My Deep Dive into the
History of Compulsory Attendance Law
in Massachusetts
Nicky Hardenbergh
1852: An Act concerning the Attendance of Children at School.
Decades ago, after my husband and I decided to homeschool our two young children, I came face to face with compulsory school attendance laws. I quickly learned that Massachusetts, my state, held the distinction of being the first in the nation to enact such a law: the 1852 Act concerning the Attendance of Children at School. This novel statute required a child between the ages of 8 and 14 to attend school unless the child had “been otherwise furnished with the means of education for a like period of time.” While the 1852 statue has been amended in some significant ways, the “otherwise furnished” language remains today.
As I read that statute, I began to wonder what sorts of historical conditions inspired legislators to propose this unprecedented measure? I wondered even more after I came across a sensational account of how the militia in one town needed to be called out in order to march children to school.1 “That can’t be right,” I said to myself, and I resolved to find out more. (In my subsequent deep dive, I found no substantiation whatsoever for the claim about the militia.)
Since I lived in Massachusetts, near Boston, I had access to a treasure trove of resources. and I eagerly set about my research with purpose.2 I discovered that the Attendance Act was passed quietly and remained virtually invisible for decades. Much of what has been written about the Attendance Act rightly describes, instead, an earlier piece of legislation, the Truant Act of 1850. That earlier law, which targeted habitual absentees and vagrants, is well documented in contemporary accounts. Scholars have mistakenly assumed that those contemporary accounts described the 1852 Attendance Act when, in fact, contemporaries were actually referring to the Truant Act and its 1852 amendment. Much historical commentary about the passage of the Attendance Act is, therefore, erroneous.
In the fall of 2014, after about four years of delightful exploration which took me to multiple libraries and collections, I compiled my findings into an article. I did not reach any firm conclusion about what actually was the motivation for the 1852 Attendance Act. Rather, I documented as much as I could about what was known at the time and about the subsequent conflation of the Attendance Act with the Truant Act. My top choice for publication was the scholarly journal published by the History of Education Society. I sent in my submission in the fall of 2014. In 2015, I received a polite rejection, along with three reviewer comments. I was very pleased with the reviewers’ comments, as at least one of them left some room for me to consider rewriting and resubmitting. Life events intervened, however, and I dropped the project. Still, I retained my goal of sharing my findings with those few people interested in this niche topic.
Thus this website. Before commencing, I performed a search with AI to see if perhaps, after the ten year hiatus, my research had been duplicated by someone else. I asked Grok the question of “Why did Massachusetts pass the 1852 compulsory attendance statute?” Grok’s answer showed me that no one had yet published the information contained in my paper. 3
Rereading my article now, after ten years, I find much that could be improved, but, in the interests of getting the substantive information disseminated, I am simply sharing it as written. I also include the reviewers’ comments.
Invisible Landmark: The Beginnings of Compulsory School Attendance in Massachusetts
Making this paper available online is, knock wood, only a first step toward making public other fruits of my research. I am happy to hear from anyone who has questions or comments.
Email me at 1852@nickyhardenbergh.com
- John Taylor Gatto, an educator widely read by homeschoolers at that time, made this claim in an interview:
Our form of compulsory schooling is an invention of the state of Massachusetts around 1850. It was resisted – sometimes with guns – by an estimated eighty per cent of the Massachusetts population, the last outpost in Barnstable on Cape Cod not surrendering its children until the 1880’s when the area was seized by militia and children marched to school under guard.Why Schools Don’t Educate – https://www.naturalchild.org/articles/guest/john_gatto.html
Gatto was an affable approachable guy, and I sent him an inquiry as to his source for that claim. Gatto kindly replied, but said he could not put his hands on his source clipping. Nor, I wryly note, did I keep the email he sent me! His claim that compulsory schooling was resisted by 80% of the population is also spurious; even before the law was passed, Massachusetts provided public schools and most children attended at least for part of the year. Contemporary surveys indicated that most children could read and write. See footnote #31 in my paper. [↩]
- I cannot now reconstruct the timeline of my deep dive, but I can vividly recall the delight of visiting so many libraries and historical societies. My destinations included State House archive, the Columbia Point Massachusetts archives, the Boston Public Library’s newspaper microfilm archives, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Boston Atheneum, Harvard’s Gutman Library special collections, the Social Law Library, the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester the historical societies of Boxford, Danvers, Concord, and Manchester. I loved having particular tasks taking me to so many inviting places. In addition to physical collections, I made good use of internet resources. I marveled at how the data available through full text search gives researchers new and powerful tools. Without such tools, I would never have found tiny newspaper articles relevant to my quest. Additionally, I accumulated about 12 running feet of reference books related to my topic, making good use again of the internet to buy second hand volumes of these titles, many of which were out of print.[↩]
- When asked about the origins of the 1852 Attendance Act, Grok referred to motivations of boosting literacy and keeping children out of mills; both concerns of Horace Mann, but no such concerns can be documented in connection with the 1852 law, as the measure was almost invisible when passed.
Well, back in eighteen fifty-two, Massachusetts passed that first compulsory school law mainly to boost literacy and keep kids out of factories-think long hours in mills for kids as young as eight. The legislature worried illiteracy would tank society, so they mandated at least twelve weeks of school a year for ages eight to fourteen, pushing education as a public duty. Horace Mann, the education reformer, really drove it, wanting to level class divides and make folks better citizens through common schools. It wasn’t all rosy-some say it targeted immigrant families and poor kids to control them better. Grok-2 (xAI, 2024)
When asked about 1850 Truant Act, Grok denied its existence, instead making the same mistake that other commentators have done – thinking newspaper accounts, which referred to the 1852 amendments of the Truant Act, were referring to the 1852 Attendance Act.
I know plenty-it’s the same as that Compulsory School Attendance Act from eighteen fifty-two in Massachusetts. They called it the Truant Law in newspapers back then, since it cracked down on kids skipping school to work or wander. Basically, parents had to send eight-to-fourteens to class for twelve weeks a year, or face fines up to twenty dollars, which was real money then. Enforcement involved truant officers rounding up absentees, often from poor or immigrant homes. No separate Truman or Truant Act title-it’s all one thing, just worded differently over time. Grok-2 (xAI, 2024[↩]