It has been stated that in the 1770s, at the eve of the American Revolution, the English-American colonies’ average literacy exceeded that of any of the Old Countries, whether it was England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Germany, or Holland – meaning that it was the highest in the world at that time.  Though unverifiable by statistics, that was probably true, and as such was a great credit to Calvinist and Quaker insistence on reading the scriptures as the road to righteousness.  But it was hardly grounds for excessive boasting;  by modern standards literacy in Europe was extremely low indeed, and the best that could be said for America was that there it was somewhat higher and rising.  On the whole, even colonial education was sporadic, seldom in skillful hands and often poorly organized.  The wonder is, in fact, that any sizeable number of colonists were ever able to acquire even the most basic skills in reading and writing.

Real opportunities for most children to learn how to read even nominally ranged from very poor in the South to theoretically good but actually only fair in New England.  The scattered nature of the Southern settlements discouraged most any kind of schools there;  a schoolroom is pointless unless a certain number of potential pupils live near enough to reach it under most conditions.  For that reason, school districts like that in upper New York State of the early 1800s were calculated to include the homes of children not more than four miles away, the distance a child of school age was assumed to be able to walk twice a day.  On the large Southern plantations, therefore, the master’s children sometimes had tutors, usually from Britain or a Northern colony, practically never of local origin – an eloquent testimony to the shortcomings of Southern schooling.  John Carter, for instance, made provisions in his will for a tutor to teach his six-year old son, the future King Carter; and young George Washington received his first lesson at the hands of an indentured servant from England whose time his father had purchased.

Such tutors might at the same time take on additional children from nearby plantations for a small fee.  Or – though this was something that could never be counted on – the local Anglican parson might be sober and literate and ambitious enough to try and eke out his scanty income by running an elementary school of logs and planks near the parsonage – if it proved central enough, that is, to permit a few pupils to come by horseback.  Most Quality children, girls as well as the boys, were thus exposed to some reading and writing at least, some elementary “ciphering”, and maybe a smattering of Latin, though that was considered important for boys only. The quality of such education inevitably varied with the inborn teaching talents of the given tutor or parson.  Only in very few sizeable settlements, such as Norfolk or Charleston or Annapolis, was it worth for a general schoolmaster to try for tuition-paying offsprings of the local Quality.

But even these sketchy facilities served only a small top layer of society. Below that, Southern education hardly existed at all, almost literally reinforcing early Virginia’s Governor William Berkeley’s fervent statement: “Thank god there are no free schools and no printing presses in Virginia and I hope there will be none for another hundred years.”  The small tobacco farmers, steadily pushed westward from the Piedmont by the big planters; the settlers in the pinewoods clearings, barely subsisting on a steady diet of corn and pork; the fur traders in and out of the woods;  the crossroads craftsman shoeing horses, repairing wagons or making saddles; not to mention the largely submerged black slaves – all these people had had illiterate parents, and they and their children stayed illiterate.  In the high upcountry, among the Bible-reading Germans and Scotch-Irish, the alphabet was likely to be more familiar to the common man, but his plodding, lip-moving reading of the printed pages did by no means imply that he was also able to write. Too many of his number still made the mark X on official documents.

Snobbery and nostalgia – or perhaps desperation – finally moved some of the Southern Quality to send their sons overseas to Eaton or some other respected school.  Only in this way could they hope to maintain the cultivation evident in some planters’ sizeable private libraries or in the skillful writings of many Southern colonial leaders.  It was such hopes and ambitions which eventually raised Williamsburg’s College of William and Mary from a small academy which offered little beyond penmanship and elementary Latin to something like an institution of higher learning, and which graduated such cultivated men as Thomas Jefferson and Edmund Randolph.  It also is clear, however, that most learned Virginians among the Founding Fathers were basically self-educated, owing far less to formal schooling than to their own initiative in buying, borrowing and devouring of books.  Moreover, 18th-century Virginians had to improve their minds without access to the rich public libraries of today; as late as 1775, the only two non-private libraries south of the Mason-Dixon Line were one at William and Mary, and a subscription general library supported by wealthy Charlestonians.

In that, as in most other respects, things were much better north of the Chesapeake.  In Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin had founded America’s first proper subscription library as early as 1713, and worthy imitations had sprung up in New York, Boston, and other colonial capitals within thirty years thereafter.  Such libraries were all the more important because of the outrageous prices of books in the days before power presses and cheap paper revolutionized publishing.  Three dollars for a volume of a history of Charles V sounds reasonable enough, until one reflects that this amount represented two days wages for a skilled craftsman.  Amassing King Carter’s famous library of 1,500 volumes, therefore, must have cost as much as an ocean-going vessel.

The South-North contrast was equally sharp in education.  Private schools in mid-1700 Philadelphia were good enough to attract pupils from nearly every other colony, many of whom were preparing for entrance into Old Country universities.  The city’s schools, sponsored by the Quakers, the German-Lutheran, Presbyterian and Anglican churches, taught talented boys of all classes on a semi-scholarship basis on equal footing as the sons of the gentry.  In fact, Philadelphia, Boston, and even the Newport of the early 1700s were soon able to boast of school facilities better than most anything England had to offer outside of London.

In the port towns the apprenticeship system filled in some educational gaps for poorer boys.  The apprenticeship contract usually required the master to see that the boy learned at least elementary reading and writing and bookkeeping.  Though literacy was not absolutely essential to a blacksmith or a shoemaker’s performance, a familiarity with written words and figures in any business is obviously an advantage;  any craftsman was more useful to his master, or to himself, if he was able to read written instructions and calculate dimensions and time in his work.  Most colonial masters therefore readily taught such skills to their apprentices, or even paid a local private teacher to do so.  Ambitious journeymen, too, paid fees for instructions in simple accounting, navigation, or major European languages, perhaps.  Thus the colonists had already begun to anticipate the peculiarly American ambition of the business college night school.