The Classic Liberal Arts Education of the American Founding Fathers
Ichabod Crane wasn't run out of town by a flaming pumpkin. He was run out of town by Flaming Hegelians.
From the time of the English Reformation (1549) in the reign of Edward VI Tudor, until the early to mid 19th century, the Grammar School system in both Britain and British North America remained remarkably constant, and produced consistent results.
The English University system evolved over that 300 year time frame, but the Grammar School system that fed it barely moved the needle. As an example of this, we have a description of 'what William Shakespeare's grammar-school education must have been like', using a description of the system by a famous educator, Christopher Hoole, written in 1636.[1] This was well after Shakespeare's grammar school days and somewhat before the English Civil War, yet it is probably accurate.
[1]: Shakespeare's School Days: What Did Shakespeare Read in Grade School?
Quoting Professor Thomas Baynes, at that link:
Shakespeare's school days [1580ish] and those of Hoole [writing in 1636] was in the more general teaching of Greek, as a regular branch of school instruction. Leaving, however, his "less Greek," I shall confine myself to the "little Latin" which, according to his friend and fellow-dramatist [Ben Jonson], Shakespeare possessed. And on this head we may confidently assume that the course of instruction established at Ashby, at Wakefield, and at Rotherham would also be found established at Stratford-upon-Avon….
As the article notes, the main difference between Shakespeare's education in the 1580s and Hoole's day would have been the enrichment of the [Classical] Grammar School curriculum (for young boys mind you) to include Greek as well as Latin. This was a natural step for the Protestant Reformation, since the Greek New Testament and later the addition of the Hebrew Language study (under Cromwell) represented Protestant goals for the professional class of doctors, lawyers, and clergy, who were the main target of a [Classical, Liberal Arts] Grammar School education.
That same system, in place at the beginning of the period that in Music we call the 'Common Practices Period'[2] (1650-1900), which covers the Baroque through the Romantic era, in with vary similar analogues in Art, and Architecture, is based on the grounding of Classical Liberal Arts education. We can pass from the classical style in Architecture from Christopher Wren to the Federal style of the late 18th century, or from William Byrd at the beginning of our period, to the narrowly classical style of Mozart, with the same degree of constancy that we observe in the educational system of both Grammar school and ‘College’. This educational system was reproduced as exactly as possible, and fully in place in the era that Cotton Mather overlapped with Ben Franklin.
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_practice_period
Image: Rotunda of the University of Virginia.
The Classical Grammar school system in England and Scotland was fairly similar to that of other European countries, so that there is little throughout what I will now call the 'Common Practice Period' in Classical Liberal Arts Education at the Grammar School level and even at the University level, to separate protestant and catholic practice. There are obvious differences—an English Grammar School might prefer to use the Rhetorical Elements text by Philip Melanchthon, who along with Martin Luther was responsible for the Reformation in Germany. But then that same tradition will turn around and assign, even in the 17th century, the Latin text of Thomas-a-Kempis, or perhaps for moral instruction, the Anglican, semi-Arminian Whole Duty of Man, to Calvinist, Puritan children. And, of course, Erasmus was quite ambiguous between the protestant and catholic 'parties' and is a central figure in the tradition.
Romanticism, in all fields of Humane endeavour, both in the Arts and in the Sciences, represents a reaction against the unified Common Practices of the Classical Liberal Arts, after the trauma of the American and French Revolutions, and of Napoleonic Wars and Peninsular Wars.
In the Americas, this period of global warfare led to both the eventual expulsion of the House of Bourbon from this hemisphere, and the defeat of the British, in 1815. The ‘War of 1812’ is con-celebrated by all of the Americas, both North and South, except for a few remaining Commonwealth colonies like Canada, and also in Russia, and for identical reasons. The Romantic piece 'The 1812 Overture' serves as a suitable conclusion to the defeat of Napoleonic and Bourbon Militarism, in both the American hemisphere, and in Russia.
After that victory and, in the young Republic of the united States of America, the 'Era of Good Feelings' followed, but it was brought to an end, eventually, in the 1830s and 1840s by events in both Britain (the Reform era) and America. The culture of post-Napoleonic European continent was established at the Congress of Vienna, and the rise of 'Enlightened [i.e., Enlightenment-themed] Despotisms'. The transmission of these intellectual currents to our shores took place with New England Transcendentalist school of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and eventually triggered the rise of 'Anti-Masonic' opposition in the so-called American party, the Know-Nothings. Later, this latter movement spawned several different foundations of the parties named ‘Republican’, of which one finally predominated, in the era I like to call 'The War of Ph.D. Aggression' (because there were men who had been educated in Germany on both sides, as well as, on one side, German immigrants serving as 'substituted' combatants).
The Ph.D. degree and the Research University of the post-Bellum era, were novelties imported from Germany, in the late Romantic era. The various forms of Hegelianism, Neo-Kantianism, and the practices of Psychology (Wundt) and Sociology (Durkheim) which became the 'norm' of American Universities, all date from and bring about an end to the entire superstructure of the Common Practice period. This was quickly followed by State ‘mandatory education laws’ enjoining the new and imported style and culture of education.
The classical education of young children is what created the academic and cultural triumphs of the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, right through the time of the 'Scottish Enlightenment' and the 18th Century and American Founding Fathers who wrote, famously, the Declaration of Independence and later the Constitution and Federalist Papers explaining and defending it, and who of course formed the governments under the Continental Congress and later the Early Republic.
This Classical Liberal Arts education arrives ahead of the 'Common Practice' period (1650-1900) in the Humane Arts, by about a century—it takes a generation or three to get a common culture going, starting from the birth of its eventual members. Thus, King Edward VI founded his protestant Grammar Schools in 1551, to replace the medieval educational system that was destroyed by his father's Dissolution of the monasteries (and very nearly of the Public Schools, who received a last-minute stay of execution).
Thirty years on we have a Shakespeare, and a couple generations thence Hoole writes of it, in this work, which is given the long title[3]:
A New Discovery of the Old Art of Teaching Schoole: in four small Treatises; concerning, A Petty School, The Usher's Duty, The Master's Method, and Scholastick Discipline: Shewing how Children in their playing years may Grammatically attain to a firm groundedness in an exercise of the Latine and Greek Tongues.
[3]: https://www.google.com/books/edition/A_New_Discovery_of_the_Old_Art_of_Teachi/6tAxAQAAMAAJ
A modern academic discussion of the book and its contents:
The Petty-School mentioned is similar to a Dame-School in what it accomplishes in the English tongue, but it was taught by a man, to prepare boys for Grammar School. Boys on the Grammar school track would pick up what we now call ‘The Language Arts’ for English, as a by-product of studying Latin and Greek.
Later this weekend, in the Autodidact section, I will publish an in-depth dive into Hoole’s account of how this system worked. In brief, children were taught literacy in English, in the home or in Dame-Schools (i.e. schools run by women). Then as now, children aged 3-4 in literate households with access to books, learned to read by being read to, and achieved in many cases a high level of literacy before the age for Grammar School, around age 6 or 7.
Grammar, in the context of Classical Liberal Arts education of the Common Practice period, means Latin, and later Greek. Grammar School was typically taught in a one room schoolhouse by a school-master (ludi-magister in Latin, the master of the ludus, 'a school' or 'a game'). Often, the Master had an assistant, whose title was the Usher, a sort of deputy Master. In colonial British America we would likely have had, in many places, an itinerant school-master, whence Ichabod Crane of Sleepy Hallow fame, but one who who would have no ‘Usher’ as an assistant.
In the more civilised (?) and stable conditions of 17th century England and Scotland, and at its full development, a single Grammar school might have the Master managing up to 140 students, with the help of the Usher. The Usher would focus on teaching the first three forms Latin, and the Master, who might be and probably was the only teacher who knew Greek, would teach forms four, five, and six, introducing Greek beginning in the fourth form.
An attestation that this 'school system' of England and Scotland in the protestant era survived intact on American shores is given by Professor Ziobro's wonderful site:
There you can read about Classic Liberal Arts education in America, from the Boston and Philadelphia of Benjamin Franklin, through the classical education of Thomas Jefferson, and that of both his elders and younger proteges in the Revolutionary generation.
The site also goes into detail about the architecture of the period, which itself is a testament to the influence of the Common Practice period in 18th century (late colonial) America. I especially recommend this link which has most of the course content:
CLASSICAL AMERICA - Syllabus Fall 2009
Professor Ziobro's course gives many attestations that Grammar schools in 1722 Philadelphia (when Ben Franklin was boy) teach substantially the same subjects, in the same order, by the same methods as at the end of the 18th century and after the American Revolution.
Grammar Schools:
Colleges as well:
Characteristics of the American Colonial College
My point here is that Classical Liberal Arts education is not some notion that is 'up for grabs' any more than how to compose a gigue, or an adagio movement in a concerto grosso, in the Common Practice period. Such things might vary, subtly, as we pass from Baroque through the Rococo stage and Classical stage proper, and they might be modified greatly in the Romantic period, but these are all internal changes in a single and uniform cultural tradition, with its rules, canons, and expectations known to all participants. At least historically that was the case.
And so a ‘Classical Liberal Arts’ education is also something that can be done well or badly, judging by its own theory and its own rules of practice. The Lost Tools of Learning cannot be reinvented, anymore than a Bach Canon or Mass can be 're-invented' for a Video Game medium, incorporating elements of the Hip-Hop style of Rap.
It might be possible to adapt and restore a lost tradition, to present needs, which is that the Common Practice tradition in Music all the other Liberal and Useful Arts did, over the course of centuries, until it was destroyed tout cort in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But it cannot be done with so much violence and ignorance as to become a simple parody or a kind relief from nihilism and boredom, serving no social or cultural, much less any religious or spiritual, purpose.
To conclude, Professor Ziobro's site records a course that was put on the web in 1997, when the World Wide Web was very young -- the web became accessible to the general public in the 'Eternal September' 1993, with the notion of 'a member of the public having his own website' only emerging in 1994!
The course was taught it seems, off and on, through at least 2013, and while the site is very dated and the links damaged by age, you can find many links to other sites, should they '404' for you, at the Wayback machine:
Classical America (archive.org)
This 4th of July weekend I invite you to peruse the site and contemplate the childhood education necessary to sustain Classical, and Liberal ideals, including those of the (Scottish) Enlightenment, and the early American Republic envisioned in the various Declarations of Independence (by the several states, and then at the Continental level), as well as the Constitution and Bill of Rights that followed.