The History of Education Part 46

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 143. CHILDREN AS MINIATURE ADULTS Children leaving school, from an eighteenth-century drawing by Saint Aubin.]

Among the middle and upper social cla.s.ses, particularly on the continent of Europe, a stiff artificiality everywhere prevailed. Children were dressed and treated as miniature adults, the normal activities of childhood were suppressed, and the natural interests and emotions of children found little opportunity for expression. Wearing powdered and braided hair, long gold-braided coats, embroidered waistcoats, c.o.c.kaded hats, and swords, boys were treated more as adults than as children.

Girls, too, with their long dresses, hoops, powdered hair, rouged faces, and demure manner, were trained in a, for children, most unnatural manner.

[25]

The dancing master for their manners and graces, and the religious instructor to develop in them the ability to read and to go through a largely meaningless ceremonial, were the chief guides for the period of their childhood.

SCHOOL SUPPORT. No uniform plan, in any country, had as yet been evolved for even the meager support which the schools of the time received. The Latin grammar schools were in nearly all cases supported by the income from old "foundations" and from students' fees, with here and there some state aid. The new elementary vernacular schools, though, had had a.s.signed to them few old foundations upon which to draw for maintenance, and in consequence support for elementary schools had to be built up from new sources, and this required time.

In England the Act of Conformity of 1662 (R. 166), it will be remembered (p. 324), had laid a heavy hand on the schools by driving all Dissenters from positions in them, and the Five Mile Act of 1665 had borne even more severely on the teachers in the schools of the Dissenters. Fortunately for elementary education in England, however, the English courts, in 1670, had decided in a test case that the teacher in an elementary school could not be deprived of his position by failure of the bishop to license him, if he were a nominee of the founder or the lay patron of the school. The result of this decision was that, between 1660 and 1730, 905 endowed elementary schools were founded in England, and 72 others previously founded had their endowments increased. The number continued to increase throughout the eighteenth century, and by 1842 had reached a total of 2194. These new foundations probably gave the best schooling of the time, and tended to stir the Established Church to action. Accordingly we find that during the eighteenth century the vestries of the different church parishes began the creation of parish elementary schools for the children of the poor of the parish, supporting a teacher for them out of the parish rates, and without specific legal authorization to do so. These new parish schools also contributed somewhat to the provision of elementary education, and mark the beginning of the church "voluntary schools" which were such a characteristic feature of nineteenth-century English education. We thus have, in England, endowed elementary schools, parish schools, dame schools, private-adventure schools of many types, and charity-schools, all existing side by side, and drawing such support as they could from endowment funds, parish rates, church t.i.thes, subscriptions, and tuition fees. The support of schools by subscription lists (R. 240) was a very common proceeding. Education in England, more than in any other Protestant land, early came to be regarded as a benevolence which the State was under no obligation to support. Only workhouse schools were provided for by the general taxation of all property.

In the Netherlands and in German lands church funds, town funds, and tuition fees were the chief means of support, though here and there some prince had provided for something approaching state support for the schools of his little princ.i.p.ality. Frederick the Great had ordered schools established generally (1763) and had decreed the compulsory attendance of children (R. 274), but he had depended largely on church funds and tuition fees (--7) for maintenance, with a proviso that the tuition of poor and orphaned children should be paid from "any funds of the church or town, that the schoolmaster may get his income" (--8). In Scotland the church parish school was the prevailing type. In France the religious societies (p. 345) provided nearly all the elementary vernacular religious education that was obtainable.

In the Dutch Provinces, in the New England Colonies, and in some of the minor German States, we find the clearest examples of the beginnings of state control and maintenance of elementary schools--something destined to grow rapidly and in the nineteenth century take over the school from the Church and maintain it as a function of the State. The Prussian kings early made grants of land and money for endowment funds and support, and state aid was ordered granted by Maria Theresa for Austria (R. 274 a), in 1774. In the New England Colonies the separation of the school from the Church, and the beginnings of state support and control of education, found perhaps their earliest and clearest exemplification. In the other Colonies the lottery was much used (R. 246) to raise funds for schools, while church t.i.thes, subscription lists, and school societies after the English pattern also helped in many places to start and support a school or schools.

Only by some such means was it possible in the eighteenth century that the children of the poor could ever enjoy any opportunities for education. The parents of the poor children, themselves uneducated, could hardly be expected to provide what they had never come to appreciate themselves. On the other hand, few of the well-to-do cla.s.ses felt under any obligation to provide education for children not their own. There was as yet no realization that the diffusion of education contributed to the welfare of the State, or that the ignorance of the ma.s.ses might be in any way a public peril. This att.i.tude is well shown for England by the fact that not a single law relating to the education of the people, aside from workhouse schools, was enacted by Parliament during the whole of the eighteenth century. The same was true of France until the coming of the Revolution.

It is to a few of the German States and to the American Colonies that we must turn for the beginnings of legislation directing school support. This we shall describe more in detail in later chapters.

THE LATIN SECONDARY SCHOOL. The great progress made in education during the eighteenth century, nevertheless, was in elementary education.

Concerning the secondary schools and the universities there is little to add to what has previously been said. During this century the secondary school, outside of German lands, remained largely stationary. Having become formal and lifeless in its teaching (p. 283), and in England and France crushed by religious-uniformity legislation, the Latin grammar school of England and the surviving colleges in France practically ceased to exert any influence on the national life. The Jesuit schools, which once had afforded the best secondary education in Europe, had so declined in usefulness everywhere that they were about to be driven from all lands.

The Act of Conformity of 1662 (R. 166) had dealt the grammar schools of England a heavy blow, and the eighteenth century found them in a most wretched condition, with few scholars, and their endowments shamefully abused. The Law of 1662, says Montmorency, "involved such a peering into the lives of schoolmasters, such a course of inquisitorial folly, that the position became intolerable. Men would not become schoolmasters....

Education had no meaning when none but political and religious hypocrites were allowed to teach.... National education was destroyed." and the grammar schools of England were "practically withdrawn during more than two centuries (1662-1870) from the national life." [26]

In German lands the old Latin schools continued largely unchanged until near the middle of the eighteenth century, with Latin, taught as it had been for a century or more, as the chief subject of study. Shortly after the coming of Frederick the Great to the throne (1740) the Latin schools of Prussia, and after them the Latin schools in other German States, were reorganized and given a new life. The influence of Francke's school at Halle (p. 418), and the new types of teaching developed there and by his followers elsewhere, began to be felt. German, French, and mathematics were given recognition, and some science work was here and there introduced. Above all, though, Greek now attained to the place of first importance in the reorganized Latin schools.

It was not until after 1740 that the German people awakened to the possibility of an independent national life. Then, under the new impulse toward nationality, French influence and manners were thrown off, German literature attained its Golden Age, the _Ritterakademieen_ (p. 405) were discarded, and a number of the German Princ.i.p.alities and States revised their school regulations and erected, out of the old Latin schools, a series of humanistic _gymnasia_ in which the study of Greek life and culture occupied the foremost place. New methods in cla.s.sical study were thought out and applied, and a new pedagogical purpose--culture and discipline--was given to the regenerated Latin schools. A new Renaissance, in a way, took place in German lands, [27] and a knowledge of Greek was proclaimed by German university and gymnasial teachers as indispensable to a liberal education with an earnestness of conviction not exceeded by Battista Guarino (p. 268) four centuries before. To know Greek and to have some familiarity with Greek literature and history now came to be regarded as necessary to the highest culture, [28] and a pedagogical theory for such study was erected, based on the discipline of the mind, [29] which dominated the German cla.s.sical school throughout the entire nineteenth century. It was in the eighteenth century also that the German States began the development of the scientific secondary school (_Realschule_), see p. 420, as described in a preceding chapter.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 144. A PENNSYLVANIA ACADEMY York Academy, York, Pennsylvania, founded by the Protestant Episcopal Church, in 1787.]

RISE OF THE ACADEMY IN AMERICA. As we have seen (p. 361), the English Latin grammar school was early (1635) carried to New England, and set up there and elsewhere in the Colonies, but after the close of the seventeenth century its continued maintenance was something of a struggle.

Particularly in the central and southern colonies, where commercial demands early made themselves felt, the tendency was to teach more practical subjects. This tendency led to the evolution, about the middle of the eighteenth century, of the distinctively American Academy, with a more practical curriculum, and by the close of the century it was rapidly superseding the older Latin grammar school. Franklin's Academy at Philadelphia, which began instruction in 1751, and which later evolved into the University of Pennsylvania, was probably the first American Academy. The first in Ma.s.sachusetts was founded in 1761, and by 1800 there were seventeen in Ma.s.sachusetts alone. The great period of academy development was the first half of the nineteenth century. The Phillips Academy, at Andover, Ma.s.sachusetts, founded in 1788, reveals clearly the newer purpose of these American secondary schools. The foundation grant of this school gives the purpose to be:

to lay the foundation of a public free school or ACADEMY for the purposes of instructing Youth, not only in English and Latin Grammar, Writing, Arithmetic, and those Sciences wherein they are commonly taught; but more especially to learn them the GREAT END AND REAL BUSINESS OF LIVING ... it is again declared that the _first_ and _principle_ object of this Inst.i.tution is the promotion of TRUE PIETY and VIRTUE; the _second_, instruction in the English, Latin, and Greek Languages, together with Writing, Arithmetic, Music, and the Art of Speaking; the _third_, practical Geometry, Logic, and Geography; and the _fourth_, such other liberal Arts and Sciences or Languages, as opportunity and ability may hereafter admit, and as the TRUSTEES shall direct.

Though still deeply religious, these new schools usually were free from denominationalism. Though retaining the study of Latin, they made most of new subjects of more practical value. A study of real things rather than words about things, and a new emphasis on native English and on science were prominent features of their work. They were also usually open to girls, as well as boys,--an innovation in secondary education before almost wholly unknown. Many were organized later for girls only. These inst.i.tutions were the precursors of the American public high school, itself a type of the most democratic inst.i.tution for secondary education the world has ever known.

THE UNIVERSITIES. The condition of the universities by the middle of the eighteenth century we traced in the preceding chapter. They had lost their earlier importance as inst.i.tutions of learning, but in a few places the sciences were slowly gaining a foothold, and in German lands we noted the appearance of the first two modern universities--inst.i.tutions destined deeply to influence subsequent university development, as we shall point out in a later chapter.

END OF THE TRANSITION PERIOD. We have now reached, in our study of the history of educational progress, the end of the transition period which marked the change in thinking from mediaeval to modern att.i.tudes. The period was ushered in with the beginnings of the Revival of Learning in Italy in the fourteenth century, and it may fittingly close about the middle of the eighteenth.

We now stand on the threshold of a new era in world history. The same questioning spirit that animated the scholars of the Revival of Learning, now full-grown and become bold and self-confident, is about to be applied to affairs of politics and government, and we are soon to see absolutism and mediaeval att.i.tudes in both Church and State questioned and overthrown. New political theories are to be advanced, and the divine right of the people is to be a.s.serted and established in England, the American Colonies, and in France, and ultimately, early in the twentieth century, we are to witness the final overthrow of the divine-right-of- kings idea and a world-wide sweep of the democratic spirit. A new human and political theory as to education is to be evolved; the school is to be taken over from the Church, vastly expanded in scope, and made a constructive instrument of the State; and the wonderful nineteenth century is to witness a degree of human, scientific, political, and educational progress not seen before in all the days from the time of the Crusades to the opening of the nineteenth century. It is to this wonderful new era in world history that we now turn.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

1. Contrast a religious elementary school, with the Catechism as its chief textbook, with a modern public elementary school.

2. Contrast the elementary schools of Mulcaster and Comenius.

3. To what extent did the religious teachings of the time support Locke's ideas as to the disciplinary conception of education?

4. Do we to-day place as much emphasis on habit formation as did Locke? On character? On good breeding?

5. State some of the reasons for the noticeable weakening of the hold of the old religious theory as to education, in Protestant lands, by the middle of the eighteenth century.

6. How do you explain the slow evolution of the elementary teacher into a position of some importance? Is the evolution still in process?

Ill.u.s.trate.

7. What were the motives behind the organization of the religious charity- schools?

8. Show how tax-supported workhouse schools represented, for England, the first step in public-school maintenance.

9. Show that teaching under the individual method of instruction was school keeping, rather than school teaching.

10. How do you explain the general prevalence of harsh discipline well into the nineteenth century?

11. Did any other country have, in the eighteenth century, so mixed a type of elementary education as did England? Why was it so badly mixed there?

12. Show how the English Act of Conformity, of 1662, stifled the English Latin grammar schools.

13. What reasons were there for the development of the more practical Academy in America, rather than in England?

14. Compare the American Academy with the German _Realschule_.

SELECTED READINGS

In the accompanying _Book of Readings_ the following selections, ill.u.s.trative of the contents of this chapter, are reproduced:

226. Mulcaster: Table of Contents of his _Positions_.

227. Locke: On the Teaching of Latin.

228. Locke: On the Bible as a Reading Book.

229. Coote-Dilworth: Two early "Spelling Books."

230. Webster: Description of Pre-Revolutionary Schools.

231. Raumer: Teachers in Gotha in 1741.

232. Raumer: An 18th Century Swedish People's School.

233. Raumer: Schools of Frankfurt-am-Main during the Eighteenth Century.

234. Krusi: A Swiss Teacher's Examination in 1793.

235. Crabbe; White; Shenstone: The English Dame School described.

236. Newburgh: A Parochial-School Teacher's Agreement.

237. Saint Anne: Beginnings of an English Charity School.

238. Regulations: Charity-School Organization and Instruction.

(a) Qualifications for the Master.

(b) Purpose and Instruction.

239. Allen and McClure: Textbooks used in English Charity-Schools.

240. England: A Charity-School Subscription Form.

241. Southwark: The Charity-School of Saint John's Parish.

242. Gorsham: An Eighteenth-Century Indenture of Apprenticeship.

243. Indenture: Learning the Trade of a Schoolmaster.