Schooldays in New England, 1650-1900 

Schooldays in New England, 1650–1900 is a three-day conference of nineteen lectures and related field trips on the culture of education in New England and adjacent areas of New York and Canada from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. The conference opens with site visits to local schools and academies Friday afternoon. The lecture program begins Friday evening with talks on the larger objectives of New England’s common schools; it continues Saturday morning with special purpose education for religious minorities and abolitionists and for blind, deaf, and disenfranchised students. Saturday afternoon will address the teaching experience and school architecture. After-dinner talks will cover one-room schoolhouse museums and “pen-pictures” of New England schools and schooling. Sunday morning will address curriculum standards and female education.

The Seminar is designed for educators, historians, collectors, authors, scholars, librarians, groups who preserve historic schoolhouses, and museum curators, as well as students and the general public. A selected and edited transcript of this conference will appear as the 2015 Annual Proceedings of the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife, to be issued about two years after the conference. Past Seminar Proceedings and publications by program speakers will be available at the conference.
The fortieth annual meeting in the Dublin Seminar series, Schooldays in New England, 1650–1900, will take place at Historic Deerfield, Deerfield, Massachusetts. The lecture program will begin at 7:00 p.m. on Friday evening and will continue until approximately 11:30 a.m. on Sunday. The weekend will include optional site visits to local academies and one-room schoolhouses on Friday afternoon, 1 p.m. – 5 p.m. Lunch and dinner will be provided on Saturday, June 20; coffee and doughnuts will be served each morning. Housing is available at group rates at local hotels.      

For a complete schedule, download the brochure.