Land was sometimes set aside to support partly the school; it was called the "school-meadows," or "school-fields," and was let out for an income to help to pay the teacher. This was a grant made on the same principle that grants were made to physicians, tanners, and other useful persons, not to establish free education. At a later date lotteries were a favorite method of raising money for schools.
It was not until about the time of the Revolution that the modern signification of the word "free"—a school paid for entirely by general town taxes—could be applied to the public schools of most Massachusetts towns, and when the schools of Boston were made free, that community stood alone for its liberality not only in America, but in the world.
The pay was given in any of the inconvenient exchanges which had to pass as money at that time,—in wampum, beaver skins, Indian corn, wheat, peas, beans, or any country product known as "truck." It is told of a Salem school, that one scholar was always seated at the window to study and also to hail passers-by, and endeavor to sell to them the accumulation of corn, vegetables, etc., which had been given in payment to the teacher.
The logs for the great fireplace were furnished by the parents or guardians of the scholars as a part of the pay for schooling; and an important part it was in the northern colonies, in the bitter winter, in the poorly built schoolhouses. Some schoolmasters, indignant at the carelessness of parents who failed to send the expected load of wood early in the winter, banished the unfortunate child of the tardy parent to the coldest corner of the schoolroom. The town of Windsor, Connecticut, voted "that the committee be empowered to exclude any scholar that shall not carry his share of wood for the use of the said school." In 1736 West Hartford ordered every child "barred from the fire" whose parents had not sent wood.
"Erudition" Schoolhouse, Bath, Maine, 1797
The school laws of the State of Massachusetts, framed in 1789, crystallized all the principles, practice, and hopes that had been developed by a hundred and fifty years of school life. The standard set by these laws was decidedly lower than those of colonial days. Where a permanent English school had been imperative, six months schooling a year might be permitted to take its place; where every town of a hundred families had had a grammar school in which boys could be fitted for the university, only towns of two hundred families were compelled to have such schools. Thus the open path to the university was closed in a hundred and twenty Massachusetts towns.
Judge Thomas Holme composed in grammarless rhyme, in 1696, a True Relation of the Flourishing State of Philadelphia. In it he says:—
"Here are schools of divers sorts
To which our youth daily resorts,
Good women, who do very well
Bring little ones to read and spell,
Which fits them for writing; and then
Here's men to bring them to their pen,
And to instruct and make them quick
In all sorts of Arithmetick."