The History of North American Education, 15,000 BCE to 1491

Abstract

In an earlier work I provided quantitative evidence for the claim that the recent historiography of American education is characterized by an increased emphasis on the recent past to the detriment of the colonial, early national, and even antebellum eras. In that piece I noted offhandedly that there has been next to no work done on the history of American education before the arrival of Europeans. This article is my attempt to initiate the process of filling this appalling gap. Anyone so foolhardy as to hazard a history of education before European contact in the land that is now the United States, however, must deal at the outset with at least four theoretical and methodological concerns.