Browsing by Author "Ma, Weng Si *Matina"

The New-England Primer is one of the most influential children’s books in America and it was used as a school textbook for about a hundred years in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The rise and fall of the Primer provides important insights into childhood ideology before the founding of America. This thesis studies the nation’s founding documents, decrees, seminal Christian works, sermons, literatures, biographies, diaries and medical records in relation to the Primer. Among the authors whose works included in the research are John Calvin, John Cotton, John Winthrop, Solomon Stoddard, Cotton Mather, John Locke, Benjamin Franklin and Noah Webster. In order to understand how childhood ideology was formed in New England, I first scrutinize The New-England Primer’s ABC and survey its origin, significance and impact. Then I contextualize several momentous events in American history, including the conflicts between Anne Hutchinson and John Winthrop in the seventeenth century and the contradictions between the doctrine of ‘Thou shalt not kill’ and the smallpox inoculation among the common people in the early eighteenth century. The New-England Primer is a vivid example of how the Puritan governance kept a tight rein on childhood ideology by severe punishments and rewards such as social mobility. My findings include that the literacy level among Puritans was due to learning the Catechism during the infancy and the centrality of death education for children. In an era of sin and infant mortality, people believed that salvation was the way to reach immortal life. At the time, The New-England Primer was a successful political tool to regulate the common people’s morals and behaviour. However, it lost its credibility along with the decline of the Puritan faith among the social elite. The clash with the emerging science, changes in the rhetoric of education from piety to happiness as well as the changes in the landscape of knowledge contributed to the establishment of the first knowledge-based English Academy in America in Philadelphia, which had an innovative curriculum. Finally the appearance of Webster’s patriotic The American Spelling Book gradually replaced The New-England Primer in the early nineteenth century. The contents and the ideas of The New-England Primer are clearly not suitable for the children in the twenty-first century. However, learning about the rise and fall of the Primer can also help us see today’s ideology. How are parents influenced by contemporary mass culture and in which way do they choose to teach their children? How is the world portrayed in children’s books? What is the current dominant knowledge and how will it influence life in the next generations? I believe that the answers to such questions are deeply concerned with educational policies.