Education.
The second form of schools was the parochial organization of the middle colonies of New Netherlands and Pennsylvania. In these colonies there arose a school in connection with a church and, unlike the education of the South, which was along secondary training, the work of this parochial school was chiefly in elementary education. In New Netherlands, as in Holland, the church was connected with the state and there was but one church, the Dutch Reformed, and the civil and religious authorities jointly controlled and directed the education. In Pennsylvania, however, religious and civil freedom had been granted from the very first and there had come into the colony people of different nationalities and of different religions, and education came to be established with the different religious bodies and each religious sect had its own distinctive parochial school alongside its own church. There also were some attempts at higher and secondary education. Among the schools started was the Penn Charter School, which was originally organized by the Friends in 1689, and there were higher schools of other denominations. When New Netherlands fell into the hands of the English, there came about in New York conditions somewhat similar to those in Virginia and a number of secondary schools were organized.
The third type of schools in colonial times was that formed by governmental action in the New England colonies of Massachusetts and Connecticut. In these colonies there was no such class distinctions as in Virginia, and, unlike Pennsylvania, there was but one nationality and one religion, and, unlike the Dutch of New Netherlands, they had cut themselves away from the ruling classes of their native land, and thus they were free to develop along their own ideas. Their religious belief and training called for the education of each of the members of the colony, as the Bible was held to be the infallible rule of faith and practice, and so every one should at least have enough schooling to enable him to read the Bible for himself. Hence schools arose in a short time after settlement. In 1644 Salem taxed all who had children and were able to pay and procured in this way means for paying for the schooling of children whose parents were too poor to pay for them. In 1647 Massachusetts passed a law that in every town of fifty families a school for the teaching of reading and writing should be provided and that in a town of one hundred families a grammar school should be provided. Connecticut in 1659 provided for its children in the same way. But all such schools were not free as we term free schools now, and it was not till near the time of the Revolution that general taxes were levied for school purposes and free schools were thereby established.
The early schoolhouses in Pennsylvania and New York were made of logs and the top covered with bark. Holes were cut in the sides for windows, which sometimes were covered with greased paper that let in a dim light. Some had a rough puncheon floor and others a dirt floor. A distance up from the floor around the walls pegs were placed between the logs and boards laid on them for desks and by them were boards set on stakes for seats for the older children, while the younger children sat on blocks or benches of logs. At one end or in the middle was a catted chimney. At least some of the schoolhouses in New England were better furnished, as is shown by the following entry in the town records of Roxbury in 1652:
"The feoffes agreed with Daniel Welde that he provide convenient benches with forms, with tables for the scholars, and a conveniente seate for the scholmaster, a Deske to put the Dictionary on and shelves to lay up bookes."[386]
This schoolhouse was not kept in proper repairs, as the teacher in Roxbury in 1681 wrote:
"Of inconveniences (in the schoolhouse) I shall mention no other but the confused and shattered and nastie posture that it is in, not fitting for to reside in, the glass broke, and thereupon very raw and cold; the floor very much broken and torn up to kindle fires, the hearth spoiled, the seats some burned and others out of kilter, that one had as well-nigh as goods keep school in a hog stie as in it."[387]
Supplies for school purposes were quite scarce in colonial times. There were no blackboards nor maps. Paper was quite scarce and very carefully used. Birch bark was used to cipher on. Slates also were used and those of the earlier times had no frames and had a hole in one side in which a string could be tied for holding a pencil or for hanging around the neck. If lead pencils were used at all during colonial times it was in the latest part of the period. Instead of lead pencils they used plummets made of lead melted and cast into wooden molds and cut into shape by a jack-knife. Pens were cut from goose-quills and it required quite a little skill to make good pens and keep them in order. Ink was made by dissolving ink-powder, each child furnishing his own ink-bottle or ink-horn and ink. Sometimes the ink was wholly home-made: "In remote districts of Vermont, Maine, and Massachusetts, home-made ink, feeble and pale, was made by steeping the bark of the swamp-maple in water, boiling the decoction till thick, and diluting it with copperas."[388]
There were not a great number or variety of books for use in these early schools. The two most noted books were the Hornbook and the New England Primer. The hornbook was the first book used by the child. This consisted of a thin piece of wood about five inches long and two inches wide. A sheet of paper was placed upon this. At the top of this paper came the alphabet in small letters; then the alphabet in capital letters followed; then the vowels; then syllables, as, ab, eb, ib, etc.; next "In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, Amen;" and last came the Lord's prayer. Over this paper went a sheet of horn, through which the printed matter could be read. The paper and the horn were fastened to the wood by strips of brass or other metal, going around the sides and ends, and all held fast by tacks driven through the metal strips. At the lower end of the hornbook was usually a handle, which sometimes had a hole through it for a string to carry it by or to hang it around the neck.
"The New England Primer is a poorly printed little book about five inches long and three wide, of about eighty pages. It contains the alphabet, and a short table of easy syllables, such as a-b, ab, e-b, eb, and words up to those of six syllables. This was called a syllabarium. There were twelve five-syllable words; of these five were abomination, edification, humiliation, mortification, and purification. There were a morning and evening prayer for children, and a grace to be said before meat. Then followed a set of little rhymes which have become known everywhere, and are frequently quoted. Each letter of the alphabet is illustrated with a blurred little picture. Of these, two-thirds represent Biblical incidents. They begin:
'In Adam's fall
and ended with Z:
'Zaccheus he
Did climb a tree
His Lord to see.'
"In the early days of the Primer, all the colonies were true to the English king, and the rhyme for the letter K reads:
'King Charles the Good
No man of blood.'
"But by Revolutionary years the verse for K was changed to:
'Queens and Kings
Are Gaudy Things.'
"Later verses tell the praise of George Washington. Then comes a series of Bible questions and answers; then an 'alphabet of lessons for youth,' consisting of verses of the Bible beginning successively with A, B, C, and so on. X was a difficult initial letter, and had to be contented with 'Xhort one another daily, etc.' After the Lord's prayer and Apostle's Creed appeared sometimes a list of names for men and women, to teach children to spell their own names. The largest and most interesting picture was that of the burning at the stake of John Rogers; and after this a six page set of pious rhymes which the martyr left at his death for his family of small children. After the year 1750, a few very short stories were added to its pages, and were probably all the children's stories that many of the scholars of that day ever saw."[389]
In the establishing of the elementary schools in New England there was but little more required of the teacher than to instruct the children in reading and writing, especially were they to be taught sufficiently that they could read the Bible. Also they were to be taught enough arithmetic for their every-day needs. This is well shown in the records of the town of Plymouth, where in 1671 they had built a schoolhouse and employed a schoolmaster "to teach the children and youth to read the Bible, to write, and to cast accounts."[390] In the secondary schools the emphasis was laid upon Latin and such other subjects were taught as would fit the scholars for college. Penmanship was made a great deal of while orthography was not, the results of which are shown by the writing and spelling of the diaries and other writings of that period that remain.
The work of the district school, of the academy, and of the college is well portrayed by McMaster. "The daily labors of the schoolmaster who taught in the district school-house three generations since were confined to teaching his scholars to read with a moderate degree of fluency, to write legibly, to spell with some regard for the rules of orthography, and to know as much of arithmetic as would enable them to calculate the interest on a debt, to keep the family accounts, and to make change in a shop.... To sit eight hours a day on the hardest of benches poring over Cheever's Accidence; to puzzle over long words in Dilworth's speller; to commit to memory pages of words in Webster's American Institute; to read long chapters in the Bible; to learn by heart Dr. Watt's hymns for children; to be drilled in the Assembly Catechism; to go to bed at sundown, to get up at sunrise, and to live on brown bread and pork, porridge and beans, made up, with morning and evening prayers, the every-day life of the lads at most of the academies and schools of New England.... The four years of residence at college were spent in the acquisition of Latin and Greek, a smattering of mathematics, enough of logic to distinguish barbara from celarent, enough of rhetoric to know climax from metonomy, and as much of metaphysics as would enable one to talk learnedly about a subject he did not understand."[391]
The teachers of the elementary schools of those early days were too often not educated nor cultured men. These men in many cases were drunken, cruel, ignorant, and lazy. Drunkenness seems to have been quite prevalent among the teachers of early New York, and yet there were some most excellent men among them. In the middle and southern colonies among the teachers were redemptioners and exported criminals. It was not uncommon on the arrival of a ship for schoolmasters to be advertised for sale along with men of other callings and usually the teachers did not fetch as good prices as weavers, tailors, and the like. The teachers in the secondary schools, on the contrary, often were men of good scholarship and of high standing in the community, occupying a place of honor among their fellow men. Such teachers were Christopher Dock in Pennsylvania and Ezekiel Cheever in New England.
"Among the New England teachers there were men of both learning and ability. Not a more cultured body of men ever formed a colony than settled about Boston, Salem, New Haven, and Hartford. They coveted the best advantages for their children, frequently making the best men their teachers. It is on record that of the twenty-two masters of Plymouth from 1671 to the Revolution, twenty were graduates of Harvard. The like was true of Roxbury. Such men, next to the functionaries of church and state, commanded the highest respect. In the churches they had special pews provided for their use beside those of magistrates and the deacon's family. In every community was usually one who was the teacher professionally, so considered as much as was the minister or physician."[392]
There were women teachers in the colonial times. They taught what was known as dame-schools, which were attended by small boys and girls. Women teachers and dame-schools were probably confined to New England and parts of New York adjacent to New England and settled by emigrants from there. There grew up the custom in some rural districts of having one term of school in the summer for the younger pupils and taught by a woman and another term in the winter for the older pupils and taught by a man. This arrangement arose because it was difficult for the younger children to attend school during the bitter weather of the winter, while the older pupils could attend well only during the cold time of the year when there was not much work to do on the farm.
There is in existence a contract between a Dutch schoolmaster and the authorities of Flatbush, New York, of the date of October 8, 1682. This is a full paper and quite well shows the duties of a teacher of that time in that colony. The school day was to be from eight o'clock to eleven and from one to four. Each forenoon and afternoon session was to open and close with prayer. On every Wednesday and Saturday the schoolmaster was to instruct the children in the common prayers and in the catechism and to be present at the church meeting when the children were catechized before the congregation. He was to keep school nine months in succession, from September to June of each year. Beside his school duties he had church duties. He was to keep the church clean, ring the bell, lead in the singing, and sometimes he was to read the sermon. He was to provide water for baptism and to furnish the minister with the name of the child to be baptized and also the names of the parents or witnesses. He was to provide bread and wine for the communion. He was to serve as messenger for the consistory. He was to give out the funeral invitations, dig the grave, and toll the bell.[393]
It can scarcely be believed that the schoolmasters of the early period of our country could have been so cruel as is told of them. It would appear as if a great deal more time was put upon devising means of punishment than upon learning ways of instruction. It was a time of cruelty and of belief in the general depravity of humanity. It was deemed that there was a natural wilfulness in children that needed stern repression and harsh correction. The parents and teachers in New England were especially repressive of child nature and their guide and rule of action, the Bible, gave them constant proof of the need of corrective punishment for children. "John Robinson, the Pilgrim preacher, said in his essay on Children and Their Education: 'Surely there is in all children (though not alike) a stubbornes and stoutnes of minde arising from naturall pride which must in the first place be broken and beaten down that so the foundation of their education being layd in humilitie and tractablenes other virtues may in their time be built thereon.'"[394]
The rod was very greatly in use by the schoolmasters of colonial times and too often the rod became the cudgel. Some teachers had the boy mount the back of another boy and with arms and legs held tight he was given a beating. The ferule was applied to the hands, the face, and the feet, and sometimes this ferule was a heavy oaken ruler. One instrument used was a hickory club with leather thongs attached at one end and similar to it was the tattling stick, a cat-o'-nine-tails with heavy leather straps. Another instrument used was termed a flapper, which was a piece of leather about six inches wide with a hole in the middle and fastened to a handle. Every stroke with this flapper on a boy's bared back would raise a blister the size of the hole in the leather. A branch of a tree was split and placed over a child's nose and he had to then stand before the school. For whispering a whispering-stick was used, which was a kind of wooden gag tied in the mouth with strings, somewhat as a horse's bit. Another punishment was to put two boys together in a yoke devised for that purpose, similar to an ox-yoke, and to make the punishment all the more disgraceful would be to yoke a boy and girl together. A unipod, a one-legged stool, was used, and the child occupying it found it very hard and tiresome to balance himself on it. The dames in their schools used quite freely a heavy iron thimble, which by being snapped quite vigorously against a boy's head would make for him "thimell-pie." The dunce-block was freely used and the culprit appropriately labelled, as, "Tell-Tale," "Bite-Finger-Baby," "Lying Ananias," "Idle-Boy," and "Pert-Miss-Prat-a-Pace." There were some teachers who did not use such cruel punishments, although they must have been very few in number, one being Samuel Dock, a German schoolmaster of Pennsylvania, who was intelligent enough to be kind to his children, but there were plenty of the drunken, dirty, careless, and cruel teachers in that colony. Mrs. Earle states: "I may say here that I have not found that New York schoolmasters were ever as cruel as were those of New England."[395]
"I often fancy that I should have enjoyed living in the good old times, but I am glad I never was a child in colonial New England—to have been baptized in ice water, fed on brown bread and warm beer, to have had to learn the Assembly's Catechism and 'explain all the Quaestions with conferring Texts,' to have been constantly threatened with fear of death and terror of God, to have been forced to commit Wigglesworth's 'Day of Doom' to memory, and, after all, to have been whipped with a tattling-stick."[396]
The colonial period was an age of child precocity. In that time overzealous parents pushed children forward till they displayed a remarkable precocious learning, to end, in most cases, in an early death either physically or mentally, and yet some of these children did survive the process to become noted and honored men. One such parent wrote to her sister asking to have sent to her a set of toys now known as alphabet blocks and stating that the child's father was contriving a set of toys to teach the child his letters by the time he could speak, he being not yet four months old at the time of the letter. In a later letter the mother wrote to the child's aunt that at twenty-two months of age he could tell his letters in any book and he was beginning to spell. This boy grew up to be the Revolutionary General Charles Cotesworth Pinckney. One boy born in 1752 learned his alphabet in a single lesson and he could read the Bible before he was four years old. At the age of six he was sent to a grammar school, and, as his father would not let him study Latin, he borrowed a Latin grammar and studied through it twice without a teacher. This boy afterward was known as President Timothy Dwight of Yale College.
This precociousness was not confined to boys, for one little girl, born in Boston in 1708, daughter of the President of Harvard College, before her second year was finished could speak distinctly, knew her letters, could relate many stories out of the Scriptures, and when three years old she could recite the greater part of the Assembly's Cathechism and also she could recite many of the psalms and many lines of poetry and read distinctly. The Governor of the colony and other distinguished guests at her home sometimes would place this little girl on a table to show off her acquirements. Another little girl, born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1759, in her third year could "read any book," so the story ran, and, too, this she could do holding the book upside down.
Boys entered the Boston Latin School as young as six and a half years of age and often parents had them begin Latin at an earlier age, some parents teaching their little ones to read Latin words when but three years old along with the English. Young Timothy Dwight would have been prepared to enter college at eight years of age had not his grammar school been discontinued because of having no teacher. A boy in 1686 entered Harvard College at eleven years of age and another boy in 1799 graduated from Rhode Island College (now Brown University) at barely fourteen years of age.
The most remarkable case of childish precocity given by Mrs. Earle was that of Richard Evelyn, who died in 1658 at the early age of five years and three days. The father in his diary recounted in the following quoted passage the wonderful acquirements of the little boy before his death:
"He had learned all his catechism at two years and a half old; he could perfectly read any of the English, Latin, French, or Gothic letters, pronouncing the first three languages exactly. He had, before the fifth year, or in that year, not only skill to read most written hands, but to decline all the nouns, conjugate the verbs regular, and most of the irregular; learned out of Puerelis, got by heart almost the entire vocabulary of Latin and French primitives and words, could make congruous syntax, turn English into Latin, and vice versa, construe and prove what he read, and did the government and use of relatives, verbs, substances, ellipses and many figures and tropes, and made a considerable progress in Comenius' Janua; begun himself to write legibly and had a strong passion for Greek. The number of verses he could recite was prodigious, and what he remembered of the parts of plays which he would also act; and, when seeing a Plautus in one's hand, he asked what book it was, and being told it was comedy and too difficult for him, he wept for sorrow. Strange was his apt and ingenious application of fables and morals, for he had read Æsop; he had a wonderful disposition to mathematics, having by heart divers propositions of Euclid that were read to him in play, and he would make lines and demonstrate them. He had learned by heart divers sentences in Latin and Greek which on occasion he would produce even to wonder. He was all life, all prettiness, far from morose, sullen, or childish in anything he said or did."[397]
The girls of colonial times did not receive much education, as it was not considered necessary for women to have learning beyond that necessary for household duties. All that was considered really needed by a girl in the way of book learning was to know how to read and write and cipher a little. Most of the girls received nothing further than elementary training in reading and writing and many of them did not even have that much of education. This was true in all the colonies, New England, New York, and the others.
A lady writing of the education of girls of her time in New York, in the first quarter of the eighteenth century stated:
"It was at that time very difficult to procure the means of instruction in those island districts; female education was, of consequence, conducted on a very limited scale; girls learned needlework (in which they were indeed both skilful and ingenious) from their mothers and aunts; they were taught, too, at that period to read, in Dutch, the Bible, and a few Calvinistic tracts of the devotional kind. But in the infancy of the settlement few girls read English; when they did, they were thought accomplished; they generally spoke it, however imperfectly, and few were taught writing."[398]
A historian of New York, writing of his fellow townswomen during the year 1756, said that "there is nothing they (New York women) so generally neglect as Reading, and indeed all the Arts for the improvement of the Mind, in which I confess we have set them the Example."[399]
The attitude of the people of the period toward the admission of girls into boys' grammar schools is shown by the following extract from the rules for governing such a school in New Haven in 1684:
"... and all girls be excluded as improper and inconsistent with such a grammar school as ye law injoines and as is the Designe of this settlement."[400]
But it must not be considered that the education of the girls was wholly neglected among the colonists, for, though they were scarcely ever admitted to boys' schools, yet they did go to the dame-schools and also they received training at home. The girls were all taught household duties and the fancy needlework that went with it. Reading, writing, a little arithmetic, dancing, needlework, music, deportment, and elegance of carriage composed the curriculum for girls. Sometimes a girl would get some help from a brother and thus gain an education beyond that ordinarily obtained by girls. Occasionally an educated father would teach his daughter, one such case being that of President Colman of Harvard College, who gave what was called a profound education to his daughter Jane. Withal this meager education, nevertheless we are not at all ashamed of the bearing of our foremothers of the colonial and Revolutionary times.
As academies grew up during the latter half of the eighteenth century, most of which were for boys, a few were made co-educational and a few others were established for girls:
"For a hundred years the Penn Charter School, Philadelphia, had admitted both sexes on equal terms. The Moravians had established a school for girls at Bethlehem, Pa., as early as 1745, while the Philadelphia Female Academy dates from the Revolution. Among the earliest in New England were Dr. Dwight's Young Ladies' Academy, at Greenfield, Conn. (1785), and the Medford School, near Boston (1789)."[401]
Of the colleges in the United States today, two of them were founded during the first century of the colonial period, the seventeenth century, ten others in the next century before the Revolution, and by the close of the eighteenth century the list had increased to twenty-six, eleven of the original colonies being represented in the list and also Kentucky and Tennessee. Arranging the twelve colleges of the colonial period in the order of the year of first opening and with the names and locations as now, they run as follows:[402]
Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1636; College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia, 1693; Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, 1701; Washington College, Chestertown, Maryland, 1723; University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1740; Moravian Seminary and College for Women, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, 1742; Princeton University, Princetown, New Jersey, 1746; Washington and Lee University, Lexington, Virginia, 1749; Columbia University, New York City, New York, 1754; Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, 1765; Rutgers College, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1766; Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, 1769.
With dame-schools for the younger children, district schools for the older ones, academies for the yet more advanced, and colleges for completing the education, the early period of the United States gave such an education to its young people as well to prepare them to become the noble men and women, who, by books, papers, addresses, and general bearing, were able to stand alongside the people of the world in the great period of the American Revolution, and furnished thinkers and doers such as have not been surpassed by our own time.