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IN MARCH 1711, Cotton Mather declared that, "A lively Discourse about the Benefit and Importance of Education, should be given to the Countrey." "The Countrey/' he asserted, "is perishing for want of it; they are sinking apace into Barbarism and all Wickedness." (1) Mather was convinced that formal education was being neglected in eighteenth-century Massachusetts, and for two centuries after Math er's death historians accepted his verdict. As early as 1835, Lemuel Shattuck described the late seventeenth and early eighteenth cen turies as a "dark age" of learning. (2) Later historians used similar phrases. By the close of the nineteenth century, Edward Eggleston wrote the epitaph for early eighteenth-century education, "a period of darkness and decline." (3) Mather's dictum stood unchallenged until 1934 when Clifford Shipton offered a less dismal view of eighteenth-century New Eng land education. In "Secondary Education in the Puritan Colonies," Shipton argued that New England schools were improving rather than deteriorating during the period. Moreover, according to Shipton, the concern for education that typified the early Puritan remained strong throughout the eighteenth century. Shipton concluded by denying that there had ever been a "permanent collapse of secondary Mr. Teaford, a recent graduate of Oberlin College, is now at the University of Wisconsin. JON TEAFORD Fall ipyo 287 education in Puritan New England such as earlier studies indi cated." (4) More recently, Robert Middlekauff has reinforced Shipton's findings. In Ancients and Axioms: Secondary Education in Eigh teenth-Century New England, Middlekauff found that "the commu nity's devotion to literacy and classical learning" survived "the de cline of religion and the commercialization of society which oc curred in the eighteenth century." (5) Thus Middlekauff speaks of the "persistence of the Puritan tradition in education," declaring that "long after the Puritans disappeared, their educational tradition survived, a legacy to their commitment to intelligence and to hu mane values." (6)

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