ABSTRACT
A history of the origins of education for the nonelite, the poorer classes in the United States, must place race and settler colonization at the center of its analysis. The Lower South developed some of the United States’ earliest state-funded public schooling initiatives for poorer whites at the same time that it created some of the country’s most stringent exclusions from formal learning for the enslaved, African Americans, and Indigenous people (largely through removal). The exclusions did not inhibit educational development in the region, as historians once concluded. On the contrary, exclusion of colonized populations from status and benefit in colonial society was part of the incitement to expand schooling. Exclusion and inclusion were part of the region’s racialization as a settler colony. They unfolded in the context of a multilayered power struggle. The insurgent, hybridizing learning of Cherokee, Fante, Kongolese, Creek, and even poorer whites often challenged colonial authority. Settler colonial society gradually developed a culture of seeking to shape learning through expanded formal instruction of some people in skills that were simultaneously proscribed for others.
