College educations don’t seem to contribute much to the things that actually allow the nation to operate. Quite often,the occupations that really keep things moving along in the economy of a nation are the important jobs that don’t pay as well as those backed up by a “do nothing” college education that really doesn’t qualify a person for anything useful.
The Puritans had the priority right:
Much due to the Protestant belief that lay people should learn to read the Bible, many colonists pushed for literacy. In 1642, the Massachusetts School Law required that parents and master saw to it that their children could read English and knew the principles of religion and the capital laws of the commonwealth. If any parents were unable to “catechize their children and servants in the grounds and principles of Religion” once a week (at the least), then they were to procure some short orthodox catechism for them to learn from, and to answers question put to them from it by their parents or masters and the Select men when they were tested. In addition, children who could not be made fit for higher employments were to be taught some honest lawful trade profitable for themselves and the Commonwealth. The law also instructed that if the Select men found that parents and masters grew lax in their responsibility and thus their children became “rude, stubborn and unruly,” then the government (the Select men with law enforcement) would be obligated to remove such children from the home and place them in a type of reform school where they could receive adequate instruction.
However, education was mainly considered to be a local, or a family responsibility, often using private schools, rather than being an duty of the State. Ralph Walker, author of Old Readers, believes that in this period “children were often taught to read at home before they were subjected to the rigours of school. In middle-class families, where the mother would be expected to be literate, this was considered part of her duties.[4]
In Puritan New England this seems to have been particularly evidenced. In The Intellectual Life of New England Samuel Eliot Morison notes that Boston Latin was “the only public school down to 1684, when a writing school was established; and it is probable that only children who already read were admitted to that . . . . they must have learned to read somehow, since there is no evidence of unusual illiteracy in the town. And a Boston bookseller’s stock in 1700 includes no less than eleven dozen spellers and sixty-one dozen primers.” [5]
While Congress declared in the Land Ordinance of 1785 that a section of every township which was surveyed in the public lands in the western territories was to be set aside for the maintenance of public schools, and a similar provision was made in the the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 for the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley regions, neither ordinance was fully implemented.[6]
Robert A Peterson[7] argues,
For two hundred years in American history, from the mid-1600s to the mid-1800s,...America produced several generations of highly skilled and literate men and women who laid the foundation for a nation dedicated to the principles of freedom and self-government.
The private system of education in which our forefathers were educated included home, school, church, voluntary associations such as library companies and philosophical societies, circulating libraries, apprenticeships, and private study. It was a system supported primarily by those who bought the services of education, and by private benefactors. All was done without compulsion. Although there was a veneer of government involvement in some colonies, such as in Puritan Massachusetts, early American education was essentially based on the principle of voluntarism.[8]
Peter Augustine Lawler also writes,
The citizens of New England took care of the poor, maintained the highways, kept careful records and registries, secured law and order, and, most of all, provided public education for everyone—through high school when possible. The justification of universal education was that everyone should be able to read the Bible to know the truth about God and his duties to Him for himself. Nobody should be deceived by having to rely on the word of others; they had the democratic or Cartesian distrust of authority without the paralyzing and disorienting rejection of all authority (DA.2.1.1) That egalitarian religious understanding, of course, was the source of the American popular enlightenment that had so many practical benefits.[9]
Libraries with good books contributed to the literacy of the average American. Desire for books brought a large number of libraries into existence. These included church libraries, which were supported primarily by voluntarism. Non-private, non-church libraries in America were first maintained by membership fees, and by gifts of books and money from private benefactors interested in education. Entrepreneurs also served to fulfill the desire for self-improvement by colonial Americans, providing new services and innovative ways to sell or rent printed matter. [10] Almanacs (usually mainly consisting of miscellaneous information and collections of religious and moral sayings), primers and law book were the mainstay of printing, with the largest category consisting of books on theology. [11]
More: http://www.astorehouseofknowledge.info/w/Education_in_the_United_States
In 1647 the Massachusetts colonial legislature commented that as the “old deluder Satan” had worked to keep the Bible (in the vernacular) from the people in the times before the Protestant Reformation, they passed a law (also known as the Old Deluder Satan Act) that towns of over 50 families should provide a school.[2]