THE INTEREST THE NEW PLAN AWAKENED. It is not strange that the new plan aroused widespread enthusiasm in many discerning men, and for almost a quarter of a century was advocated as the best system of education then known. Two quotations will illustrate what leading men of the time thought of it. De Witt Clinton, for twenty-one years president of the New York "Free School Society," and later governor of the State, wrote, in 1809:
When I perceive that many boys in our school have been taught to read and write in two months, who did not before know the alphabet, and that even one has accomplished it in three weeks—when I view all the bearings and tendencies of this system—when I contemplate the habits of order which it forms, the spirit of emulation which it excites, the rapid improvement which it produces, the purity of morals which it inculcates—when I behold the extraordinary union of celerity in instruction and economy of expense—and when I perceive one great assembly of a thousand children, under the eye of a single teacher, marching with unexampled rapidity and with perfect discipline to the goal of knowledge, I confess that I recognize in Lancaster the benefactor of the human race. I consider his system as creating a new era in education, as a blessing sent down from heaven to redeem the poor and distressed of this world from the power and dominion of ignorance.
In a message to the legislature of Connecticut, a State then fairly well supplied with schools of the Massachusetts district type, Governor Wolcott said, in 1825:
If funds can be obtained to defray the expenses of the necessary preparations, I have no doubt that schools on the Lancastrian model ought, as soon as possible, to be established in several parts of this state. Wherever from 200 to 1000 children can be convened within a suitable distance, this mode of instruction in every branch of reading, speaking, penmanship, arithmetic, and bookkeeping, will be found much more efficient, direct, and economical than the practices now generally pursued in our primary schools.
The Lancastrian schools materially hastened the adoption of the free school system in all the Northern States by gradually accustoming people to bearing the necessary taxation which free schools entail. They also made the common school common and much talked of, and awakened thought and provoked discussion on the question of public education. They likewise dignified the work of the teacher by showing the necessity for teacher- training. The Lancastrian Model Schools, first established in the United States in 1818, were the precursors of the American normal schools.
COMING OF THE INFANT SCHOOL. A curious early condition in America was that, in some of the cities where public schools had been established, by one agency or another, no provision had been made for beginners. These were supposed to obtain the elements of reading at home, or in the Dame Schools. In Boston, for example, where public schools were maintained by the city, no children could be received into the schools who had not learned to read and write (R. 314 a). This made the common age of admission somewhere near eight years. The same was in part true of Hartford, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and other cities. When the monitorial schools were established they tended to restrict their membership in a similar manner, though not always able to do so.
In 1816 there came to America, also from England, a valuable supplement to education as then known in the form of the so-called Infant Schools (p. 630). First introduced at Boston (R. 313), the Infant Schools proved popular, and in 1818 the city appropriated $5000 for the purpose of organizing such schools to supplement the public-school system. These were to admit children at four years of age, were to be known as primary schools, were to be taught by women, were to be open all the year round, and were to prepare the children for admission to the city schools, which by that time had come to be known as English grammar schools. Providence, similarly, established primary (Infant) schools in 1828 for children between the ages of four and eight, to supplement the work of the public schools, there called writing schools.
THE DAME SCHOOL ABSORBED. For New England the establishment of primary schools virtually took over the Dame School instruction as a public function, and added the primary grades to the previously existing school. We have here the origin of the division, often still retained at least in name in the Eastern States, of the "primary grades" and the "grammar grades" of the elementary school.
[Illustration: FIG. 197 "MODEL" SCHOOL BUILDING OF THE PUBLIC SCHOOL SOCIETY Erected in 1843. Cost (with site), $17,000. A typical New York school building, after 1830. The infant or primary school was on the first floor, the second floor contains the girls' school, and the third floor the boys' school. Each floor had one large room seating 252 children; the primary schoolroom could be divided into two rooms by folding doors, so as to segregate the infant class. This building was for long regarded as the perfection of the builder's art, and its picture was printed for years on the cover of the Society's Annual Reports.]
An "Infant-School Society" was organized in New York, in 1827. The first Infant School was established under the direction of the Public School Society as the "Junior Department" of School No. 8, with a woman teacher in charge, and using monitorial methods. A second school was established the next year. In 1830 the name was changed from Infant School to Primary Department, and where possible these departments were combined with the existing schools. In 1832 it was decided to organize ten primary schools, under women teachers, for children from four to ten years of age, and after the Boston plan of instruction. This abandoned the monitorial plan of instruction for the new Pestalozzian form, which was deemed better suited to the needs of the smaller children. By 1844 fifty-six Primary Departments had been organized in connection with the upper schools of the city.