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Introduction: Explorations in Early American Education

Nearly three decades ago, Bernard Bailyn issued his now famous plea for a broader and more comprehensive interpretation of early American education.' Some of Bailyn's particular interpretations of the origins of schooling in the New World have been challenged and discarded-particularly those that postulated the breakup of the stable, extended English family in the wilderness of the New World. Yet overall he succeeded in encouraging more critical and integrative studies of education than the more traditional and laudatory institutional work by earlier scholars such as Ellwood Cubberly. Historians have now explored a variety of interesting topics such as the increasingrates of male and femaleliteracy,shifts in responsibilityfor educating the young from the father to the mother, and the changing role of the church in instructing its parishioners. Despite the increased sophistication of analyses of colonial education, surprisingly few scholars have chosen to specialize in this area so that much remains to be done." The four essays presented here as a special issue of the History of Education Quarterly represent a modest effort to stimulate additional work on early American education and to synthesize some of the existing findings. Naturally, due to the constraints of time and space, there is no pretence of even mentioning, let alone settling, many of the still unresolved debates and questions in colonial education. Yet the authors of these essays, most of whom represent the next generation of colonial educational historians, demonstrate the value of continued work in this field and the utility of heeding Bailyn's call for a broader and more interdisci-