Why did the New England colonists value education?

Answer 1

The ubiquity of "common" schools in the United States belies both the long effort to establish a system of publicly supported elementary and secondary schools and the many controversies that have attended public schools before and since their creation. The belief that public, or free, schools and pauper schools were synonymous terms, and that such schools were only for children of the poor, long hampered the acceptance of the idea that publicly supported schools could and should exist for all children, regardless of social class, gender, religion, ethnicity, or country of origin. Moreover, the European and colonial insistence that responsible parents need concern themselves only with the education of their own children through the avenues of the family, church, or the voluntary efforts of like-minded citizens only slowly gave way to the conviction that publicly supported common schools might serve all children equally, and in so doing advance the moral, social, and economic interests so vital to the nation.

Read more: Common School Movement - Colonial and Republican Schooling, Changes in the Antebellum Era, The Rise of the Common School - StateUniversity.com http://education.stateuniversity.com/pages/1871/Common-School-Movement.html#ixzz2Nwh0LVXm

Answer 2

To teach children how to read.

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Answer 3

they were not smart

Answer 4

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