Massachusetts established public schooling in 1647 to counteract Satanic influence

Evidence

As early as 1647, the General Court (legislature) in Massachusetts invoked the power of schooling to reinforce the moral training of the family. The preamble of a law allowing local taxation for the support of public schools in that year outlined the evident need for such legislation: It being one chiefe project of that ould deluder, Satan, to keepe men from the knowledge of the Scriptures, as in former times by keeping them in an unknowne tongue, so in these latter times by perswading from the uses of tongues, that so at lease the true sence and meaning of the originall might be clouded by false glosses of saint seeming deceivers. — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America, 477

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: New England Puritan leaders held children in low regard as inherently miserable — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America:…, 474; Early Massachusetts law mandated schools for every fifty to one hundred households — , The Rod and the Child: A Global History…, 3115; Public schooling in America was founded to produce a properly subordinate adult population

Broader Connections

• Early Massachusetts law mandated schools for every fifty to one hundred households #expands (0.95) — , The Rod and the Child, 3115
• Public schooling in America was founded to produce a properly subordinate adult population #corroborates (0.70)