"Later verses tell the praise of George Washington. Then comes a series of Bible questions and answers; then an 'alphabet of lessons for youth,' consisting of verses of the Bible beginning successively with A, B, C, and so on. X was a difficult initial letter, and had to be contented with 'Xhort one another daily, etc.' After the Lord's prayer and Apostle's Creed appeared sometimes a list of names for men and women, to teach children to spell their own names. The largest and most interesting picture was that of the burning at the stake of John Rogers; and after this a six page set of pious rhymes which the martyr left at his death for his family of small children. After the year 1750, a few very short stories were added to its pages, and were probably all the children's stories that many of the scholars of that day ever saw."[389]
In the establishing of the elementary schools in New England there was but little more required of the teacher than to instruct the children in reading and writing, especially were they to be taught sufficiently that they could read the Bible. Also they were to be taught enough arithmetic for their every-day needs. This is well shown in the records of the town of Plymouth, where in 1671 they had built a schoolhouse and employed a schoolmaster "to teach the children and youth to read the Bible, to write, and to cast accounts."[390] In the secondary schools the emphasis was laid upon Latin and such other subjects were taught as would fit the scholars for college. Penmanship was made a great deal of while orthography was not, the results of which are shown by the writing and spelling of the diaries and other writings of that period that remain.
The work of the district school, of the academy, and of the college is well portrayed by McMaster. "The daily labors of the schoolmaster who taught in the district school-house three generations since were confined to teaching his scholars to read with a moderate degree of fluency, to write legibly, to spell with some regard for the rules of orthography, and to know as much of arithmetic as would enable them to calculate the interest on a debt, to keep the family accounts, and to make change in a shop.... To sit eight hours a day on the hardest of benches poring over Cheever's Accidence; to puzzle over long words in Dilworth's speller; to commit to memory pages of words in Webster's American Institute; to read long chapters in the Bible; to learn by heart Dr. Watt's hymns for children; to be drilled in the Assembly Catechism; to go to bed at sundown, to get up at sunrise, and to live on brown bread and pork, porridge and beans, made up, with morning and evening prayers, the every-day life of the lads at most of the academies and schools of New England.... The four years of residence at college were spent in the acquisition of Latin and Greek, a smattering of mathematics, enough of logic to distinguish barbara from celarent, enough of rhetoric to know climax from metonomy, and as much of metaphysics as would enable one to talk learnedly about a subject he did not understand."[391]
The teachers of the elementary schools of those early days were too often not educated nor cultured men. These men in many cases were drunken, cruel, ignorant, and lazy. Drunkenness seems to have been quite prevalent among the teachers of early New York, and yet there were some most excellent men among them. In the middle and southern colonies among the teachers were redemptioners and exported criminals. It was not uncommon on the arrival of a ship for schoolmasters to be advertised for sale along with men of other callings and usually the teachers did not fetch as good prices as weavers, tailors, and the like. The teachers in the secondary schools, on the contrary, often were men of good scholarship and of high standing in the community, occupying a place of honor among their fellow men. Such teachers were Christopher Dock in Pennsylvania and Ezekiel Cheever in New England.
"Among the New England teachers there were men of both learning and ability. Not a more cultured body of men ever formed a colony than settled about Boston, Salem, New Haven, and Hartford. They coveted the best advantages for their children, frequently making the best men their teachers. It is on record that of the twenty-two masters of Plymouth from 1671 to the Revolution, twenty were graduates of Harvard. The like was true of Roxbury. Such men, next to the functionaries of church and state, commanded the highest respect. In the churches they had special pews provided for their use beside those of magistrates and the deacon's family. In every community was usually one who was the teacher professionally, so considered as much as was the minister or physician."[392]
There were women teachers in the colonial times. They taught what was known as dame-schools, which were attended by small boys and girls. Women teachers and dame-schools were probably confined to New England and parts of New York adjacent to New England and settled by emigrants from there. There grew up the custom in some rural districts of having one term of school in the summer for the younger pupils and taught by a woman and another term in the winter for the older pupils and taught by a man. This arrangement arose because it was difficult for the younger children to attend school during the bitter weather of the winter, while the older pupils could attend well only during the cold time of the year when there was not much work to do on the farm.
There is in existence a contract between a Dutch schoolmaster and the authorities of Flatbush, New York, of the date of October 8, 1682. This is a full paper and quite well shows the duties of a teacher of that time in that colony. The school day was to be from eight o'clock to eleven and from one to four. Each forenoon and afternoon session was to open and close with prayer. On every Wednesday and Saturday the schoolmaster was to instruct the children in the common prayers and in the catechism and to be present at the church meeting when the children were catechized before the congregation. He was to keep school nine months in succession, from September to June of each year. Beside his school duties he had church duties. He was to keep the church clean, ring the bell, lead in the singing, and sometimes he was to read the sermon. He was to provide water for baptism and to furnish the minister with the name of the child to be baptized and also the names of the parents or witnesses. He was to provide bread and wine for the communion. He was to serve as messenger for the consistory. He was to give out the funeral invitations, dig the grave, and toll the bell.[393]
It can scarcely be believed that the schoolmasters of the early period of our country could have been so cruel as is told of them. It would appear as if a great deal more time was put upon devising means of punishment than upon learning ways of instruction. It was a time of cruelty and of belief in the general depravity of humanity. It was deemed that there was a natural wilfulness in children that needed stern repression and harsh correction. The parents and teachers in New England were especially repressive of child nature and their guide and rule of action, the Bible, gave them constant proof of the need of corrective punishment for children. "John Robinson, the Pilgrim preacher, said in his essay on Children and Their Education: 'Surely there is in all children (though not alike) a stubbornes and stoutnes of minde arising from naturall pride which must in the first place be broken and beaten down that so the foundation of their education being layd in humilitie and tractablenes other virtues may in their time be built thereon.'"[394]
The rod was very greatly in use by the schoolmasters of colonial times and too often the rod became the cudgel. Some teachers had the boy mount the back of another boy and with arms and legs held tight he was given a beating. The ferule was applied to the hands, the face, and the feet, and sometimes this ferule was a heavy oaken ruler. One instrument used was a hickory club with leather thongs attached at one end and similar to it was the tattling stick, a cat-o'-nine-tails with heavy leather straps. Another instrument used was termed a flapper, which was a piece of leather about six inches wide with a hole in the middle and fastened to a handle. Every stroke with this flapper on a boy's bared back would raise a blister the size of the hole in the leather. A branch of a tree was split and placed over a child's nose and he had to then stand before the school. For whispering a whispering-stick was used, which was a kind of wooden gag tied in the mouth with strings, somewhat as a horse's bit. Another punishment was to put two boys together in a yoke devised for that purpose, similar to an ox-yoke, and to make the punishment all the more disgraceful would be to yoke a boy and girl together. A unipod, a one-legged stool, was used, and the child occupying it found it very hard and tiresome to balance himself on it. The dames in their schools used quite freely a heavy iron thimble, which by being snapped quite vigorously against a boy's head would make for him "thimell-pie." The dunce-block was freely used and the culprit appropriately labelled, as, "Tell-Tale," "Bite-Finger-Baby," "Lying Ananias," "Idle-Boy," and "Pert-Miss-Prat-a-Pace." There were some teachers who did not use such cruel punishments, although they must have been very few in number, one being Samuel Dock, a German schoolmaster of Pennsylvania, who was intelligent enough to be kind to his children, but there were plenty of the drunken, dirty, careless, and cruel teachers in that colony. Mrs. Earle states: "I may say here that I have not found that New York schoolmasters were ever as cruel as were those of New England."[395]
"I often fancy that I should have enjoyed living in the good old times, but I am glad I never was a child in colonial New England—to have been baptized in ice water, fed on brown bread and warm beer, to have had to learn the Assembly's Catechism and 'explain all the Quaestions with conferring Texts,' to have been constantly threatened with fear of death and terror of God, to have been forced to commit Wigglesworth's 'Day of Doom' to memory, and, after all, to have been whipped with a tattling-stick."[396]