The History of Education Part 35

Baird, C. W. _Huguenot Emigration to America_.

Grant, Jas. _History of the Burgh Schools of Scotland_.

Hughes, Thos. _Loyola, and the Educational System of the Jesuits_.

Kilpatrick, Wm. H. _The Dutch Schools of New Netherlands and Colonial New York_.

Laurie, S. S. _History of Educational Opinion since the Renaissance_.

Ravelet, A. _Blessed J. B. de la Salle_.

Schwickerath, R. _Jesuit Education; its History and Principles in the Light of Modern Educational Problems_.

Woodward, W. H. _Education during the Renaissance_.

CHAPTER XV

EDUCATIONAL RESULTS OF THE PROTESTANT REVOLTS

III. THE REFORMATION AND AMERICAN EDUCATION

THE PROTESTANT SETTLEMENT OF AMERICA. Columbus had discovered the new world just twenty-five years before Luther nailed his theses to the church door at Wittenberg, and by the time the northern continent had been roughly explored and was ready for settlement, Europe was in the midst of a century of warfare in a vain attempt to extirpate the Protestant heresy.

By the time that the futility of fire and sword as means for religious conversion had finally dawned upon Christian Europe and found expression in the Peace of Westphalia (1648), which closed the terrible Thirty Years'

War (p. 301), the first permanent settlements in a number of the American colonies had been made. These settlements, and the beginnings of education in America, are so closely tied up with the Protestant Revolts in Europe that a chapter on the beginnings of American education belongs here as still another phase of the educational results of the Protestant Revolts.

Practically all the early settlers in America came from among the peoples and from those lands which had embraced some form of the Protestant faith, and many of them came to America to found new homes and establish their churches in the wilderness, because here they could enjoy a religious freedom impossible in their old home-lands. This was especially true of the French Huguenots, many of whom, after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes [1] (1685), fled to America and settled along the coast of the Carolinas; the Calvinistic Dutch and Walloons, who settled in and about New Amsterdam; the Scotch and Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, who settled in New Jersey, and later extended along the Allegheny Mountain ridges into all the southern colonies; the English Quakers about Philadelphia, who came under the leadership of William Penn, and a few English Baptists and Methodists in eastern Pennsylvania; the Swedish Lutherans, along the Delaware; the German Lutherans, Moravians, Mennonites, Dunkers, and Reformed-Church Germans, who settled in large numbers in the mountain valleys of Pennsylvania; and the Calvinistic dissenters from the English National Church, known as Puritans, who settled the New England colonies, and who, more than any others, gave direction to the future development of education in the American States. Very many of these early religious groups came to America in little congregations, bringing their ministers with them. Each set up, in the colony in which it settled, what were virtually little religious republics, that through them they might the better perpetuate the religious principles for which they had left the land of their birth. Education of the young for membership in the Church, and the perpetuation of a learned ministry for the congregations, from the first elicited the serious attention of these pioneer settlers.

Englishmen who were adherents of the English national faith (Anglicans) also settled in Virginia and the other southern colonies, and later in New York and New Jersey, while Maryland was founded as the only Catholic colony, in what is now the United States, by a group of persecuted English Catholics who obtained a charter from Charles I, in 1632. These settlements are shown on the map on the following page. As a result of these settlements there was laid, during the early colonial period of American history, the foundation of those type att.i.tudes toward education which subsequently so materially shaped the educational development of the different American States during the early part of our national history.

THE PURITANS IN NEW ENGLAND. Of all those who came to America during this early period, the Calvinistic Puritans who settled the New England colonies contributed most that was valuable to the future educational development of America, and because of this will be considered first.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 107. MAP SHOWING THE RELIGIOUS SETTLEMENTS IN AMERICA]

The original reformation in England, as was stated in chapters XII and XIII, had been much more nominal than real. The English Bible and the English Prayer-Book had been issued to the churches (R. 170), and the King instead of the Pope had been declared by the Act of Supremacy (R. 153) to be the head of the English National Church. The same priests, though, had continued in the churches under the new regime, and the church service had not greatly changed aside from its transformation from Latin into English.

Neither the Church as an organization nor its members experienced any great religious reformation. Not all Englishmen, though, took the change in allegiance so lightly (R. 183), and in consequence there came to be a gradually increasing number who desired a more fundamental reform of the English Church. By 1600 the demand for Church reform had become very insistent, and the question of Church purification (whence the name "Puritans") had become a burning question in England.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 108. HOMES OF THE PILGRIMS, AND THEIR ROUTE TO AMERICA]

The English Puritans, moreover, were of two cla.s.ses. One was a moderate but influential "low-church" group within the "high" State Church, possessed of no desire to separate Church and State, but earnestly insistent on a simplification of the Church ceremonial, the elimination of a number of the vestiges of the old Romish-Church ritual, and particularly the introduction of more preaching into the service. The other cla.s.s const.i.tuted a much more radical group, and had become deeply imbued with Calvinistic thinking. This group gradually came into open opposition to any State Church, stood for the local independence of the different churches or congregations, and desired the complete elimination of all vestiges of the Romish faith from the church services. [2] They became known as Independents, or Separatists, and formed the germs of the later Congregational groups of early New England. Both Elizabeth (1558-1603) and James I (1603-25) savagely persecuted this more radical group, and many of their congregations were forced to flee from England to obtain personal safety and to enjoy religious liberty (R. 184). One of these fugitive congregations, from Scrooby, in north-central England, after living for several years at Leyden, in Holland, finally set sail for America, landed on Plymouth Rock, in 1620, and began the settlement of that "bleak and stormy coast." Other congregations soon followed, it having been estimated that twenty thousand English Puritans migrated [3] to the New England wilderness before 1640. These represented a fairly well-to-do type of middle-cla.s.s Englishmen, practically all of whom had had good educational advantages at home.

Settling along the coast in little groups or congregations, they at once set up a combined civil and religious form of government, modeled in a way after Calvin's City-State at Geneva, and which became known as a New England town. [4] In time the southern portion of the coast of New England was dotted with little self-governing settlements of those who had come to America to obtain for themselves that religious freedom which had been denied them at home. These settlements were loosely bound together in a colony federation, in which each town was represented in a General Court, or legislature. The extent of these settlements by 1660 is shown on the map on the opposite page.

BEGINNINGS OF SCHOOLS IN NEW ENGLAND. Having come to America to secure religious freedom, it was but natural that the perpetuation of their particular faith by means of education should have been one of the first matters to engage their attention, after the building of their homes and the setting up of the civil government (R. 185). Being deeply imbued with Calvinistic ideas as to government and religion, they desired to found here a religious commonwealth, somewhat after the model of Geneva (p.

298), or Scotland (p. 335), or the Dutch provinces (p. 334), the corner- stones of which should be religion and education.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 109. NEW ENGLAND SETTLEMENTS, 1660]

At first, English precedents were followed. Home instruction, which was quite common in England among the Puritans, was naturally much employed to teach the children to read the Bible and to train them to partic.i.p.ate in both the family and the congregational worship. After 1647, town elementary schools under a master, and later the English "dame schools"

(chapter XVIII), were established to provide this rudimentary instruction.

The English apprentice system was also established (R. 201), and the masters of apprentices gave similar instruction to boys entrusted to their care. The town religious governments, under which all the little congregations organized themselves, much as the little religious parishes had been organized in old England, also began the voluntary establishment of town grammar schools, as a few towns in England had done (R. 143) before the Puritans migrated. The "Latin School" at Boston dates from 1635, and has had a continuous existence since that time. The grammar school at Charlestown dates from 1636, that at Ipswich from the same year, and the school at Salem from 1637. In 1639 Dorchester voted:

that there shall be a rent of 20 lb a year for ever imposed upon Tomsons Island ... toward the mayntenance of a schoole in Dorchester.

This rent of 20 lb yearly to bee payd to such a schoole-master as shall vndertake to teach english, latine, and other tongues, and also writing. The said schoole-master to bee chosen from tyme to tyme p'r the freemen.

Newbury, in 1639, voted "foure akers of upland" and "sixe akers of salt marsh" to Anthony Somerby "for his encouragement to keepe schoole for one yeare," and later levied a town rate of 24 for a "schoole to be kepte at the meeting house." Cambridge also early established a Latin grammar school "for the training up of Young Schollars, and fitting them [5] for _Academicall Learning_" (R. 185).

The support for the town schools thus founded was derived from various sources, such as the levying of tuition fees, the income from town lands or fisheries set aside for the purpose, [6] voluntary contributions from the people of the town, [7] a town tax, or a combination of two or more of these methods. The founding of the "free (grammar) school" at Roxburie, in 1645, is representative (R. 188) of the early methods. There was no uniform plan as yet, in either old or New England.

FOUNDING OF HARVARD COLLEGE. In addition to establishing Latin grammar schools, a college was founded, in 1636, by the General Court (legislature) of the Ma.s.sachusetts Bay Colony, to perpetuate learning and insure an educated ministry (R. 185) to the churches after "our present ministers shall lie in the dust." This new college, located at Newtowne, was modeled after Emmanuel College at Cambridge, an English Puritan college in which many of the early New England colonists had studied, [8]

and in loving memory of which they rechristened Newtowne as Cambridge. In 1639 the college was christened Harvard College, after a graduate of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, by the name of John Harvard, who died in Charlestown, a year after his arrival in the colony, and who left the college his library of two hundred and sixty volumes and half his property, about 850.

The instruction in the new college was a combination of the arts and theological instruction given in a mediaeval university, though at Harvard the President, Master Dunster (R. 185), did all the teaching. For the first fifty years at Harvard this continued to be true, the attendance during that time seldom exceeding twenty. The entrance requirements for the college (R. 186 a) call for the completion of a typical English Latin grammar-school education; the rules and precepts for the government of the college (R. 186 b) reveal the deep religious motive; and the schedule of studies (R. 186 c) and the requirements for degrees (R. 186 d) both show that the instruction was true to the European type. In the charter for the college, granted by the colonial legislature in 1650 (R. 187 a), we find exemptions and conditions which remind one strongly of the older European foundations. A century later Brown College, in Rhode Island, was granted even more extensive exemptions (R. 187 b).

THE FIRST COLONIAL LEGISLATION: THE LAW OF 1642. We thus see manifested early in New England the deep Puritan-Calvinistic zeal for learning as a bulwark of Church and State. We also see the establishment in the wilderness of New England of a typical English educational system--that is, private instruction in reading and religion by the parents in the home and by the masters of apprentices, and later by a town schoolmaster; the Latin grammar school in the larger towns, to prepare boys for the college of the colony; and an English-type college to prepare them for the ministry. As in England, too, all was clearly subordinate to the Church.

Still further, as in England also, the system was voluntary, the deep religious interest which had brought the congregations to America being depended upon to insure for all the necessary education and religious training.

It early became evident, though, that these voluntary efforts on the part of the people and the towns would not be sufficient to insure that general education which was required by the Puritan religious theory. Under the hard pioneer conditions, and the suffering which ensued, many parents and masters of apprentices evidently proved neglectful of their educational duties. Accordingly the Church appealed to its servant, the State, as represented in the colonial legislature (General Court) to a.s.sist it in compelling parents and masters to observe their religious obligations. The result was the famous Ma.s.sachusetts Law of 1642 (R. 190), which directed "the chosen men" (Selectmen; Councilmen) of each town to ascertain, from time to time, if the parents and masters were attending to their educational duties; if the children were being trained "in learning and labor and other employments ... profitable to the Commonwealth"; and if children were being taught "to read and understand the principles of religion and the capital laws of the country," and empowered them to impose fines on "those who refuse to render such accounts to them when required." In 1645 the General Court further ordered that all youth between ten and sixteen years of age should also receive instruction "in ye exercise of arms, as small guns, halfe pikes, bowes & arrows, &c."

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE 9. Two TABLETS ON THE WEST GATEWAY AT HARVARD UNIVERSITY Reproducing colonial records relating to the founding of Harvard College.]

The Law of 1642 is remarkable in that, for the first time in the English- speaking world, a legislative body representing the State ordered that all children should be taught to read. The law shows clearly not only the influence of the Reformation theory as to personal salvation and the Calvinistic conception of the connection between learning and religion, but also the influence of the English Poor-Law legislation which had developed rapidly during the half-century immediately preceding the coming of the Puritans to America (R. 173). On the foundations of the English Poor Law of 1601 (R. 174) our New England settlers moulded the first American law relating to education, adding to the principles there established (p. 326) a distinct Calvinistic contribution to our new-world life that, the authorities of the civil town should see that all children were taught "to read and understand the principles of religion and the capital laws of the country." This law the Selectmen, or the courts if they failed to do so, were ordered to enforce, and the courts usually looked after their duties in the matter (R. 192).

_The Law of 1647._ The Law of 1642, while ordering "the chosen men" of each town to see that the education and training of children was not neglected, and providing for fines on parents and masters who failed to render accounts when required, did not, however, establish schools, or direct the employment of schoolmasters. The provision of education, after the English fashion, was still left with the homes. After a trial of five years, the results of which were not satisfactory, the General Court enacted another law by means of which it has been a.s.serted that "the Puritan government of Ma.s.sachusetts rendered probably its greatest service to the future."

After recounting in a preamble (R. 191) that it had in the past been "one cheife proiect of y't ould deluder, Satan, to keepe men from the knowledge of y'e Scriptures, ... by keeping y'm in an unknowne tongue," so now "by pswading from y'e use of tongues," and "obscuring y'e true sence & meaning of y'e originall" by "false glosses of saint-seeming deceivers," learning was in danger of being "buried in y'e grave of o'r fath'rs in y'e church and comonwealth"; the Court ordered:

1. That every town having fifty householders should at once appoint a teacher of reading and writing, and provide for his wages in such manner as the town might determine; and

2. That every town having one hundred householders must provide a grammar school to fit youths for the university, under a penalty of 5 (afterwards increased to 20) for failure to do so.

This law represents a distinct step in advance over the Law of 1642, and for this there are no English precedents. It was not until the latter part of the nineteenth century that England took such a step. The precedents for the compulsory establishment of schools lie rather in the practices of the different German States (p. 318), the actions of the Dutch synods (R.

176) and provinces (p. 335), the Acts of the Scottish parliament of 1633 and 1646 (p. 334; R. 179), and the general Calvinistic principle that education was an important function of a religious State.

PRINCIPLES ESTABLISHED. The State here, acting again as the servant of the Church, enacted a law and fixed a tradition which prevailed and grew in strength and effectiveness after State and Church had parted company. Not only was a school system ordered established--elementary for all towns and children, and secondary for youths in the larger towns--but, for the first time among English-speaking people, there was an a.s.sertion of the right of the State to require communities to establish and maintain schools, under penalty if they refused to do so. It can be safely a.s.serted, in the light of later developments, that the two laws of 1642 and 1647 represent the foundations upon which our American state public-school systems have been built. Mr. Martin, the historian of the Ma.s.sachusetts public-school system, states the fundamental principles which underlay this legislation, as follows: [9]

1. The universal education of youth is essential to the well-being of the State.

2. The obligation to furnish this education rests primarily upon the parent.

3. The State has a right to enforce this obligation.

4. The State may fix a standard which shall determine the kind of education, and the minimum amount.

5. Public money, raised by general tax, may be used to provide such education as the State requires. The tax may be general, though the school attendance is not.

6. Education higher than the rudiments may be supplied by the State.

Opportunity must be provided, at public expense, for youths who wish to be fitted for the university.

"It is important to note here," adds Mr. Martin, "that the idea underlying all this legislation is neither paternalistic nor socialistic. The child is to be educated, not to advance his personal interests, but because the State will suffer if he is not educated. The State does not provide schools to relieve the parent, nor because it can educate better than the parent can, but because it can thereby better enforce the obligation which it imposes." To prevent a return to the former state of religious ignorance it was important that education be provided. To a.s.sure this the colonial legislature enacted a law requiring the maintenance and support of schools by the towns. This law became the corner-stone of our American state school systems.

Influence on other New England colonies. Connecticut Colony, in its Law of 1650 establishing a school system, combined the spirit of the Ma.s.sachusetts Law of 1642, though stated in different words (R. 193), and the Law of 1647, stated word for word. New Haven Colony, in 1655, ordered that children and apprentices should be taught to read, as had been done in Ma.s.sachusetts, in 1642, but on the union of New Haven and Connecticut Colonies, in 1665, the Connecticut Code became the law for the united colonies. In 1702 a college was founded (Yale) and finally located at New Haven, to offer preparation for the ministry in the Connecticut colony, as had been done earlier in Ma.s.sachusetts, and Latin grammar schools were founded in the Connecticut towns to prepare for the new college, as also had been done earlier in Ma.s.sachusetts. The rules and regulations for the grammar school at New Haven (R. 189) reveal the purpose and describe the instruction provided in one of the earliest and best of these.