the 1642 law. It stipulated that children and apprentices, under the authority of parents or masters, were to be taught reading, the public laws, the catechism and "some honest lawful calling, labour or employment." Selectmen were to act as supervisors of the population, conducting examinations and if necessary fining parents or placing the young with other masters if their education was neglected.

The practical implementation of the educational laws appears to have been distinctly inconsistent. By the end of the 1650s, all eight of the 100-family towns and a third of the 50-family towns had met the respective requirements for grammar schools and the hiring of teachers. However, the remainder of the towns and many new towns ignored both mandates and instead paid the fine. The Massachusetts Civil Code of 1660 reiterated the school laws, but still met with a lack of implementation; to enforce it, a fresh act was passed in 1668.