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Once on the website, scroll down to video that says Silver Smith.

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Colonial Williamsburg Multimedia - Video

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Colonial Williamsburg Education Resource Library

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Three Great Museums. One Ticket.

Our living history museum and two art museums at Colonial Williamsburg offer something for everyone, from hands-on activities to guided tours of original 18th-century buildings to our unmatched folk-art collection.

Your Admission Ticket is the Key

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Our living history museum and two art museums at Colonial Williamsburg offer something for everyone, from hands-on activities to guided tours of original 18th-century buildings to our unmatched folk-art collection. Your Admission Ticket is the Key

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Colonial America

When you think about education in America, what do you picture? If you're like most people, you probably think about education the way it is today. Students go to school with many other students and are taught by many teachers throughout the years. They learn math, science, reading, history and probably many other subjects as well. Of course, when they are around 17 or 18, they graduate and either go on to college or enter the workforce.

That's a pretty standard view of American education, but that's not the way it's always been. During Colonial America, which was during the 1600s and most of the 1700s, education was very different from the way it is today. Even before the American colonies were established, there was education in America. Some American Indian tribes, like the Cherokee, had a written language and an education system. But education in the colonies was not influenced very much by the American Indians. Instead, they were most influenced by their European roots. The English education system in particular gave a vision to early Americans for how to educate their children. Let's look closer at the way children were educated in Colonial America, including tutors, schools, and regional differences in education.

Tutors and Schools

Imagine for a moment that you are a child in Colonial America. Life is very different: no fast food, no air conditioning, and no smart phones. In fact, you don't even have electricity! What does education look like for you? In large part, the answer to that question rests in who you were, because education was determined by class, race, and gender in Colonial America.

Lower classes and minorities were usually not educated. Instead, they usually participated in an apprenticeship, or on-the-job training under the tutelage of an experienced practitioner. These apprenticeships usually lasted three to seven years and taught the apprentice the ins and outs of a trade. For example, if you were a poor boy in Colonial America, you might become a blacksmith's apprentice, learning how to be a blacksmith by working for one. After a certain number of years, you would be skilled enough to open your own blacksmith shop.

But upper-class children were educated outside the bounds of apprenticeship. Usually this took the form of tutoring, or working one-on-one or in small groups with a teacher. Wealthy families often hired a tutor to work with the children of that family, so siblings would study together with a tutor at their home. Boys were usually tutored until they were ready for boarding school or college, which was usually in Europe. Girls were tutored until they were ready to run a household, at which point they were married off.

But what about children who were not rich enough for a tutor, but also not poor? Sometimes they would go to dame schools, which were like a day care. Families sent children to the house of a local woman who taught the children the basics, like the ABCs or basic arithmetic, while going about her normal daily routine. So, as she cooked and cleaned and stirred lye to make soap, the 'dame' in charge of the dame school would teach local children.

Regional Differences

While economics, race, and gender were a driving force in educational opportunities in the colonies, so was geography. If you were a child in New England, your education would be very different from one in the south during the colonial period.

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education in colonial america - video & lesson transcript | study.com

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Education in Colonial America - Video & Lesson Transcript | Study.com

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When you think about education in America, what do you picture? If you're like most people, you probably think about education the way it is today. Students go to school with many other students and are taught by many teachers throughout the years. They learn math, science, reading, history and probably many other subjects as well.

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Once on the website, scroll down to video that says Colonial Chocolate

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Colonial Williamsburg Multimedia - Video

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Colonial Williamsburg Education Resource Library

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Once complete, take the quiz!

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Kids learn about the jobs, trades, and occupations of colonial America including apothecary, blacksmith, cabinetmaker, cobbler, cooper, milliner, printer, and wheelwright.

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Kids learn about food people ate and cooked during Colonial America including farming, hunting, fishing, meals, and how they prepared for winter.

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Kids learn about the history of women's roles during colonial America including education, dialy work, rules, legal status, enslaved women, facts, and the wealthy.

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Kids learn about women's clothing during Colonial America including the gown, petticoats, shift, stay, shoes, ruffles, cloak, apron, mob caps, hair styles, and hats.

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Kids learn about men's clothing during Colonial America including the waistcoat, cravat, breeches, shoes, stockings, shirt, cloak, banyan, hair styles, tricorn hats, and wigs.

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Kids learn about daily life in the city during Colonial America including jobs, trades, education, middling class, church, the enslaved, and interesting facts.

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Kids learn about daily life on the farm during Colonial America including work for men, women, chores for children, education, the enslaved, crops, and interesting facts.

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Kids learn about the jobs, trades, and occupations of colonial America including apothecary, blacksmith, cabinetmaker, cobbler, cooper, milliner, printer, and wheelwright.

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Education in the Thirteen American Colonies

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.

the New England colonies, parents believed that their children should learn about Christianity. To that end, parents taught their children to read so they could read the Bible. And once those kids knew how to read, they could read school books as well. New England villages having more than 100 families set up In grammar schools, which taught boys Latin and math and other subjects needed to get into college. And although girls could read, they weren't allowed to go to grammar school or to college.

Middle Colonies schools were also largely religious but taught the teachings of one religion. If you were a Catholic, you learned about the Catholic religion. Most schools were private. Students also learned other subjects so they could get into college. Again, girls weren't allowed to attend, unless they were Quakers.

School-age kids in the Southern Colonies were taught at home, for the most part, by their parents or by private tutors. When these kids became teenagers, they would then go off to college or to Europe. As in the other colonies, Southern girls did not go to school.

were generally small, not like the large ones many kids go to today. Kids learned to read from special books called Schools hornbooks.

Kids in colonial America were taught a trade, usually the one their fathers did, so they could continue the family business when their fathers retired. Often, kids would go to school and learn a trade.

Graphics courtesy of ArtToday

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Education in the Thirteen American Colonies 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.