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PUBLIC EDUCATION IN CALIFORNIA

ITS ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT, WITH

PERSONAL REMINISCENCES OF

HALF A CENTURY

BY

JOHN SWETT

AMERICAN BOOK COMPANY

NEW YORK .-. CINCINNATI :\ CHICAGO

Copyright, 1911, by JOHN SWETT

Entered at Stationers' Hall, London Public Educ. in Cal.

W. P. I

Preface

After my retirement from active public-school service, a number of my friends urged me, as a matter of duty that I owed to my profession, to prepare for publication a volume which should include an outline of my long and varied experience in educational affairs.

Rather reluctantly, I finally ventured on the experiment of writing a book in which the personal narrative should be made the thread for binding together various educational footnotes, including sketches of the common schools and rural academies which I attended in New Hampshire about the middle of the nineteenth century, and also the salient points in the development of public schools in California, the state which opened for me the gate of opportunity.

It has not been easy for me to write about my own work, and I have ceased to wonder why the autobiographies of American public school teachers are so few in number. ' Born and bred in New England, even the warmth of California sunshine has never quite thawed out that Puritan reticence which is mine by heredity and early environment.

The manuscript copy of this volume has been read, in part or in whole, by more than a score of professional teachers, to whom I am indebted for wholesome criticism as well as for warm commendation. I am under special obligations to Dr. Elmer Ellsworth Brown, United States Commissioner of Education, and to Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, President of Columbia University, for personal interest in my work. Furthermore, I deeply appreciate the helping hands of the officers and members of the Schoolmasters' Club, and of the California State Teachers' Association.

Hill Girt Farm, Martinez, California, 1910.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. The Genesis of the American Common Schools ... 9 II. My New England Environment 24

III. My Boyhood Home, Early School Days, and the

CHAPTER I The Genesis of American Common Schools

To comprehend clearly the origin and progress of common schools in America, it is necessary to consider briefly the chartered civil rights given by the English government to the Puritan colonists of New England.

The Company of Massachusetts Bay was organized in England by about a hundred influential Puritans for the purpose of making a settlement in New England where the people of their own religious belief should be free from the domination of the bishops of the established church of England, The stockholders in this company purchased from the Council for New England a narrow tract of land bordering on the Atlantic and extending indefinitely westward. The royal charter granted to this corporate company and signed by Charles II (1629) provided for a governor, a deputy governor, and a board of eighteen " assistants." The Company immediately dispatched a vessel which carried away to New England a hundred colonists under the lead of John Endicott, who was appointed governor. These colonists made a settlement at Salem.

In 1630 twelve leading members of the Company, all men of means and of education, including the scholarly

IO GENESIS OF AMERICAN COMMON SCHOOLS

John Winthrop, petitioned the General Court for leave to hold all future meetings of the Company in New England instead of in London, pledging themselves to go with the colonists and there make their home. The request was granted, and the same year the Company fitted out thirteen vessels which carried away nearly a thousand colonists, among whom were Governor John Winthrop and deputy governor Thomas Dudley, together with ten of the board of " assistants." When they reached their destination Governor Winthrop selected a place for settlement on Massachusetts Bay and named it Boston after the city of Boston in the mother country.

The charter of the Company provided an annual election, by the stockholders, of a board of eighteen " assistants," and for an annual election, by the assistants, of a governor and deputy governor, who, with the assistants, were to constitute a " general court," empowered to enact laws, to appoint magistrates, to make grants of land to colonists, levy taxes, and admit settlers to the "freedom of the colony," or, in other words, to give them the right of suffrage in town meeting. When the first colonial election was called, October, 1630, there were only twenty qualified electors in the colony, and of these the old board of assistants, including the governor and his deputy, constituted a majority. The old members of the board of assistants were reelected for another year, and the assistants reelected Governor John Winthrop. The General Court then proceeded to admit one hundred and eight colonists as " freemen" qualified to vote in town meeting. As a matter of course all of these new citizens were safe and true men, members of some Congregational Puritan church. The second meeting of the General Court, held May 18,

PURITAN GOVERNMENT IN MASSACHUSETTS II

1 63 1, passed the following order: — "For time to come no man shall be admitted to the freedom of the body politic, but such as are members of some of the churches within the limits of the same." 1

No magistrate could be appointed by the General Court unless he was a Puritan church member. It followed that the early colonial magistrates or judges were zealous in punishing, or fining, or banishing heretics such as Roger Williams, Anne Hutchinson, John Wheelwright, and the Quakers. But it must be borne in mind that at this time the idea of separating church from state had hardly entered into the minds of men, and suffrage based on manhood was dreamed of only by " visionaries." Year by year the number of freemen in the colony was so cautiously increased that at the end of four years, when the number of inhabitants was upwards of three thousand, the number of freemen was barely three hundred. 2

This year (1634) marked the beginning of rapid modifications of the civil government in the Bay colony. The new " towns" adjacent to Boston, such as Charlestown, Roxbury, Dorchester, Newtown (now Cambridge), and Salem, claimed the right of sending " delegates," two from each town, to represent their interests at the annual session of the General Court. The privilege was granted, and this marked the beginning of representative government. The

1 (Massachusetts Records, Vol. I.)

2 The following is the form of the "Freeman's Oath" as administered by the magistrates in 1634: —

" I do solemnly bind myself that I will give my vote and suffrage as I shall judge in mine own conscience may best conduce to the public weal; so help me God."

It is hard to find in colonial records a finer example of a vital principle condensed into idiomatic English.

next step was to curtail the power of the governor and the board of assistants by a law that no colonial taxes should be levied except by the representative delegates elected by the several towns. Then followed the demand for a written constitution, and a commission was appointed by the General Court "to frame a body of laws in resemblance to a magna charta." Following this, came the substitution of written ballots instead of counting votes by a show of hands.

In 1635, the scholarly Puritan statesman, Sir Henry Vane, came over from the English court to cast his lot with the infant colony. The following year (1636) he was elected governor of the colony of Massachusetts Bay. This was the year that the talented Puritan minister, Thomas Hooker, led his whole congregation of a hundred members away from the vicinity of Boston to the beautiful valley of the Connecticut River, and there founded a new town named Hartford, in which the right of voting in town meeting was not limited to members of the Congregational churches. It was during this same year that Roger Williams, another liberal Puritan clergyman, banished from the Bay colony for "heresy," went out into the wilderness among the Indians and founded the Rhode Island colony.

It is in the colonial town meetings for the management of local affairs that we find the democratic side of self-government, differing from the somewhat aristocratic and ecclesiastical organization of the General Court. These meetings, in the beginning, were called whenever required by urgent business or by military necessity, but in general once a year. In the original Anglo-Saxon or Teutonic tun moote (town meeting) , the sole test of a voice

COLONIAL TOWN MEETINGS 1 3

in the proceedings was the ability to bear arms and to light. The New England town meeting was a partial revival of an institution which, in the mother country, had been merged into the ecclesiastical organization of the established church of England, controlled by the king and the bishops.

The most important officers of the colonial town were the selectmen, three in number, who constituted a board for the general management of local business affairs. They appraised the value of taxable property, apportioned the taxes voted in town meeting for local purposes or imposed by the colonial General Court. The selectmen also collected the taxes, ordered the payment of bills, and acted as treasurers of the public money. There was a town clerk, who kept the town records, recorded the proceedings of town meetings, and kept careful accounts of the receipts and expenditures of public money. There was a constable to arrest offenders; a justice of the peace to try them; a pound keeper to take all stray cattle or horses and put them into safe enclosures; and still another officer was a hog-reeve to take up and impound stray swine. All of these town officials were elected annually for the term of one year. 1

1 The one feature that marred the democracy of the early town meeting was the fact that the right of suffrage was restricted to freemen, and no man was made a freeman by the general court unless he could prove himself to be a member of some Congregational church, sound on all the essential points of the Calvanistic Puritan creed. In itself, each little Congregational church was an independent organization that managed its own affairs. Each church elected its own minister by vote of its church members and dismissed him in the same manner. In the beginning, when there was only one church in a small town, the minister was elected in town meeting and paid out of the town treasury. It was hard to draw a dividing line between town and church.

Such was the civil government of the colony of Massachusetts Bay, which in the course of time developed into a representative form of state government.

Turning now from civil government to educational beginnings in the new colony, we find, as we might expect, that these recently transplanted Englishmen modeled their early schools after the grammar schools of the mother country. The Boston Latin School (1635) was started by a subscription list headed by Sir Henry Vane and Governor John Winthrop, but was soon placed under the control of the town selectmen, and thereafter the school was mainly supported by town appropriations. Into this school there entered about a dozen boys who were admitted on the sole condition that they could "read the English language," in other words, at about seven years of age. The curriculum was limited exclusively to Latin supplemented by a little Greek. At thirteen or fourteen years of age the boys were turned out fitted for college. In 1636, one year after the Boston Latin School was "set up," the General Court of the Bay colonies appropriated four hundred pounds ($2000) toward the establishment of a college at Newtown (now Cambridge).

At various intervals during the following decade, grammar schools were set up in Charlestown, Dorchester, Salem, Ipswich, Cambridge, Dedham, and Newbury in Massachusetts, at New Haven and Hartford in Connecticut, and at Newport in Rhode Island. These schools were taught exclusively by men and were attended exclusively by boys. Their primary purpose was to fit boys for college. The major study was Latin, combined with a little Greek. Boys were admitted into the grammar schools at about seven years of age, provided they could read

THE EARLY GRAMMAR SCHOOLS 15

readily in English, which accomplishment it was taken for granted they had acquired at home or in small private schools known as " women's schools," or "dame schools. "

The earlier grammar schools were supported partly by tuition fees, partly by town appropriations, partly by gifts, bequests, or endowments. In course of time, it was found that many parents did not desire their boys to study Latin; and reading in English, spelling, writing, and arithmetic were taken as a substitute, so that only a small minority of the pupils remained in the Latin course. Eventually Latin grammar was superseded by English grammar, and little of the original grammar school was left, except the name, which is still applied to the upper grades of the modern elementary graded school.

The conservative town of Boston finally came into line, and in 1682 voted in town meeting "that a committee with the selectmen consider and provide for the teaching of children to write and cipher within this town." Several grammar schools were opened, with one department for teaching writing and ciphering under one master, and the other department under another master, for teaching reading and spelling. Into these new English grammar schools boys were admitted at about seven years of age, or when they could "read the English language by spelling the same." It was one of these double-headed schools that Benjamin Franklin entered when an eight- year-old boy, remaining in it less than two years, which period included all the schooling he ever got. In Franklin's autobiography he says of himself, "I learned a good handwriting, but failed in arithmetic." Franklin's real education was gained in a printing office.

It seemed a matter of course that girls should remain illiterate, or else must learn to read and write, as in England, in the little private schools known as "dame schools" or "women's schools," in which the tuition fees were a penny a day.

Meanwhile, in 1642, the General Court of the Bay colony passed an act reading as follows:

" Forasmuch as good education is of singular behoof and benefit to any Commonwealth, it is ordered that the selectmen of every town have a vigilant eye over their brethren and neighbors to see first: That none of them shall suffer so much barbarism in any of their families as not to teach by themselves, or 1 others, their children and apprentices, so much learning as may enable them perfectly to read the English tongue, upon penalty of twenty shillings for each neglect therein."

This law does not seem to have been strictly enforced, but it served as a legal encouragement to the common people to "set up" small schools.

Five years later (1647) the General Court ordered: "that when a town had increased to the number of fifty house-holders, it should 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 the 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;" and it was further ordered that "where any town shall increase to the number of one hundred families or house-holders, they shall set up a grammar school, the master thereof being able to instruct youths so far as they may be fitted for the university." Three years later the Connecticut colony passed a law similar in the main to that of Massachusetts.

The provision for the setting up of grammar schools seems to have been enforced by the magistrates, but the

SCHOOLS IN RURAL DISTRICTS 17

matter of the smaller schools for teaching little children to write and read was, in general, left to the initiative of the common people themselves.

Common Schools in Rural Districts

It is in the records of settlements later than those at the seaports of Boston and Salem that we discover, in embryo, schools differing in type from the schools of old England. In these rural towns of small farms, after the settlers had made a clearing in the forest, they organized a town government, built a meeting-house, and in town meeting voted to hire a minister to preach the gospel. Then, in a few years, they voted in town meeting to build a schoolhouse and hire a man to teach a school to which all the children of the town, without limitation of age or sex, were admitted. Coeducation of the sexes was a necessity, not a theory. There was no printed course of study, but by custom the essential studies were reading, spelling, writing, and arithmetic. These sturdy freemen had a solemn conviction that their children ought to be able to read and write their mother tongue so that they could read the Scriptures and the church catechism. As a matter of business, they ought to know enough of arithmetic "to cast accounts." Such a school was the Hampton school of 1649, previously mentioned, which has an authenticated history in the original records of town meetings.

These primitive schools were sometimes supported by subscriptions, but were soon maintained by a tax voted in town meeting, sufficient to keep them open from three to five months in the year. These "common schools" of the plain people were not charity schools for the children of the poor. They were wholly unlike the endowed grammar schools of England, established for the higher classes. Whether these schools were good or whether they were poor depended almost entirely on the character of the schoolmaster or the temper of the people. Some of the early schoolmasters were college-bred men from over the sea, who, "finding themselves unfitted for the hard work of clearing woodlands or building stone walls, took to school-teaching. Such teachers were not limited to the customary studies of reading, writing, and arithmetic. As a matter of fact, they often helped along the big boys, who went to school during the long winters, in English grammar, or algebra, or even in Latin. Along the seacoast, at a later period, these teachers let the most promising boys worry their brains over Pike's Arithmetic, which included algebra through quadratic equations, and geometry through conic sections. 1

1 Such a teacher was John Sullivan, a scholarly Catholic Irish gentleman who came over to New England in 1723. After he had gained a foothold, twelve years later, he married Margery Brown, who, as a little girl seven years old, came over on the same vessel that brought John Sullivan. Shortly after their marriage, Schoolmaster Sullivan bought a small farm in Berwick, Maine, and continued teaching school in Berwick, and in Somersworth, New Hampshire. He spoke French fluently and taught Latin well. He seems also to have served incidentally as a lawyer in drawing wills and making out deeds and other legal papers. He taught school until he was ninety years old, and died on his farm in Berwick at the age of one hundred and four years.

The children of John Sullivan and Margery Brown seem to have inherited strong traits of character from both father and mother. Their son, John Sullivan, born in 1740, and educated in schools taught by his father, became a notable figure in the history of New Hampshire, as lawyer, jurist, and Major General in the Revolution. Another son, James Sullivan, born in 1744, became a lawyer, a jurist, and a governor of Massachusetts. One of Schoolmaster Sujli van's grandsons became governor of Maine; another, a senator from New Hampshire, and a third, lieutenant governor of Illinois. Schoolmaster Sullivan was a teacher who honered his profession.

SCHOOLS AND THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 1 9

It must be borne in mind by the student of educational history that in colonial times each little common school was a social center hardly second to that of the church. In the rural districts there were no daily papers, and the few weekly sheets in circulation were passed from hand to hand among a hardy yeomanry. There were no public libraries. Books were costly, and the majority of the farmers could not afford to buy them. To many families the Bible, the annual almanac, the New England Primer, and a few schoolbooks furnished their only reading matter. During the long cold winters when there was little farm work to be done, both boys and girls attended school up to the age of eighteen years. Along the seacoast the older boys were engaged during the summer months in fishing for cod on the "grand banks," or along the coast for mackerel. Having no work to do in winter, they went to school, studied arithmetic, and possibly navigation, if the young schoolmasters from Harvard or Dartmouth were competent to teach that branch of practical mathematics. These overgrown vikings of the seacoast were hard to govern, and the school committee preferred to employ robust athletes that could hold their own in a rough-and-tumble attack of the big boys to put the master out of the schoolhouse.

One of the Concord school of philosophers, Mr. F. B. Sanborn, born in the historic town of Hampton, N. H., said in a recent address, that "if there had been no common schools in New England, there would have been no American Revolution.' After the preliminary skirmish of Lexington, the hardy yeomanry of New England, who had been drilled in the common schools, promptly answered the call to arms and fought the battle of Bunker Hill. The strong-armed fishermen of Marblehead, Cape Ann, and Cape Cod volunteered in the militia or manned the numerous and daring privateers that were fitted out to prey on British merchant vessels. It was these hardy mariners who manned the boats which safely ferried Washington and his army across East River in the skillfully conducted retreat after the battle of Long Island. These same sailors and fishermen tugged at the oars of boats filled with "ragged Continentals" amid the floating ice of the Delaware, in the darkness of a stormy winter night, when Washington made his brilliant attack on the Hessians at Trenton. The right wing of that little army was commanded by General John Sullivan of New Hampshire, and the advance guard was led by General John Stark of the same state.

The Declaration of Independence, the long war with the mother country, and finally the adoption of the Constitution of the United States, led to a revision of state constitutions, of state laws, and of school laws. The veterans who had served through the war or fought in the ranks of the militia claimed their civil rights and in part got them. The right of suffrage was greatly extended by the relaxation of religious tests and by a reduction of property qualifications. Vermont in New England, and Kentucky in the West, were the pioneer states in establishing manhood suffrage, limited only by the age of twenty-one years. The new nation had, in some measure, cut loose from British precedents in state, in church, and in schools.

It was in 1789 that girls were admitted tentatively into the " English grammar schools of Boston town" by allowing them to go to school at the noon intermission when

SCHOOL DISTRICTS 21

the boys were absent from the schoolrooms, and on Thursday afternoons when the boys had a half holiday; but no provision had yet been made for teaching either boys or girls to read their mother tongue.

It was in 1789 that the legislature of Massachusetts enacted a law providing that towns could be subdivided into school districts. This law further provided that the course of study should include at least reading, writing, spelling, arithmetic, and "decent behavior." Opposition of the common people to the compulsory maintenance of the old-time Latin grammar schools had by this time become strong enough to secure in the law a provision that no town of less than two hundred families should be " required to maintain a grammar school."

This law of 1789 was amended eleven years later (1800) by empowering school districts to hold district meetings and to levy district taxes for building schoolhouses. In 181 7 school districts were made "corporate bodies." In > 1827 the law was amended so as to provide that towns having school districts should "choose for each district a 'prudential committeman' to look after the school and appoint the teacher." At this time geography was added to the list of school studies. 1

About this time the voters in Boston assumed the initiative in town meeting (18 18) by electing a committee "to establish and control primary schools for children under seven years of age." As a result, during the following year, twenty schools were opened, eleven hundred boys and girls were enrolled, and women were appointed as teachers. The Boston "primary schools" were opened

1 See George H. Martin's " Evolution of the Massachusetts Public School System," D. Appleton & Co., 1894.

one hundred and eighty-four years after the Boston Latin School was established.

This Massachusetts school law was so flexible and so democratic that it was suited both to the temper of the people and to the conditions of pioneer life. The school district became a small political unit in which the common people reigned supreme. The initiative in school matters must be taken by the people themselves. Other New England states followed the lead of Massachusetts. The state of New York enacted similar laws, modified by making the county, instead of the township, the political unit, and by providing for three school trustees in each school district. The New York law, in substance, was enacted by Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, and other states in the northwest. Still later, the main outlines of the New York law were taken as a basis of the law in California, in which state every rural schoolhouse has been built by a school-district tax, voted, not under compulsion, but on the initiative of the people assembled in school-district meetings. This law of 1789, with its long line of amendments, established the district common schools as they existed in 1835 when I began to go to school at five years of age in the town of Pittsfield in New Hampshire.

The Latin grammar schools and the early district schools have been the subjects of undue laudation on the one hand, and of unmerited criticism on the other. The fact is, that in the formative period the private schools, the denominational schools, the dame schools, and the common schools all were suited to the religious, the social, and the industrial conditions of the time in which they flourished, and they all contributed something towards the elementary education of the people. They must be

ADAPTABILITY TO PUBLIC NEEDS 23

judged by the conditions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, not by the standard of the twentieth century. The early public schools were organized by the plain common people assembled in town meeting. In their formative period they owed little to speculative philosophers or to denominational institutions. With every extension of the right of suffrage they grew stronger, keeping even pace with the progress of civilization, with the broader recognition of the rights of man, and with the increase in wealth and population.

Chapter II

In the central part of New Hampshire, about fifteen miles south of Lake Winnepesaukee, among the foothills of the White Mountains, lies the picturesque town of Pittsfield in which were born my father, my mother, and myself. My native town is small in area, containing only eighteen square miles. It forms a part of Merrimac County, which includes a section of the valley of the Merrimac River on which are situated Manchester, the chief city of the state,- and Concord, the capital. The early settlers were attracted to this hill region by its fine forests of oak, maple, white pine, hemlock and birch, and by the water power of the Suncook River, a branch of the Merrimac. Near the center of the town rises the long granite ridge of Catamount, shaggy with brush and trees, to a height of 1200 feet above sea level. The stony soil on the hills and rolling swells of glacial moraines was hard to clear, but, when subdued, was fairly productive. For more than half a century lumbering was an important source of profit. The tall white pines were cut and hauled in winter to tide water, a distance of about thirty miles, and sold for masts and ship timber.

One of the early settlers in Pittsfield, John Cram of Hampton, bought a large tract of woodland and built a small sawmill on the falls of the Suncook River, around which was clustered, in a few years, a thriving little village.

EARLY DAYS IN PITTSFIELD 25

The sawmill was followed by a gristmill, a fulling mill, and at a later period by a cotton mill.

Most of the early settlers of Pittsfield came from the town of Hampton, which seems to have been the hive that sent out swarms of hardy pioneers into the wilderness of central New Hampshire soon, after the close of the French and Indian War, when there was no longer danger from the incursions of savage foes.

Among these men in search of cheap land for homesteads were my grandfathers, Thomas Rogers Swett and Abraham French, and my great-grandfather on the maternalside, David Knowlton. In the early Pittsfield town records there are found many family names, all English, that appear in the still earlier Hampton records; such as Batchelder, Brown, Blake, Berry, Cram, Drake, Dow, Dearborn, French, Garland, Green, Jenness, Lane, Leavitt, Marston, Norris, Page, Perkins, Prescott, Swett, Smith, Sanborn, Tilton, and Towle. The names of small towns in southern New Hampshire, settled largely by emigrants from Hampton, show unmistakably that the early settlers came originally from the southwestern shires of the mother country over the sea, and they read like an extract from a geographical gazetteer of old England: " Hampton, Dover, Portsmouth, Exeter, Stratham, Epping, Nottingham, Salisbury, Durham, Epsom, Chichester, Canterbury, Pembroke, Newmarket; and crossing the line into Massachusetts, "Newbury," Ipswich, Essex, Gloucester, Marblehead, Boston, Plymouth, Yarmouth," etc.