Education
One of the many ways in which Revolutionary America affected children’s lives a great deal is through the effect on education. During these times education was immensely different than we imagine it today, specifically in the access and the modes of education. Education was unequal primarily due to gender and wealth, but it still played a large role in Revolutionary America in the development of the nation.
To start, the access to education during Revolutionary America was extremely unequal and therefore affected children immensely. As stated in previous sections, the girls were expected to stay home and help with household duties, and even the wealthiest girls were not given the opportunity to go to school. However, wealthy boys were often the only children given the opportunity to attend school, and “the poorer sort of children are wholly neglected."1 Although wealthy boys were often given more of an opportunity to go to school, there was not much schooling offered in the US, for “in this town, [there’s never been such] great neglect of education.” 2 Due to this, they were often sent to New England for their studies.3 This affected children throughout Revolutionary America a great deal because they were excluded from political decisions and education throughout this entire political period due to lack of literacy.
One of the many reasons that education played such an immense role in Revolutionary America is because despite its exclusions, a great deal of the communication and knowledge surrounding the politics of the developing nation at this time were literary based.4 For example, pamphlets and other documents like, Common Sense by Thomas Paine articulated a great amount of information concerning the independence of America.5 This affected children during this time period because they were excluded from political knowledge and not deemed as important as the adults. On the contrary, this exclusion created a great deal of advocacy for the need for education during the American Revolution, which started a movement for the importance of educating and including children. To elaborate, in Abigail Adams’ letters to John Adams on August 14th, 1776, she states, “If we mean to have Heroes, Statesmen and Philosophers, we should have learned women” thus advocating for unequal education especially towards girls.6 In this statement, Adams is articulating the amount of potential opportunities both socially and politically the future of America would have if they added equal education to the new constitution showing that children are currently excluded, and can too, have an impact on the future of America.7
Since children were often excluded from formal education during this time period, they were often educated in informal ways such as through overhearing discussions based upon revolutionary ideals.8 This additionally led to a lack of social skills that students would be expected to exhibit in schools. This holds true when Abigail Adams says that children were “left to range the Streets without Schools, without Business, given up to all Evil,” proving the chaos that was created because of the lack of education.9 This impacts children greatly due to the fact that once again they are being excluded from societal and political decisions due to their lack of literacy and social understanding.
All in all, Revolutionary America’s education system impacted children a great deal and is vastly different from modern education. The education consisted of a greatly exclusive system in which primarily only white, wealthy boys were included in. This caused children to be excluded from political and social knowledge, which ultimately allowed for advocacy for educational equalities to be added to the new constitution.
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1 Adams, Abigail. “Letter from Abigail Adams to John Adams, 14 August 1776.” Massachusetts Historical Society,1963. https://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/doc., 2.
2 Ibid., 2.
3 Haven, Kendall. Voices of the American Revolution: Stories of Men, Women, and Children Who Forged Our Nation. Google Books. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2000. https://tinyurl.com/mr27e9v5.
4 Ibid., 334.
5 Paine, Thomas. “Common Sense.” The Project Gutenberg eBook of Common Sense, by Thomas Paine, July 1, 1994. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/147/pg147-images.html.
6 Adams, “Letter from Abigail Adams to John Adams, 14 August 1776.”, 3.
7 Ibid., 2.
8 Haven, Voices of the American Revolution: Stories of Men, Women, and Children Who Forged Our Nation.
9 Adams, “Letter from Abigail Adams to John Adams, 14 August 1776.”, 2.