A great and obvious difference between our primary school system, and the common-school systems of the northern states, is, that they take in ALL children: while we aim to instruct only the children of the poor; literary paupers. We thus at once create two causes of failure: first, the slight value which men set upon what costs them nothing, as was evinced in the case of Connecticut; second, the mortification to pride (an honest though mistaken pride,) in being singled out as an object of charity.6 As if these fatal errors had not sufficiently ensured the impotence of the scheme, the schools themselves are the least efficient that could be devised. Instead of teachers retained expressly for the purpose,—selected, after strict examination into their capacities, and vigilantly superintended afterwards, by competent judges—the poor children are entered by the neighboring commissioner (often himself entirely unqualified either to teach or to direct teaching,) in the private school which chance, or the teacher's unfitness for any other employment, combined always with cheapness of price, may have already established nearest at hand. There, the little protegé of the commonwealth is thrown amongst pupils, whose parents pay for them and give some heed to their progress; and having no friend to see that he is properly instructed—mortified by the humiliating name of poor scholar—neglected by the teacher—and not rigorously urged to school by any one—he learns nothing, slackens his attendance, and soon quits the temple of science in rooted disgust.
6 "What you say here, is verified" (said a venerable friend to me, on reading these sheets as they were preparing for the press—a friend who at the age of 72, has taken upon him to teach 12 or 14 boys; more than half of them without compensation—) "what you say here, is verified in my school. Those who do not pay, attend hardly half their time; and one, who is anxious to learn, and would learn if he came regularly, is kept by his father to work at home, and has not been to school now for more than a fortnight. And it was just so," continued he, "when I managed the W. trust fund for a charity school, 20 odd years ago. The parents could not be induced to send their children. Sometimes they were wanted at home: sometimes they were too ragged to go abroad: sometimes they had no victuals to carry to school. And when we offered to furnish them provisions if they would attend, the parents said 'no, that was being too dependent.' In short, the school produced not half the good it might have done. There was the most striking difference between the charity scholars, and those who paid." Similar testimony as to such schools may be obtained of hundreds.
Observe now, I pray you, how precisely the results agree with what might have been foretold, of such a system. In 1833, nearly 33,000 poor children (literary paupers) were found in 100 counties of Virginia; of whom but 17,081 attended school at all: and these 17,081 attended on an average, but SIXTY-FIVE DAYS OF THE YEAR, EACH! The average of learning acquired by each, during those 65 days, would be a curious subject of contemplation: but I know of no arithmetical rule, by which it could be ascertained. That it bears a much less proportion to the reasonable attainments of a full scholastic year, than 65 bears to the number of days in that year, there can be no doubt.
Ranging, out of the schools, through the general walks of society, we find among our poorer classes, and not seldom in the middling, an ignorance equally deplorable and mortifying. Judging by the number met with in business transactions, who cannot write their names or read, and considering how many there are whose poverty or sex debars them from such transactions, and lessens their chances of scholarship; we should scarcely exceed the truth, in estimating the white adults of Virginia who cannot read or write, at twenty or thirty thousand. And of many who can read, how contracted the range of intellect! The mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms, all unexplored, though presented hourly to the eye; the glorious heavens, their grandeur, their distances, and the laws of their motion, unthought of; man himself—his structure, so fearful and so wonderful—those traits in his bodily and mental frame, attention to which would the most essentially conduce to bodily and mental health—all unnoted; History, Geography, tabulæ rasæ to them! And for political knowledge, upon which we of Virginia mainly pride ourselves—choose, at random, a man from the throng in any court-house yard, and question him touching the division of power between our two governments, and its distribution among the departments of each: the probabilities are ten to one, that he will not solve one in ten of your questions—even of those which are to be answered from the mere faces of the two constitutions. Take him then into that wild, where construction has been wont to expatiate, and you will find him just able to declare for or against this or that controverted power or measure: not because his reason has discerned it to be constitutional or otherwise, but because it is approved or disapproved by a chief of his own party, or by the leader of a hostile one. And the aggregate of opinions thus caught by accident, is the basis of the popular will: and it is the voice prompted by this will, that is called "The voice of God!"
Do not misapprehend me. Never would I have the voice of the people other than "the voice of God"—other than all-powerful—within its appropriate sphere. I am as loyal to their sovereignty as the most devout of their flatterers can be: and it is from my desire to see it perpetuated, that I speak out these unpalatable truths. Some roughness of handling is often necessary to heal a wound. The people, like other sovereigns, are sometimes misled by flattery: they should imitate also the wisdom of those monarchs we occasionally meet with in history, who can hear unwelcome truths, and let the speaker live; nay, hearken kindly to his discourse, and let it weigh upon their future conduct. Do I overrate the portion of the people I now address, in classing them with such monarchs?
Sagacious men have not been wanting among us, to see the radical defects of our primary school system: and in 1829, the late Mr. Fitzhugh7 of Fairfax, stimulated the Legislature to a feeble effort towards correcting them, by empowering the school commissioners of any county to lay it off into districts of not less than three nor more than seven miles square; and to pay, out of the public fund, two-fifths of the sum requisite for building a school house, and half a teacher's salary, for any one of those districts, whenever its inhabitants, by voluntary subscription, should raise the residue necessary for these purposes: and the schools thus established were to be open, gratuitously, alike to rich and poor. But the permissive phraseology of this statute completely neutralized its effect. It might have been foreseen, and it was foreseen, that empowering the commissioners to act, and leaving the rest to voluntary contributions, would be unavailing, where the workings of the school system had so long been regarded with apathy. The statute has been acted upon, so far as I have learned, in but three counties of the State; remaining, as to the other 107, a dead letter. I have the strongest warrant—that of actual experiment, in New York and in Massachusetts—for saying, that had the law commanded the commissioners to lay off districts in all counties where the census shewed a sufficiently dense white population; and had it then organized in the districts some local authorities, whose duty it should be to levy the needful amount upon their people;—I should have been saved the ungracious task of reproaching my country with her want of parental care; and Virginia would now be striding onward, speedily to recover the ground she has lost in the career of true greatness.
7 William H. Fitzhugh—whose death cannot yet cease to be deplored as a public calamity; cutting short, as it did, a career, which his extraordinary means and his devoted will alike bade fair to make a career of distinguished usefulness.
If a sense of interest, and of duty, do not prompt her people, and her legislature, immediately, to supply defects so obvious, to correct evils so glaring; surely, very shame at the contemplation of her inferiority to those, above whom she once vaunted herself so highly, will induce measures which cannot be much longer deferred without disgrace as well as danger.
In addition to normal schools (for training teachers,) an able writer in the Edinburgh Review (to which8 I owe the particulars of the Prussian, German, and French school systems) suggests, in my opinion very judiciously, the attaching of a Professorship to Colleges, for lecturing upon the art of instruction; to be called the professorship of Didactics. Such a chair, ably filled, would be invaluable for multiplying enlightened teachers, and for enhancing the dignity of that under-estimated pursuit. Conjointly with the normal schools, it would soon ensure an abundant supply of instructors for all the common schools.
8 Nos. 116, 117—July and October, 1833—reviewing several works of M. Cousin, who went as commissioner from France, to explore and report upon the Prussian and German systems of public instruction.