[Illustration: FIG. 103. AN URSULINEOrder founded, 1535]
The inspectress, or mistress of the class, shall endeavor, as far as it possibly can be carried out, that all the pupils of the same mistress have each the same book, in order to learn and read therein the same lesson; so that, whilst one is reading hers in an audible and intelligible voice before the mistress, all the others, following her and following this lesson, in their books at the same time, may learn it sooner, more readily, and more perfectly. [14] The Piarists were established in Italy, the first school being opened in Rome, in 1597, by a Spanish priest who had studied at Lerida, Valencia, and Alcalá. Being struck by the lack of educational opportunities for the poor, he opened a free school for their instruction. By 1606 he had 900 pupils in his schools, and by 1613 he had 1200. In 1621 Pope Gregory XV gave his work definite recognition by establishing it a teaching Order for elementary (reading, writing, counting, religion) education, modeled on that of the Jesuits. The Order did some work in Italy and Spain, but its chief services were in border Catholic lands. In 1631 it began work in Moravia, in 1640 in Bohemia, in 1642 in Poland, and after 1648 in Austria and Hungary. The members wore a habit much like that of the Jesuits, had a scheme of studies similar to theirRatio, and were organized by provinces and were under discipline as were the members of the older Order.
The Jansenists, founded by Saint Cyran, at Port Royal, conducted a very interesting and progressive educational experiment, and their schools have become known to history as the "Little Schools of Port Royal." The congregation was a reaction against the work and methods of the Jesuits. It included both elementary and secondary education, but never extended itself, and probably never had more than sixty pupils and teachers. After seventeen years of work it was suppressed through the opposition of the Jesuits, and its members fled to the Netherlands. There they wrote those books which have explained to succeeding generations what they attempted, [15] and which have revealed what a modern type of educational experiment they conducted. The progressive and modern nature of their teaching, in an age of suspicion and intolerance, condemned them to extinction. Yet despite the progressive nature of their instruction, the intense religious atmosphere which they threw about all their work (R. 181) reveals the dominant characteristic of most education for church ends at the time.
THE BROTHERS OF THE CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS. The largest and most influential of the teaching orders established for elementary education was the "Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools," founded by Father La Salle at Rouen, in 1684, and sanctioned by the King and Pope in 1724. As early as 1679 La Salle had begun a school at Rheims, and in 1684 he organized his disciples, prescribed a costume to be worn, and outlined the work of the brotherhood (R. 182). The object was to provide free elementary and religious instruction in the vernacular for the children of the working classes, and to do for elementary education what the Jesuits had done for secondary education La Salle'sConduct of Schools, first published in 1720, was theratio studiorumof his order. His work marks the real beginning of free primary instruction in the vernacular in France. In addition to elementary schools, a few of what we should call part-time continuation schools were organized for children engaged in commerce and industry. Realizing better than the Jesuits the need for well-trained rather than highly educated teachers for little children, and unable to supply members to meet the outside calls for schools, La Salle organized at Rheims, in 1685, what was probably the second normal school for training teachers in the world. [16] Another was organized later at Paris. In addition to a good education of the type of the time and thorough grounding in religion, the student teachers learned to teach in practice schools, under the direction of experienced teachers.
The pupils in La Salle's schools were graded into classes, and the class method of instruction was introduced. [17] The curriculum was unusually rich for a time when teaching methods and textbooks were but poorly developed, the needs for literary education small, and when children could not as yet be spared from work longer than the age of nine or ten. Children learned first to read, write, and spell French, and to do simple composition work in the vernacular. Those who mastered this easily were taught the Latin Psalter in addition. Much prominence was given to writing, the instruction being applied to the writing of bills, notes, receipts, and the like. Much free questioning was allowed in arithmetic and the Catechism, to insure perfect understanding of what was taught. Religious training was made the most prominent feature of the school, as was natural. A half-hour daily was given to the Catechism, mass was said daily, the crucifix was always on the wall, and two or three pupils were always to be found kneeling, telling their beads. The discipline, in contradistinction to the customary practice of the time, was mild, though all punishments were carefully prescribed by rule. [18] The rule of silence in the school was rigidly enjoined, all speech was to be in a low tone of voice, and a code of signals replaced speech for many things.
[Illustration: FIG. 104. A SCHOOL OF LA SALLE AT PARIS, 1688 A visit of James II and the Archbishop of Paris to the School (From a bas- relief on the statue of La Salle, at Rouen)]
Though the Order met with much opposition from both church and civil authorities, it made slow but steady headway. At the time of the death of La Salle, in 1719, thirty-five years after its foundation, the Order had one general normal school, four normal schools for training teachers, three practice schools, thirty-three primary schools, and one continuation school. The Order remained largely French, and at the time of its suppression, in 1792, had schools in 121 communities in France and 6 elsewhere, about 1000 brothers, and approximately 30,000 children in its schools. This was approximately 1 child in every 175 of school age of the population of France at that time. While relatively small in numbers, their schools represented the best attempt to provide elementary education in any Catholic country before well into the nineteenth century. The distribution of their schools throughout France, by 1792, is shown on the map above. In 1803 the Order was reëstablished, by 1838 it had schools in 282 communities, and in 1887, when La Salle was declared a Saint of the Church, it had 1898 communities on four continents, 109 of which were in the United States, and was teaching a total of approximately 300,000 primary children.
[Illustration: FIG. 105. THE BROTHERS OF THE CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS BY 1792Map, showing the locations of their communities]
5.General Results of the Reformation on Education
DESTRUCTION AND CREATION OF SCHOOLS. Any such general overturning of the established institutions and traditions of a thousand years as occurred at the time of the Protestant Revolts, with the accompanying bitter hatreds and religious strife, could not help but result in extensive destruction of established institutions. Monasteries, churches, and schools alike suffered, and it required time to replace them. Even though they had been neglectful of their functions, inadequate in number, and unsuited to the needs of a world fast becoming modern, they had nevertheless answered partially the need of the times. In all the countries where revolts took place these institutions suffered more or less, but in England probably most of all. The old schools which were not destroyed were transformed into Protestant schools, the grammar schools to train scholars and leaders, and the parish schools into Protestant elementary schools to teach reading and the Catechism, but the number of the latter, in all Protestant lands, was very far short of the number needed to carry out the Protestant religious theory. This, as we have seen, proposed to extend the elements of an education to large and entirely new classes of people who never before in the history of the world had had such advantages. Out of the Protestant religious conception that all should be educated the popular elementary school of modern times has been evolved. The evolution, though, was slow, and long periods of time have been required for its accomplishment.
In place of the schools destroyed, or the teachers driven out if no destruction took place, the reformers made an earnest effort to create new schools and supply teachers. This, though, required time, especially as there was as yet in the world no body of vernacular teachers, no institutions in which such could be trained, no theory as to education except the religious, no supply of educated men or women from which to draw, no theory of state support and control, and no source of taxation from which to derive a steady flow of funds. Throughout the long Middle Ages the Church had supplied gratuitous or nearly gratuitous instruction. This it could do, to the limited number whom it taught, from the proceeds of its age-old endowments and educational foundations. In the process of transformation from a Catholic to a Protestant State, and especially during the more than a century of turmoil and religious strife which followed the rupture of the old relations, many of the old endowments were lost or were diverted from their original purposes. As the Protestant reformers were supported generally by the ruling princes, many of these tried to remedy the deficiency by ordering schools established. The landed nobility though, unused to providing education for their villein tenants and serfs, were averse to supplying the deficiency by any form of general taxation. Nor were the rising merchant classes in the cities any more anxious to pay taxes to provide for artisans and servants what had for ages been a gratuity or not furnished at all.
NO REAL DEMAND OF ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS. The creation of a largely new type of schools, and in sufficient numbers to meet the needs of large classes of people who before had never shared in the advantages of education, in consequence proved to be a work of centuries. The century of warfare which followed the reformation movement more or less exhausted all Europe, while the Thirty Years' War which formed its culmination left the German States, where the largest early educational progress had been made, a ruin. In consequence there was for long little money for school support, and religious interest and church tithes had to be depended on almost entirely for the establishment and support of schools. Out of the parish sextons or clerks a supply of vernacular teachers had to be evolved, a system of school organization and supervision worked out and added to the duties of the minister, and the feeling of need for education awakened sufficiently to make people willing to support schools. In consequence what Luther and Calvin declared at the beginning of the sixteenth century to be a necessity for the State and the common right of all, it took until well into the nineteenth century actually to create and make a reality.
The great demand of the time, too, was not so much for the education of the masses, however desirable or even necessary this might be from the standpoint of Protestant religious theory, but for the training of leaders for the new religious and social order which the Revival of Learning, the rise of modern nationalities, and the Reformation movements had brought into being. For this secondary schools for boys, largely Latin in type, were demanded rather than elementary vernacular schools for both sexes. We accordingly find the great creations of the period were secondary schools.
[Illustration: FIG. 106. TENDENCIES IN EDUCATIONAL DEVELOPMENT IN EUROPE, 1500 to 1700]
LINES OF FUTURE DEVELOPMENT ESTABLISHED. Still more, certain lines of future development now became clearly established. The drawing given here will help to make this evident. It will be seen from this that not only was the secondary school still the dominant type, though elementary schools began for the first time to be considered as important also, but that the secondary schools were wholly independent of the elementary schools which now began to be created. The elementary schools were in the vernacular and for the masses; the secondary schools were in the Latin tongue and for the training of the scholarly leaders. Between these two schools, so different in type and in clientèle, there was little in common. This difference was further emphasized with time. The elementary schools later on added subjects of use to the common people, while the secondary schools added subjects of use for scholarly preparation or for university entrance. The secondary schools also frequently provided preparatory schools for their particular classes of children. As a result, all through Europe two school systems—an elementary-school system for the masses, and a secondary-school system for the classes—exist to-day side by side. We in America did not develop such a class school system, though we started that way. This was because the conception of education we finally developed was a product of a new democratic spirit, as will be explained later on.
1. Compare the attention to careful religious instruction in the secondary schools provided by the Lutherans, Calvinists, and English. What analogous instruction do we provide in the American high schools? Is it as thorough or as well done?
2. Compare the scope and ideals of the educational system provided by the Calvinists with the same for the Lutherans and Anglicans.
3. Compare the characteristics of Calvinistic (Huguenot) education, as summarized by Foster, with present-day state educational purposes.
4. Just what kind of a school system did Knox propose (1560) for Scotland?
5. Show how the educational program of the Jesuits reveals Ignatius Loyola as a man of vision.
6. Viewed from the purposes the Order had in mind, was it warranted in neglecting the education of the masses?
7. Does the success of the Order show the importance to society of finding and educating the future leader? Can all men be trained for leadership?
8. What does the statement that the Jesuits were "too practical to make many changes," but had "a keen eye for what was best" in the work of others, indicate as to the nature of school administration and educational progress?
9. Indicate the advantages which the Jesuits had in their teachers and teaching-aim over us of to-day. How could we develop an aim as clearly defined and potent as theirs? Could we select teachers with such care? How?
10. Compare the religious and educational propaganda of the Jesuits with the recent political propaganda of the Germans.
11. What is meant by the statement that the Jesuit teaching method, like that of the modern GermanVolksschule, was a teaching and not a questioning method?
12. Compare present American standards for teacher-training for elementary and secondary teaching with those required by the Jesuits:—(a) as to length of preparation; (b) as to nature and scope of preparation.
13. How do you explain the introduction of sewing into the elementary vernacular Catholic schools for girls, so long before handiwork for boys was thought of?
14. In schools so formally organized as those of La Salle, how do you explain the great freedom allowed in questioning on arithmetic and the Catechism?
15. Why should La Salle's work have been so opposed by both Church and civil authorities? Do you consider that his Order ever made what would be called rapid progress?
16. Why must the education of leaders always precede the education of the masses?
17. Explain how European countries came naturally to have two largely independent school systems—a secondary school for leaders and an elementary school for the masses—whereas we have only one continuous system.
18. Explain why modern state systems of education developed first in the German States, and why England and the Catholic nations of Europe were so long in developing state school systems.
In the accompanyingBook of Readingsthe following selections are reproduced:
175. Woodward: Course of Study at the College of Geneva.176. Synod of Dort: Scheme of Christian Education adopted.177. Kilpatrick: Work of the Dutch in developing Schools.178. Kilpatrick: Character of the Dutch Schools of 1650.179. Statutes: The Scotch School Law of 1646.180. Pachtler: TheRatio Studiorumof the Jesuits.181. Gérard: The Dominant Religious Purpose in the Education of FrenchGirls.182. La Salle: Rules for the "Brothers of the Christian Schools."
1. Was the College at Geneva (175) a true humanistic-revival school?
2. Just what did the Synod of Dort provide for (176) in the matter of schools, school supervision, and ministerial duties?
3. Compare the work of the Dutch (177) and the Lutherans (159-163) in creating schools.
4. Just what type of school is indicated by selection 178?
5. Just what did the Scotch law of 1646 provide for (179)?
6. Characterize the schools provided for by La Salle (182).
7. Compare the religious care at Port Royal (181) with that suggested by Saint Jerome (R. 45).
Baird, C. W.History of the Rise of the Huguenots of France.Baird, C. W.Huguenot Emigration to America.Grant, Jas.History of the Burgh Schools of Scotland.Hughes, Thos.Loyola, and the Educational System of the Jesuits.Kilpatrick, Wm. H.The Dutch Schools of New Netherlands and ColonialNew York.Laurie, S. S.History of Educational Opinion since theRenaissance.Ravelet, A.Blessed J. B. de la Salle.Schwickerath, R.Jesuit Education; its History and Principles in theLight of Modern Educational Problems.Woodward, W. H.Education during the Renaissance.
THE PROTESTANT SETTLEMENT OF AMERICA. Columbus had discovered the new world just twenty-five years before Luther nailed his theses to the church door at Wittenberg, and by the time the northern continent had been roughly explored and was ready for settlement, Europe was in the midst of a century of warfare in a vain attempt to extirpate the Protestant heresy. By the time that the futility of fire and sword as means for religious conversion had finally dawned upon Christian Europe and found expression in the Peace of Westphalia (1648), which closed the terrible Thirty Years' War (p. 301), the first permanent settlements in a number of the American colonies had been made. These settlements, and the beginnings of education in America, are so closely tied up with the Protestant Revolts in Europe that a chapter on the beginnings of American education belongs here as still another phase of the educational results of the Protestant Revolts.
Practically all the early settlers in America came from among the peoples and from those lands which had embraced some form of the Protestant faith, and many of them came to America to found new homes and establish their churches in the wilderness, because here they could enjoy a religious freedom impossible in their old home-lands. This was especially true of the French Huguenots, many of whom, after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes [1] (1685), fled to America and settled along the coast of the Carolinas; the Calvinistic Dutch and Walloons, who settled in and about New Amsterdam; the Scotch and Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, who settled in New Jersey, and later extended along the Allegheny Mountain ridges into all the southern colonies; the English Quakers about Philadelphia, who came under the leadership of William Penn, and a few English Baptists and Methodists in eastern Pennsylvania; the Swedish Lutherans, along the Delaware; the German Lutherans, Moravians, Mennonites, Dunkers, and Reformed-Church Germans, who settled in large numbers in the mountain valleys of Pennsylvania; and the Calvinistic dissenters from the English National Church, known as Puritans, who settled the New England colonies, and who, more than any others, gave direction to the future development of education in the American States. Very many of these early religious groups came to America in little congregations, bringing their ministers with them. Each set up, in the colony in which it settled, what were virtually little religious republics, that through them they might the better perpetuate the religious principles for which they had left the land of their birth. Education of the young for membership in the Church, and the perpetuation of a learned ministry for the congregations, from the first elicited the serious attention of these pioneer settlers.
Englishmen who were adherents of the English national faith (Anglicans) also settled in Virginia and the other southern colonies, and later in New York and New Jersey, while Maryland was founded as the only Catholic colony, in what is now the United States, by a group of persecuted English Catholics who obtained a charter from Charles I, in 1632. These settlements are shown on the map on the following page. As a result of these settlements there was laid, during the early colonial period of American history, the foundation of those type attitudes toward education which subsequently so materially shaped the educational development of the different American States during the early part of our national history.
THE PURITANS IN NEW ENGLAND. Of all those who came to America during this early period, the Calvinistic Puritans who settled the New England colonies contributed most that was valuable to the future educational development of America, and because of this will be considered first.
[Illustration: FIG. 107. MAP SHOWING THE RELIGIOUS SETTLEMENTS IN AMERICA]
The original reformation in England, as was stated in chapters XII and XIII, had been much more nominal than real. The English Bible and the English Prayer-Book had been issued to the churches (R. 170), and the King instead of the Pope had been declared by the Act of Supremacy (R. 153) to be the head of the English National Church. The same priests, though, had continued in the churches under the new régime, and the church service had not greatly changed aside from its transformation from Latin into English. Neither the Church as an organization nor its members experienced any great religious reformation. Not all Englishmen, though, took the change in allegiance so lightly (R. 183), and in consequence there came to be a gradually increasing number who desired a more fundamental reform of the English Church. By 1600 the demand for Church reform had become very insistent, and the question of Church purification (whence the name "Puritans") had become a burning question in England.
[Illustration: FIG. 108. HOMES OF THE PILGRIMS, AND THEIR ROUTE TOAMERICA]
The English Puritans, moreover, were of two classes. One was a moderate but influential "low-church" group within the "high" State Church, possessed of no desire to separate Church and State, but earnestly insistent on a simplification of the Church ceremonial, the elimination of a number of the vestiges of the old Romish-Church ritual, and particularly the introduction of more preaching into the service. The other class constituted a much more radical group, and had become deeply imbued with Calvinistic thinking. This group gradually came into open opposition to any State Church, stood for the local independence of the different churches or congregations, and desired the complete elimination of all vestiges of the Romish faith from the church services. [2] They became known as Independents, or Separatists, and formed the germs of the later Congregational groups of early New England. Both Elizabeth (1558-1603) and James I (1603-25) savagely persecuted this more radical group, and many of their congregations were forced to flee from England to obtain personal safety and to enjoy religious liberty (R. 184). One of these fugitive congregations, from Scrooby, in north-central England, after living for several years at Leyden, in Holland, finally set sail for America, landed on Plymouth Rock, in 1620, and began the settlement of that "bleak and stormy coast." Other congregations soon followed, it having been estimated that twenty thousand English Puritans migrated [3] to the New England wilderness before 1640. These represented a fairly well-to-do type of middle-class Englishmen, practically all of whom had had good educational advantages at home.
Settling along the coast in little groups or congregations, they at once set up a combined civil and religious form of government, modeled in a way after Calvin's City-State at Geneva, and which became known as a New England town. [4] In time the southern portion of the coast of New England was dotted with little self-governing settlements of those who had come to America to obtain for themselves that religious freedom which had been denied them at home. These settlements were loosely bound together in a colony federation, in which each town was represented in a General Court, or legislature. The extent of these settlements by 1660 is shown on the map on the opposite page.
BEGINNINGS OF SCHOOLS IN NEW ENGLAND. Having come to America to secure religious freedom, it was but natural that the perpetuation of their particular faith by means of education should have been one of the first matters to engage their attention, after the building of their homes and the setting up of the civil government (R. 185). Being deeply imbued with Calvinistic ideas as to government and religion, they desired to found here a religious commonwealth, somewhat after the model of Geneva (p. 298), or Scotland (p. 335), or the Dutch provinces (p. 334), the corner- stones of which should be religion and education.
[Illustration: FIG. 109. NEW ENGLAND SETTLEMENTS, 1660]
At first, English precedents were followed. Home instruction, which was quite common in England among the Puritans, was naturally much employed to teach the children to read the Bible and to train them to participate in both the family and the congregational worship. After 1647, town elementary schools under a master, and later the English "dame schools" (chapter XVIII), were established to provide this rudimentary instruction. The English apprentice system was also established (R. 201), and the masters of apprentices gave similar instruction to boys entrusted to their care. The town religious governments, under which all the little congregations organized themselves, much as the little religious parishes had been organized in old England, also began the voluntary establishment of town grammar schools, as a few towns in England had done (R. 143) before the Puritans migrated. The "Latin School" at Boston dates from 1635, and has had a continuous existence since that time. The grammar school at Charlestown dates from 1636, that at Ipswich from the same year, and the school at Salem from 1637. In 1639 Dorchester voted:
that there shall be a rent of 20 lb a year for ever imposed upon Tomsons Island … toward the mayntenance of a schoole in Dorchester. This rent of 20 lb yearly to bee payd to such a schoole-master as shall vndertake to teach english, latine, and other tongues, and also writing. The said schoole-master to bee chosen from tyme to tyme p'r the freemen.
Newbury, in 1639, voted "foure akers of upland" and "sixe akers of salt marsh" to Anthony Somerby "for his encouragement to keepe schoole for one yeare," and later levied a town rate of £24 for a "schoole to be kepte at the meeting house." Cambridge also early established a Latin grammar school "for the training up of Young Schollars, and fitting them [5] forAcademicall Learning" (R. 185).
The support for the town schools thus founded was derived from various sources, such as the levying of tuition fees, the income from town lands or fisheries set aside for the purpose, [6] voluntary contributions from the people of the town, [7] a town tax, or a combination of two or more of these methods. The founding of the "free (grammar) school" at Roxburie, in 1645, is representative (R. 188) of the early methods. There was no uniform plan as yet, in either old or New England.
FOUNDING OF HARVARD COLLEGE. In addition to establishing Latin grammar schools, a college was founded, in 1636, by the General Court (legislature) of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, to perpetuate learning and insure an educated ministry (R. 185) to the churches after "our present ministers shall lie in the dust." This new college, located at Newtowne, was modeled after Emmanuel College at Cambridge, an English Puritan college in which many of the early New England colonists had studied, [8] and in loving memory of which they rechristened Newtowne as Cambridge. In 1639 the college was christened Harvard College, after a graduate of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, by the name of John Harvard, who died in Charlestown, a year after his arrival in the colony, and who left the college his library of two hundred and sixty volumes and half his property, about £850.
The instruction in the new college was a combination of the arts and theological instruction given in a mediaeval university, though at Harvard the President, Master Dunster (R. 185), did all the teaching. For the first fifty years at Harvard this continued to be true, the attendance during that time seldom exceeding twenty. The entrance requirements for the college (R. 186 a) call for the completion of a typical English Latin grammar-school education; the rules and precepts for the government of the college (R. 186 b) reveal the deep religious motive; and the schedule of studies (R. 186 c) and the requirements for degrees (R. 186 d) both show that the instruction was true to the European type. In the charter for the college, granted by the colonial legislature in 1650 (R. 187 a), we find exemptions and conditions which remind one strongly of the older European foundations. A century later Brown College, in Rhode Island, was granted even more extensive exemptions (R. 187 b).
THE FIRST COLONIAL LEGISLATION: THE LAW OF 1642. We thus see manifested early in New England the deep Puritan-Calvinistic zeal for learning as a bulwark of Church and State. We also see the establishment in the wilderness of New England of a typical English educational system—that is, private instruction in reading and religion by the parents in the home and by the masters of apprentices, and later by a town schoolmaster; the Latin grammar school in the larger towns, to prepare boys for the college of the colony; and an English-type college to prepare them for the ministry. As in England, too, all was clearly subordinate to the Church. Still further, as in England also, the system was voluntary, the deep religious interest which had brought the congregations to America being depended upon to insure for all the necessary education and religious training.
It early became evident, though, that these voluntary efforts on the part of the people and the towns would not be sufficient to insure that general education which was required by the Puritan religious theory. Under the hard pioneer conditions, and the suffering which ensued, many parents and masters of apprentices evidently proved neglectful of their educational duties. Accordingly the Church appealed to its servant, the State, as represented in the colonial legislature (General Court) to assist it in compelling parents and masters to observe their religious obligations. The result was the famous Massachusetts Law of 1642 (R. 190), which directed "the chosen men" (Selectmen; Councilmen) of each town to ascertain, from time to time, if the parents and masters were attending to their educational duties; if the children were being trained "in learning and labor and other employments … profitable to the Commonwealth"; and if children were being taught "to read and understand the principles of religion and the capital laws of the country," and empowered them to impose fines on "those who refuse to render such accounts to them when required." In 1645 the General Court further ordered that all youth between ten and sixteen years of age should also receive instruction "in ye exercise of arms, as small guns, halfe pikes, bowes & arrows, &c."
[Illustration: PLATE 9. Two TABLETS ON THE WEST GATEWAY AT HARVARDUNIVERSITYReproducing colonial records relating to the founding of Harvard College.]
The Law of 1642 is remarkable in that, for the first time in the English- speaking world, a legislative body representing the State ordered that all children should be taught to read. The law shows clearly not only the influence of the Reformation theory as to personal salvation and the Calvinistic conception of the connection between learning and religion, but also the influence of the English Poor-Law legislation which had developed rapidly during the half-century immediately preceding the coming of the Puritans to America (R. 173). On the foundations of the English Poor Law of 1601 (R. 174) our New England settlers moulded the first American law relating to education, adding to the principles there established (p. 326) a distinct Calvinistic contribution to our new-world life that, the authorities of the civil town should see that all children were taught "to read and understand the principles of religion and the capital laws of the country." This law the Selectmen, or the courts if they failed to do so, were ordered to enforce, and the courts usually looked after their duties in the matter (R. 192).
The Law of 1647.The Law of 1642, while ordering "the chosen men" of each town to see that the education and training of children was not neglected, and providing for fines on parents and masters who failed to render accounts when required, did not, however, establish schools, or direct the employment of schoolmasters. The provision of education, after the English fashion, was still left with the homes. After a trial of five years, the results of which were not satisfactory, the General Court enacted another law by means of which it has been asserted that "the Puritan government of Massachusetts rendered probably its greatest service to the future."
After recounting in a preamble (R. 191) that it had in the past been "one cheife proiect of y't ould deluder, Satan, to keepe men from the knowledge of y'e Scriptures, … by keeping y'm in an unknowne tongue," so now "by pswading from y'e use of tongues," and "obscuring y'e true sence & meaning of y'e originall" by "false glosses of saint-seeming deceivers," learning was in danger of being "buried in y'e grave of o'r fath'rs in y'e church and comonwealth"; the Court ordered:
1. That every town having fifty householders should at once appoint ateacher of reading and writing, and provide for his wages in suchmanner as the town might determine; and
2. That every town having one hundred householders must provide agrammar school to fit youths for the university, under a penalty of£5 (afterwards increased to £20) for failure to do so.
This law represents a distinct step in advance over the Law of 1642, and for this there are no English precedents. It was not until the latter part of the nineteenth century that England took such a step. The precedents for the compulsory establishment of schools lie rather in the practices of the different German States (p. 318), the actions of the Dutch synods (R. 176) and provinces (p. 335), the Acts of the Scottish parliament of 1633 and 1646 (p. 334; R. 179), and the general Calvinistic principle that education was an important function of a religious State.
PRINCIPLES ESTABLISHED. The State here, acting again as the servant of the Church, enacted a law and fixed a tradition which prevailed and grew in strength and effectiveness after State and Church had parted company. Not only was a school system ordered established—elementary for all towns and children, and secondary for youths in the larger towns—but, for the first time among English-speaking people, there was an assertion of the right of the State to require communities to establish and maintain schools, under penalty if they refused to do so. It can be safely asserted, in the light of later developments, that the two laws of 1642 and 1647 represent the foundations upon which our American state public-school systems have been built. Mr. Martin, the historian of the Massachusetts public-school system, states the fundamental principles which underlay this legislation, as follows: [9]
1. The universal education of youth is essential to the well-being ofthe State.
2. The obligation to furnish this education rests primarily upon theparent.
3. The State has a right to enforce this obligation.
4. The State may fix a standard which shall determine the kind of education, and the minimum amount.
5. Public money, raised by general tax, may be used to provide sucheducation as the State requires. The tax may be general, though theschool attendance is not.
6. Education higher than the rudiments may be supplied by the State.Opportunity must be provided, at public expense, for youths whowish to be fitted for the university.
"It is important to note here," adds Mr. Martin, "that the idea underlying all this legislation is neither paternalistic nor socialistic. The child is to be educated, not to advance his personal interests, but because the State will suffer if he is not educated. The State does not provide schools to relieve the parent, nor because it can educate better than the parent can, but because it can thereby better enforce the obligation which it imposes." To prevent a return to the former state of religious ignorance it was important that education be provided. To assure this the colonial legislature enacted a law requiring the maintenance and support of schools by the towns. This law became the corner-stone of our American state school systems.
Influence on other New England colonies. Connecticut Colony, in its Law of 1650 establishing a school system, combined the spirit of the Massachusetts Law of 1642, though stated in different words (R. 193), and the Law of 1647, stated word for word. New Haven Colony, in 1655, ordered that children and apprentices should be taught to read, as had been done in Massachusetts, in 1642, but on the union of New Haven and Connecticut Colonies, in 1665, the Connecticut Code became the law for the united colonies. In 1702 a college was founded (Yale) and finally located at New Haven, to offer preparation for the ministry in the Connecticut colony, as had been done earlier in Massachusetts, and Latin grammar schools were founded in the Connecticut towns to prepare for the new college, as also had been done earlier in Massachusetts. The rules and regulations for the grammar school at New Haven (R. 189) reveal the purpose and describe the instruction provided in one of the earliest and best of these.
[Illustration: FIG. 111. WHERE YALE COLLEGE WAS FOUNDED]
Plymouth Colony, in 1658 and again in 1663, proposed to the towns that they "sett vp" a schoolmaster "to traine vp children to reading and writing" (R. 194 a). In 1672 the towns were asked to aid Harvard College by gifts (R. 194 b). In 1673-74 the income from the Cape Cod fisheries was set aside for the support of a (grammar) school (R. 194 c). Finally, in 1677, all towns having over fifty families and maintaining a grammar school were ordered aided from the fishery proceeds (R. 194 d).
The Massachusetts laws also applied to Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont, as these were then a part of Massachusetts Colony. After New Hampshire separated, in 1680, the Massachusetts Law of 1647 was virtually readopted in 1719-21. In Maine and Vermont there were so few settlers, until near the beginning of our national life, that the influence of the Massachusetts legislation on these States was negligible until a later period.
Only in Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, of all the New England colonies, did the Massachusetts legislation fail to exert a deep influence. Settled as these two had been by refugees from New England, and organized on a basis of hospitality to all who suffered from religious oppression elsewhere, the religious stimulus to the founding of schools naturally was lacking. As the religious basis for education was as yet the only basis, the first development of schools in Rhode Island awaited the humanitarian and economic influences which did not become operative until early in the nineteenth century.
Outside of the New England colonies, the appeal to the State as the servant of the Church was seldom made during the early colonial period, the churches handling the educational problem in their own way. As a result the beginnings of State oversight and control were left to New England. In the central colonies a series of parochial-school systems came to prevail, while in Episcopalian Virginia and the other colonies to the south the no-business-of-the-State attitude assumed toward education by the mother country was copied.
THE CHURCH SCHOOLS OF NEW YORK. New Netherland, as New York Colony was called before the English occupation, was settled by the Dutch West India Company, and some dozen villages about New York and up the Hudson had been founded by the time it passed to the control of the English, in 1664. In these the Dutch established typical home-land public parochial schools, under the control of the Reformed Dutch Church. The schoolmaster was usually the reader and precentor in the church as well (R. 195), and often acted, as in Holland, as sexton besides. Girls attended on equal terms with boys, but sat apart and recited in separate classes. The instruction consisted of reading and writing Dutch, sometimes a little arithmetic, the Dutch Catechism, the reading of a few religious books, and certain prayers. The rules (1661) for a schoolmaster in New Amsterdam (R. 196), and the contract with a Dutch schoolmaster in Flatbush (R. 195), dating from 1682, reveal the type of schools and school conditions provided. All except the children of the poor paid fees to the schoolmaster. [10] He was licensed by the Dutch church authorities. As the Dutch had not come to America because of persecution, and were in no way out of sympathy with religious conditions in the home-land, the schools they developed here were typical of the Dutch European parochial schools of the time (R. 178). Atrivial(Latin) school was also established in New York, in 1652.
After the English occupation the English principle of private and church control of education, with schooling on a tuition or a charitable basis, came to prevail, and this continued up to the beginning of our national period. [11] Of the English colonial schools of New York Draper has written: [12]
All the English schools in the province from 1700 down to the time of the Declaration of Independence were maintained by a great religious society organized under the auspices of the Church of England—and, of course, with the favor of the government—called "The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts." The law governing this Society provided that no teacher should be employed until he had proved "his affection for the present government" and his "conformity to the doctrine and discipline of the Church of England." Schools maintained under such auspices were in no sense free schools. Indeed, humiliating as it is, no student of history can fail to discern the fact that the government of Great Britain, during its supremacy in this territory, did nothing to facilitate the extension or promote the efficiency of free elementary schools among the people.
THE PAROCHIAL SCHOOLS OF PENNSYLVANIA. Pennsylvania was settled by Quakers, Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, German Lutherans, Moravians, Mennonites, and members of the German Reformed Church, all of whom came to America to secure greater religious liberty and had been attracted to this colony by the freedom of religious worship which Penn had provided for there. All these were Protestant sects, all believed in the necessity of learning to read the Bible as a means to personal salvation, and all made efforts looking toward the establishment of schools as a part of their church organization. Unlike New England, though, no sect was in a majority; church control for each denomination was considered as most satisfactory; and no appeal was made to the State to have it assist the churches in the enforcement of their religious purposes. The clergymen were usually the teachers in the parochial schools established, [13] while private pay schools were opened in the villages and towns. These were taught in English, German, or the Moravian tongue (Czech), according to the original language of the different immigrants. The Quakers seem to have taken particular interest in schools (R. 199), a Quaker school in Philadelphia (R. 198) having been established the year the city was founded. Girls were educated as well as boys, and the emphasis was placed on reading, writing, counting, and religion, rather than upon any higher form of training.
[Illustration: FIG. 112. AN OLD QUAKER MEETING-HOUSE AND SCHOOL ATLAMPETER, PENNSYLVANIA(From an old drawing)]
The result was the development in this colony of a policy of depending on church and private effort, and the provision of education, aside from certain rudimentary and religious instruction, was left largely for those who could afford to pay for the privilege. Charitable education was extended to but a few, for a short time, while, under the freedom allowed, many communities made but indifferent provisions or suffered their schools to lapse. Under the primitive conditions of the time the interest even in religious education often declined almost to the vanishing point. So lax in the matter of providing schooling had many communities become that the second Provincial Assembly, sitting in Philadelphia, in 1683, passed an ordinance requiring (R. 197) that all persons having children must cause them to be taught to read and write, so that they might be able to read the Scriptures by the time they were twelve years old, and also that all children be taught some useful trade. A fine of £5 was to be assessed for failure to comply with the law. So much in advance of English ideas as to what was fitting and proper was this compulsory law that it was vetoed by William and Mary, when submitted to their majesties for approval. Ten years later it was reënacted by the Governor and Assembly of the colony, but proved so difficult of enforcement that it was soon dropped, and the chance of starting education in Pennsylvania somewhat after the New England model was lost. The colony now settled down to a policy of non state action, and this in time became so firmly established that the do- as-you-please idea persisted in this State up to the establishment of the first free state school system, in 1834.
MIXED CONDITIONS IN NEW JERSEY. In New Jersey, situated as it was near the center of the different colonies, the early development of education there was the product of a number of different influences. The Dutch crossed from New Amsterdam, the English came from Connecticut and later from New York, Scotch and Scotch-Irish Presbyterians came from the mother country, Swedish Lutherans settled along the Delaware, and Quakers and German Lutherans came over from Pennsylvania. The educational practice of the colony or land from which each group of settlers came was reproduced in the colony. After the English succeeded the Dutch in New Amsterdam (1664), English methods and practice in education gradually came into control throughout most of New Jersey, and as a result here, as in New York, but little was accomplished in providing schools for other than a select few until well after the beginning of the nineteenth century. Neither New Jersey, New York, nor Pennsylvania may be said to have developed any colonial educational policy aside from that of allowing private and parochial effort to provide such schools as seemed desirable.
VIRGINIA AND THE SOUTHERN TYPE. Almost all the conditions attending the settlement of Virginia were in contrast to those of the New England colonies. The early settlers were from the same class of English yeomen and country squires, but with the important difference that whereas the New England settlers were Dissenters from the Church of England and had come to America to obtain freedom in religious worship, the settlers in Virginia were adherents of the National Church and had come to America for gain. The marked differences in climate and possible crops led to the large plantation type of settlement, instead of the compact little New England town; the introduction of large numbers of "indentured white servants," and later negro slaves, led to the development of classes in society instead of to the New England type of democracy; and the lack of a strong religious motive for education naturally led to the adoption of the customary English practices instead of to the development of colonial schools. The tutor in the home, education in small private pay schools, or education in the mother country were the prevailing methods adopted among the well-to-do planters, while the poorer classes were left with only such advantages as apprenticeship training or charity schools might provide. Throughout the entire colonial period Virginia remained most like the mother country in spirit and practice, and stands among the colonies as the clearest example of the English attitude toward school support and control. As in the mother country, education was considered to be no business of the State. Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and the Carolinas followed the English attitude, much after the fashion of Virginia.
Practically all the Virginia colonial legislation relating to education refers either to William and Mary College (founded in 1693), or to the education of orphans and the children of the poor. Both these interests, as we have previously seen, were typically English. All the seventeenth- century legislation relating to education is based on the English Poor-Law legislation, [14] previously described (p. 325), and included the compulsory apprenticeship of the children of the poor, training in a trade, the requirement that the public authorities must provide opportunities for this type of education, and the use of both local and colony funds for the purpose (R. 200 a), all, as the Statutes state, "according to the aforesaid laudable custom in the Kingdom of England." It was not until 1705 that Virginia reached the point, reached by Massachusetts in 1642, of requiring that "the master of the [apprenticed] orphan shall be obliged to teach him to read and write." In all the Anglican colonies the apprenticing of the children of the poor (see R. 200 b for some interesting North Carolina records) was a characteristic feature. During the entire colonial period the indifference of the mother country to general education was steadily reflected in Virginia and in the colonies which were essentially Anglican in religion, and followed the English example.
TYPE PLANS REPRESENTED BY 1750. The seventeenth century thus witnessed the transplanting of European ideas as to government, religion, and education to the new American colonies, and by the eighteenth century we find three clearly marked types of educational practice or conception as to educational responsibility established on American soil.
The first was the strong Calvinistic conception of a religious State, supporting a system of common vernacular schools, higher Latin schools, and a college, for both religious and civic ends. This type dominated New England, and is best represented by Massachusetts. From New England this attitude was carried westward by the migrations of New England people, and deeply influenced the educational development of all States to which the New Englander went in any large numbers. This was the educational contribution of Calvinism to America. [15] Out of it our state school systems of to-day, by the separation of Church and State, have been evolved.
The second was the parochial-school conception of the Dutch, Moravians, Mennonites, German Lutherans, German Reformed Church, Quakers, Presbyterians, Baptists, and Catholics. This type is best represented by Protestant Pennsylvania and Catholic Maryland. It stood for church control of all educational efforts, resented state interference, was dominated only by church purposes, and in time came to be a serious obstacle in the way of rational state school organization and control.
The third type, into which the second type tended to fuse, conceived of public education, aside from collegiate education, as intended chiefly for orphans and the children of the poor, and as a charity which the State was under little or no obligation to assist in supporting. All children of the upper and middle classes in society attended private or church schools, or were taught by tutors in their homes, and for such instruction paid a proper tuition fee. Paupers and orphans, in limited numbers and for a limited time, might be provided with some form of useful education at the expense of either Church or State. This type is best represented by Anglican Virginia, which typified well thelaissez-fairepolicy which dominated England from the time of the Protestant Reformation until the latter half of the nineteenth century.
These three types of attitude toward the provision of education became fixed American types, and each deeply influenced subsequent American educational development, as we shall point out in a later chapter.
DOMINANCE OF THE RELIGIOUS MOTIVE. The seventeenth century was essentially a period of the transplanting, almost unchanged in form, of the characteristic European institutions, manners, religious attitudes, and forms of government to American shores. Each sect or nationality on arriving set up in the new land the characteristic forms of church and school and social observances known in the old home-land. Dutch, Germans, English, Scotch, Calvinists, Lutherans, Anglicans, Presbyterians— reproduced in the American colonies the main type of schools existing at the time of their migration in the mother land from which they came. They were also dominated by the same deep religious purpose.
The dominance of this religious purpose in all instruction is well illustrated by the great beginning-school book of the time,The New England Primer. A digest of the contents of this, with a few pages reproduced, is given in R. 202. This book, from which all children learned to read, was used by Dissenters and Lutherans alike in the American colonies. This book Ford well characterizes in the following words:
As one glances over what may truly be called "The Little Bible of New England," and reads its stern lessons, the Puritan mood is caught with absolute faithfulness. Here was no easy road to knowledge and salvation; but with prose as bare of beauty as the whitewash of their churches, with poetry as rough and stern as their storm-torn coast, with pictures as crude and unfinished as their own glacial-smoothed boulders, between stiff oak covers which symbolized the contents, the children were tutored, until, from being unregenerate, and as Jonathan Edwards said, "young vipers, and infinitely more hateful than vipers" to God, they attained that happy state when, as expressed by Judge Sewell's child, they were afraid that they "should goe to hell," and were "stirred up dreadfully to seek God." God was made sterner and more cruel than any living judge, that all might be brought to realize how slight a chance even the least erring had of escaping eternal damnation.
One learned to read chiefly that one might be able to read the Catechism and the Bible, and to know the will of the Heavenly Father. There was scarcely any other purpose in the maintenance of elementary schools. In the grammar schools and the colleges students were "instructed to consider well the main end of life and studies." These institutions existed mainly to insure a supply of learned ministers for service in Church and State. Such studies as history, geography, science, music, drawing, secular literature, and organized play were unknown. Children were constantly surrounded, week days and Sundays, by the somber Calvinistic religious atmosphere in New England, [16] and by the careful religious oversight of the pastors and elders in the colonies where the parochial-school system was the ruling plan for education. Schoolmasters were required to "catechise their scholars in the principles of the Christian religion," and it was made "a chief part of the schoolmaster's religious care to commend his scholars and his labors amongst them unto God by prayer morning and evening, taking care that his scholars do reverently attend during the same." Religious matter constituted the only reading matter, outside the instruction in Latin in the grammar schools. The Catechism was taught, and the Bible was read and expounded. Church attendance was required, and grammar-school pupils were obliged to report each week on the Sunday sermon. This insistence on the religious element was more prominent in Calvinistic New England than in the colonies to the south, but everywhere the religious purpose was dominant. The church parochial and charity schools were essentially schools for instilling the church practices and beliefs of the church maintaining them. This state of affairs continued until well toward the beginning of the nineteenth century.
1. Compare the conservative and radical groups in the English purification movement with the conservative and radical groups, as typified by Erasmus and Luther, at the time of the Reformation.
2. Show how, for each group, the schools established were merely homeland foreign-type religious schools, with nothing distinctively American about them.
3. Show why such copying of home-land types, even to the Latin grammar school, was perfectly natural.
4. The provision of the Law of 1642 requiring instruction in "the capital laws of the country" was new. How do you explain this addition to mother- land practices?
5. Show why the Law of 1642 was Calvinistic rather than Anglican in its origin.
6. Explain the meaning of the preamble to the Law of 1647.
7. Show how the Law of 1647 must go back for precedents to German, Dutch, and Scotch sources.
8. Apply the six principles stated by Mr. Martin, as embodied in the legislation of 1647, to modern state school practice, and show how we have adopted each in our laws.
9. Show also that the Law of 1647, as well as modern state school laws, is neither paternalistic nor socialistic in essential purpose.
10. Show that, though the mixture of religious sects in Pennsylvania made colonial legislation difficult, still it would have been possible to have enforced the Massachusetts Law of 1642, or the Pennsylvania laws of 1683 or 1693, in the colony. How do you explain the opposition and failure to do so?
11. Show how the charity schools for the poor, and church missionary- society schools, were the natural outcome of the English attitude toward elementary education.
12. Which of the three type plans in the American colonies by 1750 most influenced educational development in your State?
13. State the important contribution of Calvinism to our new-world life.
14. Explain the indifference of the Anglican Church to general education during the whole of our colonial period.
15. Explain what is meant by "The Puritan Church applied to its servant, the State," etc.
In the accompanyingBook of Readingsthe following selections are reproduced:
183. Nichols: The Puritan Attitude.184. Gov. Bradford: The Puritans leave England.185. First Fruits: The Founding of Harvard College.186. First Fruits: The First Rules for Harvard College.(a) Entrance Requirements.(b) Rules and Precepts.(c) Time and Order of Studies.(d) Requirements for Degrees.187. College Charters: Extracts from, showing Privileges.(a) Harvard College, 1650.(b) Brown College, 1764.188. Dillaway: Founding of the Free School at Roxburie.189. Baird: Rules and Regulations for Hopkins Grammar School.190. Statutes: The Massachusetts Law of 1642.191. Statutes: The Massachusetts Law of 1647.192. Court Records: Presentment of Topsfield for Violating the Law of1642.193. Statutes: The Connecticut Law of 1650.194. Statutes: Plymouth Colony Legislation.195. Flatbush: Contract with a Dutch Schoolmaster.196. New Amsterdam: Rules for a Schoolmaster in.197. Statutes: The Pennsylvania. Law of 1683.198. Minutes of Council: The First School in Philadelphia.199. Murray: Early Quaker Injunctions regarding Schools.200. Statutes: Apprenticeship Laws in the Southern Colonies.(a) Virginia Statutes.(b) North Carolina Court Records.201. Stiles: A New England Indenture of Apprenticeship.202. The New England Primer: Description and Digest.
1. What does the selection on The Puritan Attitude (183) reveal as to the extent and depth of the Reformation in England?
2. Characterize the feelings and emotions and desires of the Puritans, as expressed in the extract (184) from Governor Bradford's narrative.
3. Characterize the spirit behind the founding of Harvard College, as expressed in the extract from New England's First Fruits (185).
4. What was the nature and purpose of the Harvard College instruction as shown by the selection 186 a-d?
5. Point out the similarity between the exemptions granted to Harvard College by the Legislature of the colony (187 a) and those granted to mediaeval universities (103-105). Compare the privileges granted Brown (187 b) and those contained in 104.
6. Compare the founding of the Free School at Roxbury (188) with the founding of an English Grammar School (141-43).
7. What does the distribution of scholars at Roxbury (188) show as to the character of the school?
8. State the essentials of the Massachusetts Law of 1642 (190).
9. Compare the Massachusetts Law of 1642 and the English Poor-Law of 1601 (190 with 174) as to fundamental principles involved in each.
10. What does the court citation of Topsfield (192) show?
11. What new principle is added (191) by the Law of 1647, and what does this new law indicate as to needs in the colony for classical learning?
12. Show how the Connecticut Law of 1650 (193) was based on the Massachusetts Law (190) of 1642.
13. What does the Plymouth Colony appeal for Harvard College (194 b) indicate as to community of ideas in early New England?
14. What type of school was it intended to endow from the Cape Cod fisheries (194 c)?
15. What is the difference between the Plymouth requirement as to grammar schools (194 d) and the Massachusetts requirement (191)?
16. Compare the rules for the New Haven Grammar School (189) with those for Colet's London School (138 a-c).
17. Characterize the early Dutch schools as shown by the rules for the schoolmaster (196) and the Flatbush contract (195).
18. Just what type of education did the Quakers mean to provide for, as shown in the extract from their Rules of Discipline (199)?
19. What kind of a school was the first one established in Philadelphia (198)?
20. Compare the proposed Pennsylvania Law of 1683 (197) and the Massachusetts Law of 1642 (190).
21. What conception of education is revealed by the Virginia apprenticeship laws (200 a, 1-3) and the North Carolina court records (200 b, 1-3)?
22. Characterize the New England Indenture of Apprenticeship given in 201.
Boone, R. G.Education in the United States.Brown, S. W.The Secularization of American Education.Cheyney, Edw. P.European Background of American Education.Dexter, E.G.A History of Education in the United States.* Eggleston, Edw.The Transit of Civilization.Fisk, C. R. "The English Parish and Education at the Beginning ofAmerican Civilization"; inSchool Review, vol. 23, pp. 433-49.(September, 1915.)* Ford, P. L.The New England Primer.* Heatwole, C. J.A History of Education in Virginia.Jackson, G. L.The Development of School Support in ColonialMassachusetts.* Kilpatrick, Wm. H.The Dutch Schools of New Netherlands and ColonialNew York.* Knight, E. W.Public School Education in North Carolina.* Martin, Geo. H.Evolution of the Massachusetts Public SchoolSystem.Seybolt, R. F.Apprenticeship and Apprentice Education in ColonialNew York and New England.* Small, W. H. "The New England Grammar School"; inSchool Review,vol. 10, pp. 513-31. (September, 1902.)Small, W. H.Early New England Schools.