Daniel Carrigg GS, in his opinion article, “History matters for Rhode Island education” (Sept. 23), gave a misleading interpretation of colonial Rhode Island’s aversion to public education.
Far from being “laggards,” Roger Williams and the various groups of Baptists, Quakers, Huguenots and a host of other heretics and non-believers who were forcibly driven from Puritan Massachusetts were bold and highly educated idealists. Until the early 1700s, Rhode Island was a wilderness outpost and a territory hotly disputed by Massachusetts, Connecticut and the local warring Indian tribes, so establishing and maintaining schools of any kind was difficult at best. Moreover, they actively resisted public schools because, at the time, education was focused on religious indoctrination.
According to Elisha Reynolds Potter (1811-1882), educator, congressman, judge and historian, the original settlers “viewed everything which they had left behind them with hostility.”
“In Massachusetts, as in most settlements, the clergy, being the only class of leisure, were the depositories of the learning of the infant commonwealth. The clergy also always exercised an active control in their government,” Potter wrote in an address. “Hence, in a great measure, has arisen the feeling against a settled and salaried clergy. …We have lost the influence which such a body of men would always have exercised in favor of education.”
Let us not forget that the College of Rhode Island — later Brown University — was founded in 1763 as a private institution on donations from the citizens of this state. It was the first Ivy League school to accept students from all religious affiliations, a clear break from the past.
Scott Lloyd
Database administrator for Facilities Management
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