Throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries,
both parents and schools played an important part in the education of young Ameri
cans. While historians of the family and of education have frequently acknowledged
these complementary, if not sometimes conflicting, institutions in the training of the
young, very little effort has been made to examine the interactions between them. The
family was an important source of education for children in colonial and nineteenth-
century America. But from the very beginning churches and schools were directed to
assist parents in the socialization of the young. Indeed, by the mid-nineteenth century,
the role of the schools had expanded to such an extent that many of the educational
tasks initially assigned to parents, such as teaching children the alphabet and how to
read, became the responsibility of the schools.
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