The first pedagogue of New Amsterdam was one Adam Roelantsen, and he had a checkered career. His name appears with frequency on the court records of the little town both as plaintiff and defendant. He was as active in slandering his neighbors as they were in slandering him; though, as Miss Van Vechten observes, "It is hard to see what fiction worse than truth could have been invented about him." In spite of the fact that "people did not speak well of him," he married well. But his misdemeanors continued and he was finally sentenced to be flogged. We may contrast the legal records of this gentleman's shortcomings with his duties as set forth in his commission, one of which was "to set others a good example as becometh a devout, pious, and worthy consoler of the sick, church clerk, precentor, and schoolmaster."
Some of the contracts under which teachers were hired still exist. One for the teacher at the Dutch settlement of Flatbush, Long Island, in 1682, is very full in detail, and we learn much of the old-time school from it. A bell was rung to call the scholars together at eight o'clock in the morning, the school closed for a recess at eleven, opened again at one, closed at four; all sessions began and closed with prayer. On Wednesdays and Saturdays the children were taught the questions and answers in the catechism and the common prayers. The master was paid (usually in wheat or corn) for "a speller or reader" three guilders a quarter, for "a writer" four guilders. He had many other duties to perform besides teaching the children. He rung the church bell on Sunday, read the Bible at service in church, and led in the singing; sometimes he read the sermon. He provided water for baptisms, bread and wine for communion, and in fact performed all the duties now done by a sexton, including sweeping out the church. He delivered invitations to funerals and carried messages. Sometimes he dug the graves, and often he visited and comforted the sick.
Full descriptions exist of the first country schoolhouses in Pennsylvania and New York. They were universally made of logs. Some had a rough puncheon floor, others a dirt floor which readily ground into dust two or three inches thick, that unruly pupils would purposely stir up in clouds to annoy the masters and disturb the school. The bark roof was a little higher at one side that the rain might drain off. Usually the teacher sat in the middle of the room, and pegs were thrust between the logs around the walls, three or four feet from the ground; boards were laid on these pegs; at these rude desks sat the older scholars with their backs to the teacher. Younger scholars sat on blocks or benches of logs. Until this century many schoolhouses did not have glass set in the small windows, but newspapers or white papers greased with lard were fastened in the rude sashes, or in holes cut in the wall, and let in a dim light. At one end, or in the middle, a "cat and clay" chimney furnished a fireplace. When the first rough log cabin was replaced by a better schoolhouse the hexagonal shape, so beloved in those states for meeting-houses, was chosen, and occasionally built in stone. A picture of one still standing and still used as a schoolhouse, in Raritan, New Jersey, is here shown. It retained its old shelf desks till a few years ago.
"Old Harmony" Schoolhouse, Raritan Township, Hunterdon Co., New Jersey
In a halting way schools in America followed the customs of English schools. The "potation-penny," or "the drinking," was collected in schools in the colonies. In England a considerable sum was often gathered for this treat at the end of the term; but the pennies were doled out more slowly in American schools. Young Joseph Lloyd (of the family of Lloyds Neck on Long Island), in the year 1693, paid out a shilling and sixpence "to the Mistris for feast and wine." A century later, in a school in New Hampshire, the children diligently saved the wood-ashes in the big fireplace and sold them to a neighboring potash works for their treat. They had ample funds to buy rum, raisins, and gingerbread for all who came to the treat, including the ministers and deacons. It was of this school, doubtless attended largely by Scotch-Irish children, that the teacher recorded that the boys, even the youngest, wore leather aprons, while many of the girls took snuff. Another old English custom, the barring-out, occasionally was known here, especially in Pennsylvania.
The furnishing of the schoolrooms was meagre; there were no blackboards, no maps, seldom was there a pair of globes. Though Mr. MacMaster asserts that pencils were never used even in the early years of our Federal life, his statement is certainly a mistake. Faber's pencils were made as early as 1761. Peter Goelet advertised lead pencils for sale in New York in 1786, with india rubbers, and as early as 1740 they were offered among booksellers' wares in Boston for threepence apiece, both black and red lead. Judge Sewall had one; perhaps it was not our common lead pencil of to-day.
In 1771 we find the patriot Henry Laurens writing thus to his daughter Martha, "his dearest Patsey," when she was about twelve years old.