The Family State, 1600–1776

Abstract

Education in the American colonies was very largely conducted in the home, which was the crucial social institution of the era. Colonial governments aggressively policed and regulated colonial households in an effort to maintain a society based on Patriarchal Protestant Christianity, but they could not hold back the shift to a family grounded in maternalism. Children of the poor were frequently educated in the homes of others, and many slaves in the colonial period got what education they could in the homes of their masters. The educations children received in colonial homes and the advice books parents read did much to prepare eighteenth century colonists for the American Revolution.