School Upon a Hill

The School Upon a Hill is the first attempt to portray a view of education that, in the author’s words, “enables us to see the educational process if not actually through children’s eyes at least from their position in a Lilliputian universe.” Its subject is socialization: the ways in which children in colonial New England were educated for life in society—whether it was the family, the church, or the larger community—and what they were taught that transformed them from cultureless newborns into functioning, obedient, and cooperative members of a distinctive society and culture.