The School Upon a Hill is the first attempt to portray a view of education that, in the author's words, "enables us to see the educational process if not actually through children's eyes at least from their position in a Lilliputian universe." Its subject is socialization: the ways in which children in colonial New England were educated for life in society--whether it was the family, the church, or the larger community--and what they were taught that transformed them from cultureless newborns into functioning, obedient, and cooperative members of a distinctive society and culture.