The importance of institutions in economic growth has come to be more fully appreciated in recent years, and schools are widely acknowledged as among the most fundamental of such institutions. Levels of schooling and literacy have been related theoretically as well as empirically to labor productivity, technological change, and rates of commercial and political participation. It is well understood, moreover, that in addition to promoting growth, education institutions can have a powerful influence on the distribution of their benefits through providing avenues for individuals to realize upward mobility. Despite these reasons why the substantial differences in the prevalence of schooling and literacy across countries may have been important contributors to disparities in their patterns of economic growth, we lack a basic understanding of how these differences first emerged and evolved over time.

The New World is ideal for studying investment in schooling and literacy, because many of the societies arising out of European colonization were sufficiently prosperous by the early nineteenth century to support the broad establishment of institutions of primary education. Only a relatively small number, however, made such investments on a scale sufficient to serve the general population before the twentieth century. At a general level, such contrasts in institutional development across the Americas have often been attributed to differences in wealth, national heritage, culture, or religion, but systematic comparative studies are rare.