Table of Contents

1. Overview
2. The Child’s World and Image
3. Wampanoag Education and Oral Tradition
4. New England Primer
5. Indian Primer
6. Catechism
7. Logick Primer
8. Corporal Punishment
9. Children’s Conversion Narratives
10. The Schoolhouse
11. Harvard Indian College
12. Wheelock’s Indian School

Overview

• Pious Children
• Views of Children
• Puritan Views of Education
• Wampanoag Views of Education
• Children and Religious Education
• Archive

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Pious Children

The era in which Experience Mayhew wrote was one of enormous change for both white and Wampanoag children. During the eighteenth-century the influence of the Enlightenment gradually elevated the white perception of children; yet during the same century Wampanoag children experienced a devaluation.  Mayhew’s text should be read within this climate of change. As you read his biographies of children, you may want to ask yourself, does his document confirm or reject traditionally histories of childhood and education in the eighteenth-century?  What precious information does his document add about the lives of Native children in this epoch of change?

When considering the place of children and education on the Vineyard in the seventeenth and eighteen centuries, it is important to emphasize the differences between Wampanoag and Puritan views on education, children, and child rearing. While Puritan education valued literacy, abstract thinking, and by-rote memorization, Wampanoag education focused on verbal performance, contextual and relational thought, and participation. As both colonial records and current storytelling attest, Wampanoags valued and continue to value the oral tradition as a means to impart knowledge about the Wampanoag worldview, cosmology, and cultural traditions. While Puritans felt that children needed to be tamed, Wampanoags had a more lenient view of childhood.  Over the course of the eighteenth-century this was to change as Wampanoags adapted to white education and child-rearing practices and as white colonists were increasingly influenced by Enlightenment views of children as blank slates rather than innate sinners.

 

Views of Children

One of the early points of dispute between Wampanoags and white settlers was the status and treatment of children.  Mayhew and other Puritan writers comment (sometimes disparagingly) on the loving and often indulgent relationship between Wampanoag parents and their children.  In contrast seventeenth-century Puritan children were considered sinful from birth and in dire need of restriction and instruction. "There was… a prevailing theory of the child, a mixed medieval and Calvinist picture of young human nature as corrupt and willful.  Because “in Adam fall, we sinned all"--that famous line from The New-England Primer (1690)--education was aimed at commencing Christian regeneration.  Learning to overcome one's natural depravity was the first step for every child, whose entire life was expected to be a preparation for salvation (Cooke 420). Even so, this preparation was not always viewed as possible for children:  according to first generation minister Thomas Hooker, even children of ten or twelve years “lived the life of a beast” and were not yet rational enough to understand “the mysteries of life and salvation” (Brekus 302, 313 quotes Hooker’s The Unbelievers Preparing for Christ [1638]).   During the early contact period a number of legal cases arose due to the “mistreatment” of Indian children by whites.  However during the eighteenth century the economic instability of island life, combined with the increase in the number of children who were indentured out seems to have decreased the leniency Wampanoag families showed towards children and the care they were given. Corporal punishment increased and Children’s involvement in island religious life decreased, even as children became more acceptable members of non-island Christianity.

 

Puritan Views of Education

During period in which Mayhew writes, the dominant pedagogy in white schools for both English and Algonquian children emphasized logic, catechism, and abstract thinking as a way to tame the “beast” found within all children. Unlike Wampanoag oral educational styles, Puritanism is a culture of the book and highly valued abstract thinking.  Thus, Puritan texts such as the New England Primer emphasize by-rote memorization:  children are instructed to learn the lessons “by heart,” and even very young children were expected to be able to recite the prayers and catechisms the primer contained from memory (Hayes 28-29).  Older children might commit all 224 stanzas of Michael Wigglesworth’s best-selling poem “The Day of Doom,” to memory, and by the time they reached adulthood many knew the entire Bible as well.  The Puritan capacity for memorization was so highly developed that it was common for congregants to memorize an entire sermon during Sunday service and later transcribe it at home for future reference.  While phenomenal, the Puritan recitation of memorized materials differs greatly from the transference of knowledge in cultures, such as Vineyard Wampanoag culture, that emphasized the value of the oral tradition.  Whereas Puritans were expected to commit texts to memory word for word without changes or personal touches, oral storytelling is fluid and adapts the stories related to context, circumstance, and audience. It is in this sense that Wampanoag transmission of knowledge was “performative,” while Puritan recitations were not.  As pniese initiation rituals and powwows show, the participation of the actors shaped the information received and transmitted.  Wampanoags were expected to be active shapers of the education they received.  Although Mayhew seems to have been aware of at least some Algonquian educational practices, his own primer is indebted to Puritan pedagogical values.

 

Wampanoag Views of Education

Wampanoag education was contributed to by many different members of society, including women.(1)  Importantly women educated the young in aspects of Wampanoag culture that Puritans would have considered more properly the domain of men.  Women, for example, might teach their children how to build wigwams, tend fields, and prepare medicines, in addition to teaching children how to make traditional foods such corn stews and roasted fish and shellfish (Silverman 364).  These technical skills were accompanied by stories from the oral tradition, as well as insights on the relationship between humans and the natural world (Fawcett, Mills).  Scholars have suggested that this emphasis on contextual rather than abstract wisdom is typical of cultures that value orality. Notably in second half of the eighteenth-century when Wampanoag children were indentured out to white families, they not only lost their ability to speak the Wôpanâak language but also the opportunity to learn folkways.  During this era, Wampanoags began to rely more upon store-bought English foods and products (Silverman 364-65).  Certain traditions continued to be passed along orally, however, and during the cultural revival of the early twentieth century Gay Head legends were once again being performed at pageants and powwows (Simmons 28).

 

Children and Religious Education

When Wampanoag children were indentured out they were excluded from certain religious educational experiences. Non-Christianized Wampanoag Children gained religious knowledge both from first-hand experience and from performances by spiritual leaders like the Pawwaws (“shamans”) and Pniese (“councilmen”) at sacred and ritual settings, such as the powwows.  These powwows conveyed knowledge that Pawwaws and Pniese had obtained through dreams and visions.  To become a Pniese, young men underwent an initiation that included loss of sleep, fasting, and hallucinogenic beverages.  According to colonist Edward Winslow, this initiation culminated when “by reason of faintness they can scarce stand on their legs, and then must go forth into the cold….they beat their shins with sticks, and cause them to run through bushes, stumps, and brambles, to make them hardy and acceptable to the devil, that in time he may appear to them”  (Simmons 39-42 cites Winslow [1624] 1910). This emphasis on revealed religion and participatory education contrasts sharply with the Puritan insistence upon the exegetical authority and by-rote learning. The “devil” who the Wampanoags hoped to have appear was the manito Hobbomock (Abbomacho, Chepi, Chepian), whose names were related to the Wôpanâak words for death, the dead, and the cold northeast wind (Simmons 39).  Hobbomock often appeared at night in the form of Englishmen, Native Americans, animals, and other objects.  He was associated with the color black (Simmons 39), a fact that undoubtedly put a different spin for Wampanoags on Puritan ministers’ predilection for black frocks.  Throughout Indian Converts, Mayhew relates the importance dreams and visions continued to play in Christianized Wampanoag culture and knowledge of the divine.

Although Puritans did not hold visionary initiation rites to mark the transitions in the life of the young, Puritans did recognize that childhood was composed of stages of development.  According to Great Awakening minister Jonathan Edwards, children went through three stages of development, each of required different educational and ministerial practices (Brekus 302).  These stages were infancy (birth to six or seven), childhood (seven to fourteen or sixteen), and youth (sixteen to twenty-five) (Brekus 302). Importantly most of Mayhew’s examples of conversions of the young occur in slightly older children.  Although many Puritans, including Edwards, believed that at the age of seven children began to grasp abstractions and reason, a century earlier Thomas Hooker had felt children lived like beasts even at age ten or twelve years (Brekus 302, 313 quotes Hooker’s The Unbelievers Preparing for Christ [1638]). Given that the average life expectancy in of English noblemen in the third quarter of the seventeenth-century was less than thirty years (Stannard 38), most of one’s life might be spent in a rather precarious state.  The artifacts and texts in this section help provide a context for the inclusion and presentation of children in Indian Converts as well as the changing views of children in both white and Wampanoag society during this era.

Notes

Items Related to Children and Education in the Archive

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