Forgotten History: The Old Deluder Satan Act

[seamusTX]

In 1647, the government of the Massachusetts Bay Colony passed a law requiring each town with 50 or more households to provide a teacher who would teach all students to read. Towns of 100 or more households had to provide a school that would educate students to the level of being eligible for admission to a university.

This was the beginning of public education in British North America, and a departure from the European practice of requiring parents to pay tuition at privately operated schools.

The law gets its name from the first sentence: "It being one chief project of that old deluder, Satan, to keep men from the knowledge of the Scriptures, ..."

http://www.constitution.org/primarysources/deluder.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

IMHO, one of the greatest contributitons of the Protestant Reformation was promoting universal literacy so that people could read the Bible in their own language. It's also a curious coincidence that Luther and Gutenberg were contemporaries.

- Jim