Intellectual Climate in the Colonies in the 17th and 18th Centuries

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In the 17th and 18th century, there were two main influences in the intellectual climate. They were the Enlightenment and the traditional view with a stress on a personal god. The Enlightenment thinkers argued that reason, not just faith, could create progress and further advance knowledge. The other view believed in witchcraft and superstition. Enlightenment thinkers said the world can be explained through logic and that humans don’t need God for every challenge they go through because we have the ability to figure things out on our own. The Enlightenment promoted the newly importance of education, politics and government in the intellectual climate. Colonists had placed a high value on education, even though it was hard to access. Families would teach their children to read and write at home, even though the amount of work in agricultural households limited the time for schooling. A 1647 law in Massachusetts required every town to support a school and many communities failed to obey the law. Even though people refused to obey the law, a network of educational establishments emerged. In other areas, the Quakers operated church schools. Widows or unmarried women would conduct “dame schools” in their homes. White male Americans achieved a high degree of literacy while the literacy rate for women lagged behind that of men in the nineteenth century. The colleges and universities of colonial America promoted the intermingling of the influences of traditional religiosity and the Enlightenment. Most of the colleges were founded by religious groups to train preachers. Almost all of the colleges were influenced by the new scientific approach to knowledge. Despite the religious basis of the colleges, students did have a liberal education, learning logic, ethics, physics, geometry, astronomy, rhetoric, Latin, Hebrew, and Greek. After the Enlightenment, there was an

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