The History of Education / Educational Practice and Progress Considered as a Phase of the Development and Spread of Western Civilization

by Ellwood Patterson Cubberley

"It is important to note here," adds Mr. Martin, "that the idea underlying all this legislation is neither paternalistic nor socialistic. The child is to be educated, not to advance his personal interests, but because the State will suffer if he is not educated. The State does not provide schools to relieve the parent, nor because it can educate better than the parent can, but because it can thereby better enforce the obligation which it imposes." To prevent a return to the former state of religious ignorance it was important that education be provided. To assure this the colonial legislature enacted a law requiring the maintenance and support of schools by the towns. This law became the corner-stone of our American state school systems.

Influence on other New England colonies. Connecticut Colony, in its Law of 1650 establishing a school system, combined the spirit of the Massachusetts Law of 1642, though stated in different words (R. 193), and the Law of 1647, stated word for word. New Haven Colony, in 1655, ordered that children and apprentices should be taught to read, as had been done in Massachusetts, in 1642, but on the union of New Haven and Connecticut Colonies, in 1665, the Connecticut Code became the law for the united colonies. In 1702 a college was founded (Yale) and finally located at New Haven, to offer preparation for the ministry in the Connecticut colony, as had been done earlier in Massachusetts, and Latin grammar schools were founded in the Connecticut towns to prepare for the new college, as also had been done earlier in Massachusetts. The rules and regulations for the grammar school at New Haven (R. 189) reveal the purpose and describe the instruction provided in one of the earliest and best of these.

[Illustration: FIG. 111. WHERE YALE COLLEGE WAS FOUNDED]

Plymouth Colony, in 1658 and again in 1663, proposed to the towns that they "sett vp" a schoolmaster "to traine vp children to reading and writing" (R. 194 a). In 1672 the towns were asked to aid Harvard College by gifts (R. 194 b). In 1673-74 the income from the Cape Cod fisheries was set aside for the support of a (grammar) school (R. 194 c). Finally, in 1677, all towns having over fifty families and maintaining a grammar school were ordered aided from the fishery proceeds (R. 194 d).

The Massachusetts laws also applied to Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont, as these were then a part of Massachusetts Colony. After New Hampshire separated, in 1680, the Massachusetts Law of 1647 was virtually readopted in 1719-21. In Maine and Vermont there were so few settlers, until near the beginning of our national life, that the influence of the Massachusetts legislation on these States was negligible until a later period.

Only in Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, of all the New England colonies, did the Massachusetts legislation fail to exert a deep influence. Settled as these two had been by refugees from New England, and organized on a basis of hospitality to all who suffered from religious oppression elsewhere, the religious stimulus to the founding of schools naturally was lacking. As the religious basis for education was as yet the only basis, the first development of schools in Rhode Island awaited the humanitarian and economic influences which did not become operative until early in the nineteenth century.

Outside of the New England colonies, the appeal to the State as the servant of the Church was seldom made during the early colonial period, the churches handling the educational problem in their own way. As a result the beginnings of State oversight and control were left to New England. In the central colonies a series of parochial-school systems came to prevail, while in Episcopalian Virginia and the other colonies to the south the no-business-of-the-State attitude assumed toward education by the mother country was copied.

THE CHURCH SCHOOLS OF NEW YORK. New Netherland, as New York Colony was called before the English occupation, was settled by the Dutch West India Company, and some dozen villages about New York and up the Hudson had been founded by the time it passed to the control of the English, in 1664. In these the Dutch established typical home-land public parochial schools, under the control of the Reformed Dutch Church. The schoolmaster was usually the reader and precentor in the church as well (R. 195), and often acted, as in Holland, as sexton besides. Girls attended on equal terms with boys, but sat apart and recited in separate classes. The instruction consisted of reading and writing Dutch, sometimes a little arithmetic, the Dutch Catechism, the reading of a few religious books, and certain prayers. The rules (1661) for a schoolmaster in New Amsterdam (R. 196), and the contract with a Dutch schoolmaster in Flatbush (R. 195), dating from 1682, reveal the type of schools and school conditions provided. All except the children of the poor paid fees to the schoolmaster. [10] He was licensed by the Dutch church authorities. As the Dutch had not come to America because of persecution, and were in no way out of sympathy with religious conditions in the home-land, the schools they developed here were typical of the Dutch European parochial schools of the time (R. 178). A trivial (Latin) school was also established in New York, in 1652.

After the English occupation the English principle of private and church control of education, with schooling on a tuition or a charitable basis, came to prevail, and this continued up to the beginning of our national period. [11] Of the English colonial schools of New York Draper has written: [12]

All the English schools in the province from 1700 down to the time of the Declaration of Independence were maintained by a great religious society organized under the auspices of the Church of England—and, of course, with the favor of the government—called "The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts." The law governing this Society provided that no teacher should be employed until he had proved "his affection for the present government" and his "conformity to the doctrine and discipline of the Church of England." Schools maintained under such auspices were in no sense free schools. Indeed, humiliating as it is, no student of history can fail to discern the fact that the government of Great Britain, during its supremacy in this territory, did nothing to facilitate the extension or promote the efficiency of free elementary schools among the people.