CHAPTER XVI.

PUBLIC SCHOOLS DURING THE COLONIAL AND REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD IN THE UNITED STATES.

By Rev. A. D. MAYO, LL. D.

INTRODUCTION.

THE AMERICAN COMMON SCHOOL.

The author of this essay does not propose to write a detailed history of the American common school. This important work has been done, with various degrees of success, in a few valuable essays, including the complete and increasing number of volumes setting forth the local history of popular education in the several States of the Union. But the great storehouse of material for the final history of the American common school is still found in the 31 volumes of the American Journal of Education, edited by the first United States Commissioner of Education, Hon. Henry Barnard, LL.D., from 1855 to 1881; but now first really made accessible to the unprofessional reader through a complete analytical index, prepared under the direction of Hon. William T. Harris, the fourth United States Commissioner of Education. Here, as nowhere else, will be found the most elaborate and reliable record of the entire progress of universal education in the United States. Here also, prepared by the most competent authorities, are the earliest intelligible accounts given to our people of the educational systems of Europe. No other man of the illustrious company of American educators has prepared an educational chronicle of equal importance. Dr. Barnard was himself a conspicuous worker in the revolution of sixty years ago which inaugurated, in our country, the ideas and methods of what in popular phrase is known as "the new education." This venerable man has been spared to receive the tribute of the most celebrated educational authorities of all civilized countries to the supreme importance of his remarkable compilation and to rejoice in the final triumph of the American common school by its establishment in every State and Territory of the Republic. Once for all, the author of this treatise disclaims any pretension to originality in the investigation or arrangement of the innuraerable details of this department of the national history. Without special reference or acknowledgment, he has drawn from the overabundance of material what suits his special purpose in telling the story of the American common school. It will be our aim in the present essay, while briefly rehearsing this "great and wondrous story," to set before the 10,000,000 American youth of sufficient age to comprehend it, before the teachers of this" grand army" of the national reserve, and before the school authorities of every degree, and the educational public in general, some considerations of absolute importance to the welfare of the Republic. (1) We desire to impress upon this portion of our people the fact that the American common school, in its present state of development, is the most original and vital product of the national life.

MAT: 24:1 Fomentar jome. emanen and Shan.sh formations of Loth Jana Ina Grozora Goragua, Proten and Iman of Panas-H stoties un iebrews of any white ste vek out at "rat on the lines of the pational training to which the, had been ace vatomed in tue 6,4d Nor.d.- Azd, it a ...of Tri:04. The nost verustent and formidable resistance to the present American MULORILOR Srstem as come from the Europe in notions and Labits of large boilies CAT HER KITIL®« ‹ Í several nationalities. From the beginning the American syseir ideation has been in a state of perpetual conflict with the convieach of these numerous classes of people. Until the last fifty The different religions bodies were the actual leaders of every According to the convictions of the influential majority ‚»», «iucation has been in the past the mental and religious 9gan into a zealous and faithful discipleship of one religious - masan the tbsolute separation of church and state, though :;a e nation and of all the States, and everywhere

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enacted into the legal code, has been delayed for a long period and resisted here as elsewhere.

So when the American common-school system of to-day is assailed as "a new departure," even a "perversion" of the original intent of its friends in colonial days, or a radical innovation upon the country district school of half a century ago, it may be replied that, like the growth of American Government and society, it has been a gradual evolution from the most profound convictions and practical experience of the American people. To no exclusive class or colony can we look for the complete ideal or the thorough working out of even the essential principles of the common school.

Education, in our American sense, is the training of a whole people for a worthy and effective manhood and womanhood as the soul of good citizenship. By its very nature it must be the most influential motive power of our civilization. Like all formative agencies, it must be of slow growth and often of imperfect and capricious manifestation. Religious creeds and polities may be modified, forms of government changed, fashions of society-even the habits of home life-upset, the industrial methods of Christendom revolutionized, new types of literary and artistic culture created, before this profound, slow-moving, conservative central power, the education of the coming generations, is essentially transformed. Every attempt to lift a people above the average training of the younger third of its population by the inspiration of a revolutionary upheaval or the semiinsanity of a popular social, industrial, or political revolt, will inevitably find its level on the common ground of the organized educational life.

Nowhere has the American people so plainly and persistently announced its ideal of republican society as in the people's common school.

For centuries before the colonization of Virginia, New York, and Massachusetts many of the elements of the present American system of popular education had been incorporated in the European school life of the period. Free schools had been supported by private beneficence, churches, corporate cities, industrial guilds, and religious orders in almost every nation in Europe. Some of the most valuable ideas and methods of mental and moral instruction and discipline were elaborated by the Jesuits, who for two centuries were the virtual educators of all classes on two continents. Like all valuable new departures in human affairs, the American common school at first included much of the spirit and largely adopted the prevailing methods of organization, administration, and instruction bequeathed to it from abroad.

But the one essential element that appeared at first in the New England colonies and has steadily grown in every American State and community to be its dominant characteristic is the idea that the whole American people claim the absolute right to use the accumulated public wealth to educate the entire body of children and youth into that type of mental, moral, and practical manhood and womanhood that culminates in good American citizenship.

To-day the plain American citizen in one respect is the most powerful sovereign on earth, for by casting his ballot he may elect a President of the United States, who for four years is, in more than one respect, the most powerful ruler among the nations, and nowhere is the opportunity and right of woman to make the man, who outwardly makes the Government, so acknowledged and exercised as in this Republic. The training of this American type of "sovereign citizen," the man who at once governs and obeys, is in no essential respects a subordinate matter. Not only the best discipline of the mind, but the schooling of the character and the union of both in the discipline of the executive faculties, is essential to the every-day life of the good citizen. Nothing less than this has been the ideal of the true educational class of the American people from the earliest day.

This lofty ideal the training of a whole people, by the whole people, for the earthly position demanding the most complete manhood and womanhoo assumed in all just criticism of the past and present educational life of

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Here comes in the golden rule, announced in Italy, two generations ago to Washington Allston by Samuel Taylor Coleridge: "No man is competent to criticise the defects of a book or a work of art who does not comprehend its merits.”

The country is now excited and the popular press almost monopolized by the wholesale criticism of experts in education, who seem never to have grasped this fundamental idea of the American common school or observed the steadfast, unrelenting way in which the American people, in every State, have wrought toward it and stood by it when obtained as the citadel of the nation's life.

So, when we are reminded that the voice of the people in education, as elsewhere, may not be the voice of God, the American people reply: We rely on every good agency of human society, working in the atmosphere of freedom, to generate and preserve that popular wisdom, virtue, and common sense which is the soul of all progressive civilization. Nowhere on earth and at no period of human history have the home, the church, social, industrial, and public life, and private schools of every grade, been so free to put forth their uttermost energy; nowhere is a wise, righteous, and efficient man or woman at the present hour so powerful for good as in this Republic. But at every crisis not only the most valuable but the only possible agency for training a new generation for sovereign citizenship in a Republic like ours is a common school, organized, governed, administered through representatives legally chosen by a flexible majority, which is for the time the agent of the popular will and is supported by the whole people. Though for the time this system of education shares the defects and can not rise above the high average of its creator and administrator, still it is the best and most helpful arrangement under the circumstances. For this is the theory on which the whole structure of American society stands, and its displacement as the chief corner stone of the common schoolhouse would undermine the foundations of the Republic.

Nothing is easier than for an expert, influenced by the superficial order and smooth working of a system of national education, devised and administered by a despotic beurocracy, to declare the American common school in its present condition unscientific, illogical, a realm of incapacity and disorder, and bring forth a recipe for its reconstruction. But this "short method" of dealing with the imperfections of a people toiling in the midst of the grand experiment of training a generation for sovereign citizenship fails completely of its purpose, inasmuch as it does not comprehend the characteristic method of our American republican civilization.

What to this expert appears the caprice of chance or the sign of decay is like the disorder of a great metropolitan city square in which a noble public building is being erected with its swarming multitude of workmen, its piles of débris, its litter of precious and common materials, its awkward, half-finished portions, giving no fit suggestion of the entire plan. These defects and crudities in the people's common school are more evident to its intelligent and responsible friends, who have "borne the burden and heat" of long years of public administration, than to the expert. But the best instructed of these practical schoolmen understand what the critic can not- the immense difficulty of doing anything well by the slow and tortuous method of educating public opinion and directing public administration.

They have learned to bear and forbear with much that at present is unsatisfactory and apparently pernicious; to be content to take in hand what comes first; not to expect that a work so great can be carried on with all of its departments abreast; to await the right time to achieve the least good result; to watch the happy moments and loftiest inspiration of the people for the accomplishment of the noblest ends, and often to be gratified with some genuine advance, though minute in comparison with the completed design.

It is one thing to elaborate a scheme of national education in a bureau of "great educators," itself the creature of a sovereign who at best represents a fixed order of society, which can only by slow advances avoid the chronic peril of revolution, and quite another for the foremost educational public of an American State to educate the political "dissolving view" we call a legislature into a reasonable and conscien

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tious apprehension of educational affairs. Much more difficult is it to save a good educational bill on its passage through such a body from the mischievous amendments and annexes of its ignorant, pretentious, or narrow-minded friends or from the insidious and untiring scheming of the foes of popular education. But all American experience demonstrates that this education of legislature, Congress, and court is one of the most hopeful factors in the nation's life. Year by year we behold, even in our great corrupt metropolitan cities, in States that for a century held the American common school at arm's length, in the least ambitious and most provincial rural districts, astonishing revivals of sound and progressive ideas. We see the flaring up of an irrepressible ambition to imitate the achievements of a more advanced community. We see the common people, even the freedmen first introduced to responsible citizenship, revolting against the cherished theories of the cultured class and exploding, in the wrath of one election day, the shrewdest plots of political, ecclesiastical, and social "rings" for the capture of the people's great heritage, the common school.

That man, or body of men, however exalted or established in their own convictions, who have only contempt and hatred for the American common school, even at its feeblest beginnings, or fancy that the mighty current of popular education can be fenced within the levees or diverted into the reservoirs of any system less comprehensive than the present, reckon without their host. Here, as everywhere in American affairs, the final verdict of 70,000,000 of people is better than the most scientific scheme of any clique in church, university, or partisan civic policy. And the one thing the people of the United States will not do, until a permanent majority concludes to adopt a different form of government, will be to intrust to any class, however well informed or apparently impartial, that absolute authority over popular educational affairs so attractive to a growing class of scholarly men in our own and every land.

To these and similar misapprehensions, both of the original intent and characteristic methods of administration that have already become a national conviction and habit in the conduct of the American common school, are we indebted for the persistent attempts to change essentially its type of character; sometimes by the earnest representatives of large and influential bodies of people. The demand that the American common-school system shall be changed to a federation of private, religions, and corporate institutions, loosely held together by an annual Government inspection and subsidy; or that, by some indirect arrangement, the old-time European parochial school shall become an annex to our national system of unsectarian moral instruction and discipline; the peremptory demand of certain university critics that the secondary, even the elementary, department of the common school shall be radically modified in order to weed out the superior few and speed their course to the doors of a college in no way responsible to the State and only indirectly influenced by the advance of educational thought and practice; the outery from a considerable body of the patrons and teachers of private and denominational seminaries against the public support of the free high and normal schools and the State university; the almost brutal assault in great industrial centers upon every department of the common school that can not at once be brought inside the narrow circle of a materialistic so-called "practical" notion of the training of the average American child; the imperious demand that the administration of the common-school system, in all save its mere financial and economic details, shall be removed beyond the reach of the people whose children are its subjects and remanded to a body of scholars whose only known qualification is a loud and often insolent assertion of their own supreme capacity-these and other similar projects for the reformation and reconstruction of the system of universal education, slowly built up by the combined effort of the most eminent educators and foremost people of every order and condition, by the thought, observation, and experience of almost three centuries of American life, may sometimes be productive of good through the wakening and concentration of public attention on some acknowledged or insidious defect in the