About this time (1835) Cousin’s report of the Prussian system, made to the French minister of public instruction, came into my hands and it was read with much interest. Sitting one pleasant afternoon upon a log on the hill north of where the courthouse at Marshall now stands, Gen. Crary (chairman of the convention committee on education) and myself discussed for a long time the fundamental principles which were deemed important for the convention to adopt in laying the foundations of our State. The subject of education was a theme of special interest. It was agreed, if possible, that it should make a distinct branch of the government, and that the constitution ought to provide for an officer who should have this whole matter in charge and thus keep its importance perpetually before the public mind.
Mr. Pierce’s indebtedness to Prussia for many of the ideas which he worked out in the system which he organized is thus set forth by a later superintendent of the Michigan system, Francis W. Shearman, who, writing in 1852, said:
The system of public instruction which was intended to be established by the framers of the constitution (Michigan), the conception of the office, its province, its powers, and duties were derived from Prussia.[8]...
Results of the Adoption of the German Example.
It is a striking fact that all this borrowing had to do with the common school. Nor was it inappropriate at that period that emphasis should be on the school for the common people. In the young states there was relatively little higher education, and the need was great for an improvement of the common schools.
The consequences of this borrowing were momentous for our history. There are two characteristics which our American schools of elementary grade took on in imitation of the German model, which characteristics have determined in large measure their subsequent development down to the present. In the first place, the German common school was strictly a vernacular school, and, in the second place, it dealt only with rudimentary subjects. The Gymnasium, or the school for the aristocracy, was not a vernacular school. Latin and Greek and modern foreign languages were taught in even the lower grades of the Gymnasium. Furthermore, the Gymnasium alone taught such “higher” subjects as the higher mathematics, while the common school confined itself exclusively to arithmetic as the rudimentary branch of mathematics. In point of time the German Volksschule, as noted above, conducted a course eight years in length. The pupils completed this course at fourteen years of age, when they were confirmed in the Church.
The common school was the institution which America borrowed in 1830-1840. The common school was set up in the United States as an eight-year school devoted exclusively to the vernacular and to rudimentary subjects. But the American system developed. The length of the school year increased, and the number of pupils who are ambitious to go on into the higher schools has enormously increased. In 1917 we were told by the Commissioner of Education of the United States that more than 1,300,000 of the young people in this country were in the high schools. Even now, however, the eight-year vernacular rudimentary school of Germany has its stamp on our American life. As a rule our American schools do not permit a pupil to study foreign languages in the lower school, even when we know that he is going on to high school. The general exclusion of languages is due to the tradition that the elementary school is a vernacular school, not to inability on the part of pupils to learn languages. We will not permit algebra to be taught in the elementary school, because algebra is not a rudimentary subject. To be sure, we have had a hard time trying to keep arithmetic in its position of exclusive domination of the elementary course. We have grafted into the arithmetic all kinds of economic information about insurance and banks and foreign exchange. We have exercised our ingenuity to the limit in inventing examples of a complicated sort in order to keep the pupils in the upper grades at work in arithmetic. But through it all we have been kept from a rational development by adherence to the tradition of the German common school,—the tradition which treats higher subjects as the exclusive property of the aristocracy.
The Reorganization of American Schools
The day of reform is, however, at hand. Social pressure has gradually been making it evident to all that in America the elementary school cannot be a caste school. The people are demanding that pupils who are to have only a limited schooling be admitted to some of the higher subjects. Furthermore, there are enough pupils who go on into the high school to make it evident that the American scheme should be organized not with a view to distinguishing between the elementary school and the high school, but with a view to combining the two into a continuous institution.
Within the last five years there has spread rapidly a movement known as the junior-high-school movement, or the intermediate-school movement. This is essentially a reform of the seventh, eighth, and ninth grades, and consists, first of all, in the introduction into the course of study of material which formerly belonged to the high school. In the second place, this movement recognizes the maturity of pupils in a variety of ways. It adopts a form of discipline which throws responsibility on them. It departmentalizes the teaching and offers electives, thus securing the advantages of specialization. The movement promises to reorganize our whole school system in such a way as to give us a new kind of national education. America has at the present moment a closer approximation to a continuous educational ladder than any other country, but the ladder needs a little splicing. With the present enthusiasm for national development the splicing is likely to be facilitated.