Founding preparatory schools
In addition to the instruction given by pious Puritan parents to the flock in their own homes, a limited number of common or church schools was established in the Colonial period. The position of academies, as they develop in the Revolutionary period, is significant. We find that “alongside each of the first colleges, frequently antedating them, sometimes forming part of the organization, was a grammar-school.”
Such schools, attached to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, William and Mary’s, and others, prepared for the universities, and supplemented the work of the elementary or common schools. Herein lay a vital point. They had home schools, elementary schools, and colleges. It was impossible for these elementary schools to fit students for university life when such schools required for entrance that the student should “read Tully or any like classical Latin author ex tempore, and make and speak true Latin in verse and prose, and decline perfectly the paradigms of nouns and verbs in the Greek tongue,” as has already been quoted from an early Harvard announcement.
The universities demanded classics
The universities founded by the church were, then, forming a course of study for these grammar schools, or academies, as they were soon called; and since the demand was for a classical preparatory school, naturally their courses were “fitted to the time-sanctioned curriculum of the college. They taught much Latin and Greek, an extended course in mathematics, and were strong generally on the side of the humanities.” This was a modeling after Rugby, Eton, and other noted English schools, or the classical drill-schools of Germany, which, as we have before seen, were schools bearing decided marks of Jesuit teaching.
Should a young man care to pursue his studies beyond the elementary school, his only opportunity to do so was in one of the academies, where the classics formed the sum and substance of the instruction. The tendency to revert to the established forms of European education, or the papal system, is plainly visible.
Footprints of the papal education
The first colleges had been planted to give a Christian training, and doubtless had a start which might have resulted in the greatest strength to the church, and to the nation in a secondary way; but the introduction of these grammar schools or academies, with a course of study in the classics made necessary by the universities, threw the majority of the young people into a classical instead of a practical line of instruction. Looking at it from one standpoint, no wiser move could have been made to turn the tide of educational reform again toward papal education. Can we here trace the footprints of the Jesuits, whose policy since the days of Loyola had been to overthrow Protestantism by a false system of education?
Protestantism and republicanism weakened
The effect of the mixture of the pure and the impure methods, traceable in indistinct lines at the very beginning, now assumed more definite proportions. The growth of academies was remarkably rapid, and when attention is called to such men as Franklin, the Adamses, John Hancock, and the generation of “’76,” who received most of their education in these schools, it may seem like sheer presumption to condemn their work. The results, however, as seen in later years, warrant the charge that at that time was taken a long step from the principles of the Reformation, which meant to this country a weakening both in Protestantism and republicanism.