BOOK BEVIEWS [ 273 ] who newly acquired this skill!' In short, literacy made only a quantitative, not a qualitative, difference in New England. By comparison, the other American colonies never approached the New England achievement. In Pennsylvania and Virginia "male literacy rose to the two-thirds level by the early eighteenth century, then stagnated there for the rest of the colonial era!' Women remained illiterate in numbers comparable to their New England counterparts, and "the charitable attitudes of literates remained as traditional as those of illiterates!' The literacy profile of colonial America outside New England looks very much like that of Augustan England, while New England resembles the smaller, more intensely Protestant societies of Sweden and Scotland. The latter resemblance is not accidental, for Lockridge argues that the Protestant ideology of individual salvation and the consequent need to read the Bible, augmented by colony-wide school laws, was the major cause of the rapid rise of literacy in New England after 1710. The fear of "the dissolving effects of the wilderness" that Bailyn and others have posited simply played no part. "If the wilderness had a role it was first to offer unusual scope to the Puritan concern for education then initially to delay its full impact on society" by inhibiting local population sufficient to activate the school laws. While my own study of New England education, The School upon a HiU, supports Lockridge's contention that "New England was a Puritan society which achieved its goal of universal male literacy to essentially conservative ends" I would demur when he argues—throughout the text and in an appendix—that "there was no wilderness force powerful enough to reduce or locally to disrupt the orderly transmission of literacy!' This is to ignore the simultaneously menacing and attractive Indian cultures of the New World, capable of closing schools with a mere rumor of hostility, but more powerfully, of seducing Puritans young and old into lives of "savagery" paganism, and unabashed illiteracy. james axtell, Sarah Lawrence College A HISTORY OF COLONIAL EDUCATION, 1607-1776 By Sheldon S. Cohen. (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1974. Pp. vii, 228; intro., epilogue, biblio. essay, timeline, index. $8.95 cloth, $3.95 paper.) THE SCHOOL UPON A HILL: EDUCATION AND SOCIETY IN COLONIAL NEW ENGLAND By James Axtell. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974. Pp. xxi, 298; foreword, prologue, afterword, index. $15.00.) There is an old way to write the history of education in colonial America, and there is a new way. Sheldon Cohen's A History of Colonial Education