Horace Mann and the common school revival in the United States

Preface

The single purpose of this book is fairly to set before the reader Horace Mann as an educator in his historical position and relations. Everything is made to bend to this central idea. The aim is to tell the story clearly and simply, and in a manner to utilize some part, at least, of the great motive power with which Mr. Mann's life is charged. The materials for the story have been drawn mainly from the Life and Works of Horace Mann, five Vols., Boston, 1891. The other sources of information used in the preparation of the work are generally indicated in footnotes. Mrs. Mann's Life of Horace Mann, which is Vol. I. of the Life and Works, aboimds in extracts from his letters and diaries, and also contains many letters and extracts from letters written to him. It is, therefore, to a great extent a book of original materials, and its value is largely due to this fact. In some parts of the present work, and particularly in Chapter III., Mr. Mann's own language is often used with little change beyond what is necessary to transfer the narrative from the first person to the third person. This vi PREFACE

lias seemed better than to load the pages with formal quotations. Mrs. Mann's work is commonly referred to simply as The Life. Some facts have been furnished by Mr. George C. Mann of Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, son of Horace Mann. For this courtesy, and other valuable assistance that he has cheerfully rendered, the author extends to Mr. Mann his grateful acknowledgments.

B. A. HINSDALE.

University of Michigan, November 15, 1897.

Contents

CHAP. PAGE

I. Two Centuries of Common Schools . . 1 II. Horace Mann's Forerunners . . . .46

III. Horace Mann's Schools and Schoolmasters . 75

Chapter I

Any adequate account of Horace Mann, and of the Common School Eevival in the United States with which his name is connected, must be introduced by a general view of the progress of elementary education in the country for the first two centuries of its history. Accordingly, the first and second chapters of this work will be devoted to that object. Principal attention will be given to New England. Moreover, Massachusetts will hold the pre-eminence, because it was on her soil that the American system of common schools originated, and because she was both the home of Horace Mann and the first beneficiary of the great work that he accomplished.

I. Massachusetts

The Puritan character had been well annealed in the hot furnace that glowed in England following the Eeformation, and it is nowhere seen to better advantage than in the New England colonies. " God sifted a whole nation," the familiar quotation runs, "that he might send choice grain out into this

B 1 wilderness." The New England Puritans were as learned as they were pious, and as thoroughly devoted to education as they were to religion. Men of learning so abounded among them that, at one time, they counted one Cambridge graduate for every two hundred and fifty persons, and not a few Oxford men besides. In repute the teacher stood next to the minister. The leaders were thoroughly acquainted with the results, both of the Eenaissance and of the Eef ormation ; they regarded them as inseparable ; and so as soon as possible, after they made their first beginning, they took steps to plant the school and the church side by side in their new home.

In February, 1635, the town of Boston took action to establish its celebrated Latin school, the most venerable educational institution in New England.^ Other towns followed the example that Boston had set, and by 1647 as many as seven similar schools existed on the shores of Massachusetts Bay. In 1636, 1637 the General Court founded Harvard College, the oldest American seat of higher learning. The first colonial action relating to general education was had in 1641, when the General Court desired "that the elders would make a catechism for the instruction of youth in the grounds of religion." This expression of desire was soon followed by something more decisive. The grammar schools and the college together would fill the two upper divisions of the tripartite scheme of education; but the educational system could not be considered satisfactory

1 The Oldest School in America. An oration by Phillips Brooks, D.D., etc. Boston, 1885.

until proper elementary schools were founded, and tlie grammar schools put upon a firmer foundation than mere local consent or agreement. So, on June 14, 1642, the General Court enacted compulsory education. Since many parents and masters neglected the training of their children in learning and employment profitable to the Commonwealth, the Court ordered that the selectmen in every town should thenceforth stand charged with the care of redressing the evil; and to this end they should be clothed with power to take account, from time to time, of all parents and masters, and of their children in respect to calling and employment, and especially in respect to their ability to read and understand the principles of religion and the capital laws of the country. Fines should be imposed upon all who neglected the training of their children, or refused to render an account to the selectmen when called upon to do so.^ While the Act of 1642 made education compulsory, it did not provide schools or teachers; the people were still left to domestic instruction, to private teachers, and to such voluntary schools as they should organize among themselves. The situation was illogical as well as inconvenient ; so at least the statesmen of the Plantation seem to have thought, for, on November 11, 1647, the General Court enacted a general school law, the first one, be it observed, met with in American history. In modernized spelling this law runs as follows :

1 A collection of the early Massachusetts statutes relating to education will be found in The Repoi^t of the Commissioner of Education for 1892, 1893, Vol. II., pp. 1225-1339.

"It being one chief object of that old deluder, Satan, to keep men from the knowledge of the Scriptures, as in former times by keeping them in an unknown tongue, so in these latter times by persuading from the use of tongues, that so at least the true sense and meaning of the original might be clouded by false glosses of saint-seeming deceivers, that learning may not be buried in the grave of our fathers in the Church and Commonwealth, the Lord assisting our endeavors, —

^^ It is therefore ordered, That every township in this jurisdiction, after the Lord hath increased them to the number of fifty householders, shall then forthwith appoint one within their town to teach all such children as shall resort to him to write and read, whose wages shall be paid either by the parents or masters of such children, or by the inhabitants in general, by way of supply, as the major part of those that order the prudentials of the town shall appoint: Provided, Those that send their children be not oppressed by paying much more than they can have them taught for in other towns; and

" It is further ordered. That where any town shall increase to the number of one hundred families or householders, they shall set up a grammar school, the master thereof being able to instruct youth so far as they may be fitted for the university: Provided, That if any town neglect the performance hereof above one year, that every such town shall pay five pounds to the next school until they shall perform this order."

In 1647 Massachusetts consisted of some thirty towns, inhabited by about twenty thousand people. The law of that date rounded out the outline of the system of public instruction as it exists to-day. Evolution and not revolution has characterized the system from the beginning. Let us see what this outline really contained.

The Act recognizes the three customary grades of education, — elementary, secondary, and higher, — and all are made subject to the State's control. It lays stress upon the relation of education to the State; what is profitable to the Commonwealth is set up as the criterion to govern the action of the General Court. Again, while the responsibility of educating children is placed primarily upon parents and masters, the State may see to it that parents and masters perform their duty. Money may be raised by general taxation to defray the cost of public education; whether it shall be done or not, it is left with the towns themselves to determine. School provision is made compulsory, but not school attendance; the " shall " of the Act of 1647 is directed to towns not parents, and so is the fine that is to be imposed for non-compliance with legal duty. Citizens may pro-- vide tuition for their children at home, or in private schools as before. The schools are not formally free therefore, since they are to be supported either by those who use the schools or by the inhabitants of the town in general by way of supply, or by both of these. Important history turned on this word "or," as we shall see hereafter.

In the first elementary schools of Massachusetts only writing and reading were required to be taught.

The names that the secondary schools bore, Latin schools and grammar schools, suggest the staple of the teaching that they furnished. The curriculum of Harvard College consisted mainly of the Greek, Roman, and Oriental languages and divinity. Two reasons may be suggested for the stress that the Puritans placed on languages and language teaching. In its inception the Eenaissance was a distinctly classical movement; while Comenius, the ^ founder of the Realistic School of Pedagogy, was the contemporary of the founders of New England.^ It preceded and, to a great extent, caused the Reformation. Then Protestantism rests upon the authority of a book, a fact that has given primary education a great importance in all thoroughly Protestant countries. Now, to borrow Burke's famous phrase,^Puritanism was the dissidence of dissent, the Protestantism of the Protestant religion; so that for a Puritan to contend earnestly for the faith once delivered to the saints was to contend earnestly for the Bible. The preamble of the Act of 1647 is aimed straight at the Church of Rome and at those Angli- "cans who affected her ways, and the Act itself is alive with the spirit that emanated from Erasmus and Luther.

The question where the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay got their educational ideas' has been sometimes

1 On the authority of a passage iu Cotton Mather's Magnolia, it has been assumed that Comenius was offered the presidency of Harvard College. Mr. W. H. Monroe has subjected the assumption to a thorough examination, and reached the conclusion that Mather was in error. — Educational Bevieio, November, 1896, ^' Was Comenius called to Harvard ? "

asked. These Puritans were Englishmeii, and they sought to reproduce Old England, freed from what thej thought her faults, in New England. The men who laid the foundations of the new Cambridge had studied at the old Cambridge, and they patterned after it. The grammar schools that they set up in Boston and the other towns were modelled after the grammar schools that they had attended in the old home. The originals of the primary schools are less definite. Still the three grades of schools grow out of the nature of studies as related to the human mind: Comenius had already formulated the division in The School of Infancy ; while the idea, and to a certain extent the practice, of the tripartite division had become familiar in all countries that had been touched by the genius of Protestantism.

How generally or completely the foregoing legislation was carried out in Massachusetts, it is not easy at this distance of time to determine. In general it may be said that the system of education established in those early years grew for a time with the growth of the Commonwealth. The many learned to write and read in the elementary schools ; the few fitted for college in the Latin schools and graduated at Harvard. Previous to the Revolution Massachusetts, far more than any of the colonies outside of New England, was self-educated. The native schools furnished a supply of learned men for the service of the State and of the Church.

The primary schools and grammar schools were created, managed, and in part supported by the towns, but they were not for a long time generally free. The first planters had paid school fees in England, and they continued the practice in their new home. Then Governor Winthrop says: "Divers free schools were erected, as at Eoxbury (for maintenance whereof every inhabitant bound some house or land for a yearly allowance forever) and at Boston (where they made an order to allow forever £50 to the master and an house, and £30 to an usher, who should also teach to read and write and cipher, and Indian children were to be taught freely, and the charge to be by yearly contribution, either by voluntary allowance, or by rate of such as refused).'^ This order was confirmed by the General Court. Other towns did the like, providing maintenance by several means. ^

But the logic of events led straight to free schools. The question, whether those who used the schools or the inhabitants of the town should maintain them in whole or in part, was left to those to determine who ordered the prudentials of the town, and these inclined more and more to town support. The cost of the schools tended to outgrow the ability of parents and guardians to keep them up; while private benevolence is commonly slow when the public authorities can touch the lever of public taxation. The poor were unable to pay the tuition of their children, and discrimination between the poor and the rich was odious in the democratic atmosphere that surrounded the colony. And so the germs planted in 1642 and 1647 continued to grow until,

1 History of New England, 1630-1649. Boston, 1«53, Vol. II., p. 264.

I about the middle of the eighteenth century, the I schools became practically free. The dame school I pictured in The New England Primer is proof of I the currency of primary teaching.

As time wore on there was little additional school j legislation: the brief ordinances already enacted i proved in the main sufficient. In 1671 the Court ; doubled the penalty imposed upon towns having one ' hundred families that failed to support a Latin i! school, and a little later it doubled it again. In jl 1683 the Court enacted that every town consisting 1 of more than five hundred families or householders ; should set up and maintain two grammar schools I and two writing schools, and that the penalty imposed on towns having two hundred families or householders that failed to comply with the requirement of the law should be £20.

Before the close of the seventeenth century, it is claimed, an educational declension had set in. The doubling on two occasions of the fine imposed upon towns that failed to comply with the compulsory law in respect to Latin schools, is significant. This declension is commonly ascribed to the wars with the Indians and the French that wasted the blood and treasure of the colony; the political and social contentions that disturbed its peace; the uncertain relations that existed between Massachusetts and the Mother Country, and internal, economic, and social changes. There can be no doubt, too, that the brightness of the early Puritan ideal had become dimmed. It was impossible even for the Puritans to resist the deteriorating influences of environment;

while in education it is always harder, other things being equal, to hold a large and somewhat heterogeneous community up to a high standard than a small and select one. One of the internal changes that worked against the school should be particularized.

For a century or more the schools were all town schools, and what is now known as the Township Unit System prevailed. There were no school officers as such, but the selectmen, assisted by the ministers, who were real school supervisors, carried on the schools under the laws, subject to the instructions given by the freemen in the town meeting. The typical New England town of the first period was a small concentration of population, with outlying farms and a piece of common land grouped around the church and schoolhouse. This organization tended strongly to intensify the internal life of the community, as well as to make it much more capable of resisting external attacks. Sometimes the public authority defined the circle within which houses must be built, as one or two miles of the meeting-house.^

But when the increase of the colony and the down-

1 W. B. Weeden, Economic and Social History of Neiv England, Vol. I., pp. 282, 283, gives the following description :

"Next the meetiug-honse, locally and in the hearts of the settlers, was the common school. The location and definition of the Haverhill building, about 1670, for schools and for other uses of the community, was a type of the system. The house was placed on the common land, as near the meeting-house, * which now is as may be.' It was to be used for schools and for a watch-house, and on Sabbath days for the entertainment, between services, of those who did not go home. It was in substance an ' annex ' of the meeting on its social side. There they taught reading, writing, arithfall of King Philip removed or mitigated the immediate fear of danger, the growing population of the towns began to break ranks and scatter into the wilderness. Towns increased in number rapidly. But this was not all: the character of the towns, socially and economically, and to some extent politically, began to change. The new town was not so much a body of population gathered about the meeting-house and schoolhouse, as it was a body of population scattered over a township. Being less concentrated, life was less intense and vital than before. For example, a single school or a single church no longer answered the wants of the people as well as it had done, and a process of modification set in, which naturally went much farther in the educational sphere than in the religious sphere. We now begin to meet the "travelling" school or " moving " school, which for a time gained a considerable prominence, and continued to the time of Horace Mann. The travelling school reversed the usual practice: the school went to the children, not the children to the school; that is, the single town school was kept a certain time in one corner of the town, then in another, and so on until the circuit had been completed, the periods that it spent in the different localities being equal or unequal, as circumstances might determine. Even grammar schools

metic; in some instances, Latin and Greek, and 'good manners.' But in most schools there was little progress beyond the elementaryrudiments. As in the famous Pepperell family, near Kittery Point, an English grammar was preserved, to show the teaching, but the evidences are that the pupils made scant headway in such abstruse learning."

circulated. This method was called "squadroning out" the schools.^ But this evil was light and transient compared with those now to be mentioned. Soon the one central school of the town began to break up into a plurality of schools in the angles or " squadrons " of the town. Eor a time these schools were managed by the selectmen as before; but in a democratic society the portions of the town that had once gained schools would naturally soon begin to demand that their management be handed over to them, and just as naturally, the townships first, and then the Commonwealth, would in the long run yield to the demand. The result was the appearance and establishment of the school district. At first the district was established solely for the purpose of bringing the school to the people, and of regulating school attendance, leaving control, as before, in the selectmen of the town; but in time it became fully autonomous, a body politic and corporate.^ In its rudiments the district system was in practical operation by the middle of the last century, but it was not formally legalized in Massachusetts until near its close. There can be no doubt that it tended to the diffusion of education, or that this diffusion was purchased at the cost of depth and thoroughness. Had the district served simply the first purposes that it was created to accomplish, it would have been much more than defensible under

1 G. H. Martin, The Evolution of the Massachusetts Public School System. Boston, 1894, Lect. II.

2 The Report of the Commissioner of Education for 1894, 1895, Chap. XXXIV.

TWO CENTUEIES OF COMMON SCHOOLS 13

existing conditions. Perhaps the system worked for the best as it was ; but the disruption of the central educational authority in the town, when it came, and the introduction of a plurality of authorities, entailed upon the Commonwealth serious evils which will claim our attention hereafter. The old system of town control did not disappear at once; in fact, the Law of 1789, soon to be mentioned, assumes that it is still in vigorous operation.

In 1780 the constitution of Massachusetts was framed, ratified, and put in operation. It took under its protecting aegis the State system of education. It contains by far the most generous recognition of education found in any of the State constitutions of the period, and has never been outgrown. The constitution was followed, in 1789, by a revision and codification of the school laws, which was practically an adaptation of the law to the existing state of things. The declension of this law from the standard set by the Puritans is very marked in two particulars. A six-months' school takes the place of the earlier permanent school, and two hundred families is substituted for one hundred in the description of towns required to maintain a Latin school. This law would have wrought great havoc, provided all the towns had been complying with the old requirement. Under the old law two hundred and thirty towns out of two hundred and sixty-five were required to maintain a Latin school; under the new law, only a hundred and ten.^ This was a long step

1 Martin, Tlie Evolution of the Massachusetts Public School System, Lect. III.

14 HORACE MAKN

in the wrong direction, and was soon followed by others of the same kind.

Mr. Weeden calls the early part of the eighteenth century " ' the dark days ' of New England in education and social culture." "Schools were half neglected in many districts; in a few they were totally neglected. The daughters of men holding important offices in town and church were obliged often to make a mark instead of writing their signature. Yet in many places there was a dame school, and women performed important functions in education." English grammar was a rare science.^ Mr. Martin makes the more specific statement that "of women whose names appear in the recorded deeds of the early part of the eighteenth century, either as grantors of property or as relinquishing dower, something less than forty per cent sign their names ; all the others make their mark." ^ Towards the close of the same century Mr. Weeden reports that Noah Webster's Spelling Book was just coming into use, with Webster's Selections, Morse's Geography, and the Youth's Preceptor. The Bible was the ground work of all reading. " The helps to the pupils being few in comparison with modern resources and methods, the self-help and reliance developed by this crude system of education was something remarkable." ^

1 The Economic a7id Social Condition of New England, etc., p. 419.

2 The Evolution of the Massachusetts Public School System, p. 75.

3 Reviewing the whole course of education in a typical Massachusetts town down to 1800, Mr. C. F. Adams has said: "In point of fact, the children were neither taught much, nor were they taught well; for through life the mass of them, while they could do little

The American Ee volution did not, as we might now think it should have done, usher in an educational revival. The war left the country too much exhausted, and there were too many other things to think of. Colleges at once began to multiply, but the new institutions failed to maintain the earlier college standard. No new ideas, inspirations, or enthusiasms marked the period.^

In respect to public schools, Massachusetts continued on her downward course. The recognition of the school districts in 1789 left the powers of taxation and control still in the hands of the town : the districts served for supply only. If a district wanted a new schoolhouse built or an old one remore in the way of writing than rudely scrawl their names, could never read with real ease or rapidity, and could keep accounts only of the simplest kind. As for arithmetical problems, the knowledge of them was limited to the elementary multiplication, division, addition, and subtraction. None the less, after a fashion and to a limited extent, the Braintree school child, like the school children of all other Massachusetts towns, could read, could write, and could cipher; and for those days, as the world then went, that was much." — Three Episodes in Massachusetts History. Boston, 1892, p. 781.

1 The Marquis de Chastellux, a member of the French Academy and a major-general in the French army under Count de Rochambeau, travelled extensively in the United States in 1780-1782. He states that he found Americans suffering not a little from the reflection which occurred frequently ; that their language was the language of their oppressors. This feeling '* they carried so far," the Marquis says, "as seriously to propose introducing a new language; and some persons were desirous, for the convenience of the public, that the Hebrew should be substituted for the English. The proposal was that it should be taught in the schools, and made use of in all public acts." — Travels in North America, etc. Translated from the French by an English gentleman who lived in America at that period. London, 1787, Vol. H., pp. 265, 266.

paired, there was nothing for it but to provide the means by voluntary contributions. But in 1800 the taxing power was conceded to the districts so far as providing buikling sites, schoolhouses, and furniture was concerned. In 1817 the districts became corporations with the usual powers. In 1827 the districts gained the power to choose and contract with their own teachers, the power being exercised by a prudential committeeman who might be chosen in town meeting, but who was commonly chosen in school district meeting. The end of the road had now been reached. Democratic ideas had triumphed; and it was not until the Act of 1882 swept the new system away that the system of the Puritans was restored. Two limitations remained. The town still determined the total amount of school money to be raised, and levied the tax; but when the money had once been apportioned to the districts there was no accounting and no responsibility. Legally, the certificating of teachers still continued a town function, but this was more nominal than real. The districting of towns was not compulsory, and some were never districted. The foundation of the State school fund was laid in 1834.

The results following the later legislation that has been recounted were both social and educational in character. There ensued the contentions, school politics, irresponsibility, favoritism, small ideas, and wastefulness; the small schools, short terms, low ideals, lack of oversight, poor teachers, and poor teaching that have generally marked the introduction of the Township Unit System, In 1826 the law w?.s so clianged that no town was required to maintain a town high school unless it contained five hundred families, and then it was excused from providing instruction in the Latin and Greek languages unless its population so desired. Previous to 1826 there were one hundred and seventy-two towns in the State that were required to maintain schools in which Latin and Greek were taught; the legislation of that year removed the obligations from all of these but seven, and the seven were all maritime towns. Kor was Latin much taught in the schools that professed to teach it. The ancient and honorable name " grammar school " now disappeared from the Massachusetts statute book, and the name "high school" took its place. Verily, the State had found the descent to Avernus an easy one! The people of Massachusetts seemed almost as anxious to get rid of their schools as their ancestors had been to get them.

In the second half of the eighteenth century there set in an important educational movement that was partly the effect and partly the cause of the decline of the public schools. This was the founding of academies. Dummer Academy was opened, in Newbury, in 1763, but was not incorporated until 1782. Other institutions of the same grade followed in quick succession. The first of these schools originated in private beneficence; but about the close of the century the legislature adopted the policy of making such academies as complied with the terms of the law grants of wild land in the District of Maine, a half township each, thereby giving the schools so favored a gitasi-public character. The academies may be viewed under two aspects.

First they took the place, for the most part, that the decayed grammar schools no longer filled as fitting schools for college. In some counties at that time boys who fitted for college at home were compelled to fit themselves, with such assistance as they could get from the pastors of the churches. The academies sent to the colleges a better class of students than they had been receiving, thus enabling them to raise their acquirements for admission. They were also finishing schools, sending into society much larger numbers of pupils than they sent to the colleges. Upon the whole, the standard of the academies was probably higher than that of the grammar schools had been. They taught the English, Latin, Greek, and French languages; writing, arithmetic, geography, declamation, geometry, logic, and natural philosophy. Some of the charters also embraced the clause, "And such other liberal arts and sciences as the trustees shall direct." On this side there is nothing but good to be said of the academies.