The History of Education Part 99

CHAPTER XXVII

[1] In Spain, for example, the percentage of illiteracy in 1860 was 75.52; in 1870 70.01 per cent; in 1887, 68.01 per cent; in 1890, 63.78 per cent; and in 1910, 59.35 per cent. The percentage for 1920 will probably not be less than for 1910, due to the closing of many schools for lack of teachers during the World War. In 1916 ten provinces had an illiteracy of over 70 per cent, and but five had less than 40 per cent. In Madrid and Barcelona, cities as large as Baltimore and Cleveland, the illiteracy approaches a third of the population in Madrid, and a half in Barcelona.

[2] While an exile from the Argentine, Dr. Sarmiento was commissioned by Chili to visit, study, and report on the state school systems of the United States and Europe. While in the United States he became intimately acquainted with Horace Mann. Later he was Minister from the Argentine to the United States, being recalled, in 1868, to a.s.sume the presidency of the Republic. He was deeply impressed with the type of educational opportunity provided in the schools of the United States and, through an appointed Minister of Education, impressed his ideas on the Argentine nation.

[3] In 1910 only about 3 per cent of the total population was in any type of school.

[4] The Mikado still retained, through his ministers, very large powers, while the parliament was a consultative a.s.sembly rather than a legislative one. The form of government has been much like that of the German Empire before the World War.

[5] The j.a.panese Government has so far been a military autocracy, and the j.a.panese have been the Prussians of the Orient. The two-cla.s.s school system has accordingly met the needs of a benevolent autocracy fairly well. With the rise of a liberal party in j.a.pan, and the beginning of some democratic life, we may look for progressive changes in their schools which will tend to produce a more democratic type of educational organization.

[6] "The idea of education for all cla.s.ses, the aim of all educators and statesmen of western countries, scarcely entered the minds of the leaders of China under the traditional system of education. With the introduction of the new educational system, however, the problem of universal education suddenly came into prominence. Indeed, it is the stated goal of the new educational policy." (Ping Wen Kuo, _The Chinese System of Public Education_, p. 149.)

[7] Education in China has been common, for a cla.s.s, for over four thousand years. The schools were private, but a detailed national system of examinations was provided by the State, and all who expected any state preferment were required to pa.s.s these state examinations. The system was based on the old Confucian cla.s.sics. Under it schools existed in all the chief towns, and the examination system exerted a strong unifying influence on the nation. In 1842 China opened five treaty ports to the ships and commerce of western nations, and from 1842 to 1903 a process of gradual transition from the ancient examination system to modern conditions took place.

[8] "A nation that has preserved its ident.i.ty by peaceful means for three milleniums; that has made the soil produce subsistence for a mult.i.tudinous population during that long period, while Western peoples have worn out their soil in less than that many centuries; that has produced many of the most influential of modern inventions, such as printing, gunpowder, and the compa.s.s; that has developed such mechanical ingenuity and commercial ability as are shown in its everyday life, undoubtedly possesses the ability to accomplish results by the use of methods worked out by the Western world. When modern scientific knowledge is added by the Chinese to the skill which they already have in agriculture, in commerce, in industry, in government, and in military affairs, results will be achieved, on the basis of their physical stamina and moral qualities, which will remove the ignorance, the indifference, and the prejudice of the Western world regarding things Chinese." (Monroe, Paul, Editorial introduction to Ping Wen Kuo's _The Chinese System of Public Education_.)

[9] Though appearing small on the map, Siam is a nation of six millions of people and an area over three and a half times that of the six New England States.

[10] "Through metaphysics first; then through alchemy and chemistry, through physical and astronomical spectroscopy, lastly through radio- activity, science has slowly groped its way to the atom." (Soddy, F., _Matter and Energy_.)

[11] Adams in England, and Leverrier in France. The planet Ura.n.u.s had for long been known to be erratic in its movements, and Adams and Leverrier concluded, working from Newton's law for gravitation, that it must be due to the pull of an unknown planet. Both calculated the orbit of this unknown body, Adams sending his calculations to the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, and Leverrier to the observatory at Berlin. At both observatories the new planet--later named Neptune--was picked up by the telescope at the position indicated.

[12] This theory of "catastrophes" held that at a number of successive epochs, of which the age of Noah was the latest, great revolutions or disasters had taken place on the earth's surface, in which all living things were destroyed. Later the world was restocked, and again destroyed.

This explained the successive strata, and the fossils they contained. For this theory Lyell subst.i.tuted a slow and orderly evolution, covering ages, and completely upset the Mosaic chronology.

[13] For example:--mineralogy, petrography, petrology, crystallography, stratigraphy, and paleontology.

[14] "Darwin's Origin of Species had come into the theological world like a plow into an ant-hill. Everywhere those thus rudely awakened from their old comfort and repose had swarmed forth angry and confused. Reviews, sermons, books, light and heavy, came flying at the new thinker from all sides." (White, A. D., _The Warfare of Science and Theology_, vol. 1, p.

70.)

[15] Natural history as a study goes back to the days of Aristotle, in Greece, but it had always been a study of fixed forms. Darwin destroyed this conception, and vitalized the new subject of biology. From this botany and zoology have been derived, and from these again many other new sciences, such as physiology, morphology, bacteriology, anthropology, cytology, entomology, and all the different agricultural sciences.

[16] The bacillus of tuberculosis was isolated in 1882, Asiatic cholera in 1883, lockjaw and diphtheria in 1884, and bubonic plague in 1894.

[17] Schools of engineering, mining, agriculture, and applied science are types.

[18] The book on Germany (_De l'Allemagne_) by Madame de Stael (1766- 1817), a brilliant French novelist, was published and immediately confiscated in France in 1811, and republished in England in 1813. It is one of the most remarkable books on one country written by a native of another which had appeared up to that time. Through reading it many English and Americans discovered a new world.

[19] For example, it has been estimated that one fifteenth of the working population of modern industrial nations devotes itself to transportation; another one fifteenth to maintaining public services--light, gas, telephone, water, sewage, streets, parks--unknown in earlier times; and another one fifteenth to the manufacture and distribution and care of automobiles. Add still further the numbers employed in connection with theaters, moving-picture shows, phonographs, magazines and the newspapers, soft-drink places, millinery and dry goods, hospitals, and similar "appendages of civilization," and we get some idea of the increased labor efficiency which the applications of science have brought about.

[20] Labor unions were legalized in England in 1825. In the United States they arose about 1825-30, and for a time played an important part in securing legislation to better the condition of the workingman and to secure education for his children. In continental Europe, the reactionary governments following the downfall of Napoleon forbade a.s.semblies of workingmen or their organization, as dangerous to government. In consequence, labor organizations in France were not permitted until 1848, and in Germany and Austria not until after the middle of the century. In j.a.pan, as late as 1919, laborers were denied the right to organize.

[21] Up to 1789 serfdom was the rule on the continent of Europe; by 1850 there was practically no serfdom in central and western Europe, and in 1866 serfdom was abolished in Russia. For the worker and farmer the years between 1789 and 1848 were years of rapid progress in the evolution from mediaeval to modern conditions of living.

[22] Under conditions existing up to the close of the eighteenth century, in part persisting up to the middle of the nineteenth on the continent, and still found in unprogressive lands, a close limitation of the rights of labor was maintained. Children followed the trade of their fathers, and the right of an apprentice later to open a shop and better his condition was prohibited until after he had become an accepted master (p. 210) in his craft. Guild members, too, were not permitted to branch out into any other line of activity, or to introduce any new methods of work. All these old limitations the Industrial Revolution swept away.

[23] Women in Europe have secured the ballot rapidly since the end of the nineteenth century. With manhood suffrage secured, universal suffrage is the next step. Women were given the right to vote and hold office in Finland in 1906; in Norway in 1907; in Denmark in 1916; in England in 1918; in Germany in 1919; and in the United States in 1920.

[24] See an excellent brief article "On German Education," by E. C. Moore, in _School and Society_, vol. I, pp. 886-89.

[25] A State approximately the size of Illinois, and containing a population of about two million people. The great development of this country is in reality a history of the work of President Manuel Estrada Cabrera, who was president from 1898 to 1920. His ruling interest has been public education, believing that in universal education rests the future greatness of the State. He accordingly labored to establish schools, and to bring them up to as high a level as possible. The government has spent much in building modern-type schoolhouses and in subsidizing schools, holding that with the proper training of the younger generation the future position of the nation rests. A sincere admirer of the United States, American models have been copied. When the United States entered the World War, Guatemala was the first Central American republic to follow. During the War President Cabrera "would allow nothing to interfere with the advancement of free and compulsory education in the State." (See Domville- Fife, C. W., _Guatemala and the States of Central America_.)

[26] "Imagine how the streams of Celestials circulating between Hong Kong and the mainland spread the knowledge of what a civilized government does for the people! At Shanghai and Tientsin, veritable fairylands for the Chinese, they cannot but contrast the throngs of rickshas, dog-carts, broughams, and motor cars that pour endlessly through the spotless asphalt streets with the narrow, crooked, filthy, noisome streets of their native city, to be traversed only on foot or in a sedan chair. Even the young mandarin, buried alive in some dingy walled town of the far interior, without news, events, or society, recalled with longing the lights, the gorgeous tea houses, and the alluring 'sing-song' girls of Foochow Road, and cursed the stupid policy of a government that penalized even enterprising Chinamen who tried to 'start something' for the benefit of the community." (Ross, E. A., _Changing America_, p. 22.)

CHAPTER XXVIII

[1] The earliest Teachers' Seminaries in German lands were:

1750. Alfeld, in Hanover.

1753. Wolfenb.u.t.tel, in Brunswick.

1764. Glatz, in Prussia.

1765. Breslau, in Prussia.

1768. Carlsruhe, in Baden.

1771. Vienna, in Austria.

1777. Bamberg, in Bavaria.

1778. Halberstadt, in Prussia.

1779. Coburg, in Gotha.

1780. Segeberg, in Holstein.

1785. Dresden, in Saxony.

1794. Weissenfels, in Prussia.

[2] "My views of the subject," said he, "came out of a personal striving after methods, the execution of which forced me actively and experimentally to seek, to gain, and to work out what was not there, and what I yet really knew not."

[3] See footnote 1, page 573, for places and dates.

[4] By the Reverend Samuel R. Hall, who conducted the school as an adjunct to his work as a minister. The school accordingly traveled about, being held at Concord, Vermont, from 1823 to 1830; at Andover, Ma.s.sachusetts, from 1830 to 1837; and at Plymouth, New Hampshire, from 1837 to 1840.

[5] By James Carter, at Lancaster, Ma.s.sachusetts.

[6] In 1836, Calvin Stowe, a professor in the Lane Theological Seminary at Cincinnati, went to Europe to buy books for the library of the inst.i.tution, and the legislature of Ohio commissioned him to examine and report upon the systems of elementary education found there. The result was his celebrated _Report on Elementary Education in Europe_, made to the legislature in 1837. In it chief attention was given to contrasting the schools of Wurtemberg and Prussia with those found in Ohio. The report was ordered printed by the legislature of Ohio, and later by the legislatures of Pennsylvania, Ma.s.sachusetts, Michigan, North Carolina, and Virginia, and did much to awaken American interest in advancing common school education.

[7] These are higher inst.i.tutions which offer two, three, or four years of academic and some professional education, and may be found in connection with a university; may be maintained by city or county school authorities; or may be voluntary inst.i.tutions. In 1910-11 there were eighty-three such inst.i.tutions in England and Wales.

[8] In China, for example, as soon as the new general system of education had been decided upon, normal schools of three types--higher normal schools, lower normal schools, and teacher-training schools--were created, and missionary teachers, foreign teachers, and students returning from abroad were used to staff these new schools. By 1910 as many as thirty higher normal schools, two hundred and three lower normal schools, and a hundred and eighty-two training cla.s.ses had been established in China under government auspices. (Ping Wen Kuo, _The Chinese System of Public Education_, p. 156.)

[9] The beginnings in the United States date from about 1890, and in England even later. In France, on the other hand, the training of teachers for the secondary schools goes back to the days of Napoleon.

[10] A common division was between the teacher who taught reading, religion, and spelling, and the teacher who taught writing and arithmetic (R. 307). Writing being considered a difficult art, this was taught by a separate teacher, who often included the ability to teach arithmetic also among his accomplishments.

[11] A good example of this may be found in the monitorial schools. The New York Free School Society (p. 660), for example, reported in its _Fourteenth Annual Report_ (1819) that the children in its schools had pursued studies as follows:

297 children have been taught to form letters in sand.

615 have been advanced from letters in sand, to monosyllabic reading on boards.

686 from reading on boards, to Murray's First Book.

335 from Murray's First Book, to writing on slates.