What was the education like during the American Revolution?

Question

i have to do a research paper on this, and i can not find anything about it. so, can you please help me? thank you!

Answer 1

Early teachers of America's children came from the ranks of the upper and middling classes which already benefited from some form of formal education. They also came from social institutions which afforded women some independence outside their homes. Nineteenth century Quaker women, for example, were among the first to teach more advanced subjects to children. As Joan M. Jensen noted in "Loosening the Bonds: Mid-Atlantic Farm Women 1750-1850," by 1790, young Quaker women were marrying at later ages and many turned to teaching as a profession. They were successful because the country was in desperate need of teachers. Oftentimes, male teachers could not be found to fill vacancies.

Women of Protestant denominations, traditional teachers of Sunday schools, said Jensen, like Quaker women, found a measure of liberation in teaching.

"Teaching, like education, could be a means of enforcing conformity to women's sphere," wrote Jensen, "but it could also be a means of resisting the encroaching bonds of 'true womanhood.'" The need for teachers who would equip the country with literate citizens able to participate fully in a democracy perhaps provided the primary avenue for the liberation of women from the confining bounds of domesticity which women were seeking.

http://www.iigs.org/newsletter/9809news/...

http://www.history.org/history/teaching/...

Not all children could attend common schools together. Schooling was far less available to African Americans and Native Americans than to whites. Before the Civil War, free African Americans living primarily in cities in the North and upper South were permitted to attend school, but they were often segregated into separate and usually inferior facilities. Many of these free blacks formed their own schools taught by African American teachers. While it was not against the law to educate slaves in the colonial period, they were generally denied formal instruction. In the wake of Nat Turner’s 1831 slave rebellion in Virginia, however, Southerners began legally prohibiting the education of slaves.

http://research.history.org/Historical_R...

In eighteenth-century Virginia, education for the young was a family responsibility, not a legal entitlement to standardized instruction for all children. 1 Parents and guardians up and down the economic scale were left to provide girls and boys with the level of schooling the family could afford and judged appropriate.

http://www.socialstudiesforkids.com/arti...

If you were a school-age person in colonial America, you might have gone to a public or private school, just like you would today. But what you learned and how you learned it have changed through the years.

http://www.stratfordhall.org/ed-boysgirl...

The primary education of upper class children in colonial days included reading, writing, simple math, poems, and prayers.

http://www.education-world.com/a_lesson/...

In the New England colonies, the Puritans built their society almost entirely on the precepts of the Bible.  

Answer 2

it was a small system, but the best careers one could get at this time was either in Law, medicine or a farmer. It wasn't really emphasized cause they had to go fight and stuff. hope this helps.