The first Pennsylvania school law of 1802 carried this direction into effect by providing for pauper schools in the counties, a condition that was not done away with until 1834. In New Jersey the system lasted until 1838.
THE PRIVATE-ADVENTURE, OR "HEDGE," SCHOOL. This was a school analogous to the Dame School, but was kept by a man instead of a woman, and usually at his home or shop. Plate 15, showing a shoe cobbler teaching, represents one type of such schools. The term "hedge schools" arose in Ireland, where teaching was forbidden the Catholics, and secret schools arose in which priests and others taught what was possible. Of these McCarthy writes: [18]
On the highways and on the hillsides, in ditches and behind hedges, in the precarious shelter of the ruined walls of some ancient abbey, or under the roof of a peasant's cabin, the priests set up schools and taught the children of their race.
The term soon came to be applied to any kind of a poor school, taught in an irregular manner or place. Similar irregular schools, under equivalent names, also were found in German lands, [19] the Netherlands, and in France, while in the American Colonies "indentured white servants" were frequently let out as schoolmasters. The following advertisement of a teacher for sale is typical of private-adventure elementary school-keeping during the colonial period.
[Illustration: FIG. 140. ADVERTISEMENT FOR A TEACHER TO LET
(From the American Weekly Mercury of Philadephia, 1735)]
These schools were taught by itinerant school-keepers, artisans, and tutors of the poorer type, but offered the beginnings of elementary education to many a child who otherwise would never have been able to learn to read. In the early eighteenth century these schools attained a remarkable development in England.
A new influence of tremendous future importance—general reading—was now coming in; the vernacular was fast supplanting Latin; newspapers were being started; little books or pamphlets (tracts) containing general information were being sold; books for children and beginners were being written; the popular novel and story had appeared; [20] and all these educative forces were creating a new and a somewhat general desire for a knowledge of the art of reading. This in turn caused a new demand for schools to teach the long-locked-up art, and this demand was capitalized to the profit of many types of people.
THE APPRENTICING OF ORPHANS AND CHILDREN OF THE POOR. The compulsory apprenticing of the children of the poor, as we have seen (p. 326), was an old English institution, and workhouse training, or the so-called "schools of industry" became, by the eighteenth century, a prominent feature of the English care of the poor. These represented the only form of education supported by taxation, and the only form of education to which Parliament gave any attention during the whole of the eighteenth century. This type of institution also was carried to the Anglican Colonies in America, as we have seen in the documents for Virginia (R. 200 a), and became an established institution in America as well.
The apprenticing of boys to a trade, a still older institution, was also much used as a means for training youths for a life in the trades, not only in England and the American Colonies, but throughout all European lands as well. The conditions surrounding the apprenticing of a boy had by the eighteenth century become quite fixed. The "Indenture of Apprenticeship" was drawn up by a lawyer, and by it the master was carefully bound to clothe and feed the boy, train him properly in his trade, look after his morals, and start him in life at the end of his apprenticeship. This is well shown in the many records which have been preserved, both in England (R. 242) and the American Colonies (R. 201). For many boys this type of education was the best possible at the time, and worthily started the possessor in the work of his trade.
In the eighteenth century different English church parishes began to set up workhouse schools of various types, and to maintain these out of parish "rates." The one established in Bishopsgate Street, London, in 1701, is typical. This cared for about 375 children and in it, by 1720, there had been educated and placed forth 1420 children, and in addition 123 had died. Of this school it is recorded that poor children