The Cultural Mission of the “City on a Hill”

The late Renaissance and Reformation periods saw a new emphasis on the printing of books, on literacy, and on universal access to education. The Puritans, who brought these ideas to the New World, were intent on continuing that emphasis. Many of their leaders had been educated at Oxford or Cambridge. After arriving, they quickly established institutions of higher education, such as Harvard and Yale, to make sure that clergy and laity alike were well-trained with knowledge of the Bible and with a classical liberal arts education.

By the 1670s, all of the New England colonies had legislated compulsory education and literacy for children. With the possible exception of Scotland, these actions were unprecedented among world societies. In the colonial era, America had the highest per capita literacy rate in the world.

The Puritan colonists were simply applying the Protestant idea that average Christians are capable of reading and understanding the Scriptures, and that part of their cultural mission was to facilitate this activity. One scholar of literacy education, Dr. Jennifer Monaghan observed that “the relationship in the Puritan mind between learning to read and piety were virtually inseparable.”* They knew its importance for preserving religious and political freedom, and for the healthy functioning of any civilization.

According to Dr. Monaghan, “Civilization and education went hand in hand in the Puritan view and the fear that people who were making towns in the ‘wildernesses’ could themselves slip back into the wilderness is a recurring theme in Puritan thought.”

Chattanooga emerged from such a wilderness in the early 19^th century. In its infancy, it existed as a frontier outpost of the new American republic. The establishment of the Brainerd Mission – a boarding school campus along Chickamauga Creek – represents one of the area’s earliest attempts to develop a community united around the cause of advancing literacy, vocational instruction, and character training. The mission also broke new ground in America’s early history by overcoming barriers of ethnicity, nationality, and distrust. They sought to connect the area with an historical stream which gives attention to building strong communities around a set of common values.  (More.)

* E. Jennifer Monaghan, Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America. (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005)