Understanding the Context of The New-England Primer

The Louisiana law requiring public schools to display a version of the Ten Commandments (now blocked from taking effect while a civil-rights lawsuit is settled) also requires the display of a “context statement” about those rules.

That context doesn’t discuss where the Ten Commandments appear in the Jewish Bible, or how the Sermon on the Mount depicts Jesus riffing on them, or how different faiths present different texts.

Instead, that mandated “context statement” is written to justify the posting of the Ten Commandments themselves in public schools. It begins:

The Ten Commandments were a prominent part of American public education for almost three centuries. Around the year 1688, The New England Primer became the first published American textbook and was the equivalent of a first grade reader. The New England Primer was used in public schools throughout the United States for more than one hundred fifty years to teach Americans to read and contained more than forty questions about the Ten Commandments.

For a “context statement,” that’s missing historic context.

It’s true that most editions of The New-England Primer included questions and answers about the Ten Commandments. That’s because that little book reprinted the Westminster Catechism, a set of 107 questions and answers that children were supposed to memorize.

This text was created in 1646–1647, during the ascendancy of the Puritans in England. There had been many forms of Christian teaching for the masses before. The Church of England and Church (Kirk) of Scotland agreed to a synod in Westminster to produce an official catechism for those two faiths.

As a result, the Westminster Catechism held sway in what became Congregationalism, and thus in New England, even as the Anglican Church swung back toward episcopacy. The Presbyterian Church adopted that text for three centuries. Baptists revised that catechism to fit their understanding of salvation, and within decades individual authors published their own versions and expositions, some becoming quite popular.

That catechism did indeed devote “more than forty questions” to the Ten Commandments, or an average of more than four per Commandment. That’s because its authors didn’t think children could really understand the Ten Commandments just by reading, or even memorizing, those rules. That should raise questions about the value of posting simply those Commandments in school.

But even more salient to the Louisiana law is that The New-England Primer was not created for use in public schools. Under colonial New England’s educational systems, families were responsible for teaching children how to read English. They could do so in the home or in private neighhorhood schools, often called “dame schools.” That’s when young children studied The New-England Primer.

The public schools were established to provide boys aged seven or above with more advanced lessons: in Latin and Greek in the grammar schools, in handwriting and business math in the writing schools. A boy had to demonstrate he was already reading English well before being admitted into either of Boston’s Latin Schools, and after that his reading assignments consisted mostly of classical writers.

Thus, the true context of The New-England Primer actually casts doubt on what the Louisiana law is trying to mandate. That book contained the Ten Commandments not because they were universal but because it served the particular religious faiths that had adopted the Westminster Catechism. Those Commandments weren’t displayed on their own because the authors of that catechism thought children wouldn’t understand them correctly that way. And that textbook wasn’t created for American public schools but for home and private education.