Scholasticism in the Colonial Colleges: Education of the Founding Fathers

Walsh examines the history of the curriculum and doctrine of the early American colleges by examining their founding, their statutes, the careers and writings of their first presidents, the accounts of contemporaries, and above all the Latin broadsheets listing theses to be defended by their small graduating classes in public disputations during commencement. Walsh shows that up until the first quarter of the 1800s, these American colleges were united in teaching all undergraduates an ordered curriculum of liberal arts—grammar, logic, rhetoric, mathematics, natural philosophy, philosophical anthropology and psychology, ethics, political philosophy, metaphysics, natural theology, and biblical theology—whose outline and content consisted of Scholastic philosophy, in direct continuity with the tradition of the European universities founded in the Middle Ages.
Students were required to engage in formal, directed classroom disputations every week, offering syllogisms and raising or answering objections, which culminated in public debates at graduation. Students and masters took positions on the disputed questions of Scholastic philosophy and theology as well as those of then-contemporary early modern philosophy and science; for example, a substance is not made from mere accidents; "prime matter is without form"; the act of the intellect is not an act of a material organ; God is simple and immutable; no one may do evil that good may come of it; no civil law is just unless it agrees with the natural law; "the difference between good and evil... set up by God is immutable, because it is founded on the nature of things." Walsh further shows how this education was the common formation of many members of the Continental Congresses, the Constitutional Convention, the early federal Congress, and the colonial and state legislatures as well as preachers, magistrates, governors, and presidents of the United States.