Abstract
Abstract: This article examines the beginnings of educational systems in the colonies, focusing on Francis Daniel Pastorius’s establishment of Pennsylvania’s first sustained formal school. Pastorius, confronted with a starkly different world in a new colony versus settled European life, pursued realism over humanism as one of the colony’s first educators. He helped create Philadelphia’s first school along these lines, emphasizing practical education in the vernacular. He then returned to Germantown to repeat his Philadelphia success. Due to Germantown’s ethnic diversity, he also taught English as a second language, writing a primer designed specifically for such students. Pastorius also mentored and taught students outside of the formal setting, sharing his own humanist learning. One of these mentees, Lloyd Zachary, would in time help begin the College and Academy of Pennsylvania, alongside Benjamin Franklin—thereby establishing the colony’s first school of higher education, now known as the University of Pennsylvania. Pastorius’s early work with Pennsylvania’s first school in the 1690s would bear remarkable fruit by 1749. Pastorius’s decision to follow the more modern realism movement rather than the humanist movement helped further the transformation of education in the thirteen colonies.
Published Version
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