The School Upon a Hill

The School Upon a Hill is the first attempt to portray a view of education that in the author’s words “enables us to see the educational process if not actually through children’s eyes at least from their position in a Lilliputian universe.” Its subject is socialization: the ways in which children in colonial New England were educated for life in society―whether it was the family the church or the larger community―and what they were taught that transformed them from cultureless newborns into functioning obedient and cooperative members of a distinctive society and culture.