The History Of Education, Ellwood P. Cubberley [motivational novels .TXT] 📗

>No one did more than he to establish in the minds of the American people the conception that education should be universal, non-sectarian, and free, and that its aim should be social efficiency, civic virtue, and character, rather than mere learning or the advancement of sectarian ends.

Under his practical leadership an unorganized and heterogeneous series of community school systems was reduced to organization and welded together into a state school system, and the people of Massachusetts were effectively recalled to their ancient belief in and duty toward the education of the people.

 

HENRY BARNARD IN CONNECTICUT AND RHODE ISLAND. Almost equally important, though of a somewhat different character, was the work of Henry Barnard (1811-1900) in Connecticut and Rhode Island. A graduate of Yale, and also educated for the law, he turned aside to teach and became deeply interested in education. The years 1835-37 he spent in Europe studying schools, particularly the work of Pestalozzi’s disciples. On his return to America he was elected a member of the Connecticut legislature, and at once formulated and secured passage of the Connecticut law (1839) providing for a State Board of Commissioners for Common Schools, with a Secretary, after the Massachusetts plan. Mr. Barnard was then elected as its first Secretary, and reluctantly gave up the law and accepted the position at the munificent salary of $3 a day and expenses. Until the legislature abolished both the Board and the position, in 1842, he rendered for Connecticut a service scarcely less important than the better-known reforms which Horace Mann was at that time carrying on in Massachusetts.

 

[Illustration: PLATE 17. TWO LEADERS IN THE EDUCATIONAL AWAKENING IN THE

UNITED STATES.

 

HORACE MANN (1796-1859)

(From the painting at the Westfield, Massachusetts, Normal School) HENRY BARNARD (1811-1900)]

 

In 1843 he was called to Rhode Island to examine and report upon the existing schools, and from 1845 to 1849 acted as State Commissioner of Public Schools there, where he rendered a service similar to that previously rendered in Connecticut. In addition he organized a series of town libraries throughout the State. For his teachers’ institutes he devised a traveling model school, to give demonstration lessons in the art of teaching. From 1851 to 1855 he was again in Connecticut, as principal of the newly established state normal school and ex-officio Secretary of the Connecticut State Board of Education. He now rewrote the school laws, increased taxation for schools, checked the power of the districts, there known as “school societies,” and laid the foundations of a state system of schools. The work of Mann and Barnard had its influence throughout all the Northern States, and encouraged the friends of education everywhere.

Almost contemporaneous with them were leaders in other States who helped fight through the battles of state establishment and state organization and control, and the period of their labors has since been termed the period of the “great awakening.”

 

V. THE BATTLE TO ELIMINATE SECTARIANISM

 

THE SECULARIZATION OF AMERICAN EDUCATION. The Church, it will be remembered, was from the earliest colonial times in possession of the education of the young. Not only were the earliest schools controlled by the Church and dominated by the religious motive, but the right of the Church to dictate the teaching in the schools was clearly recognized by the State. Still more, the State looked to the Church to provide the necessary education, and assisted it in doing so by donations of land and money. The minister, as a town official, naturally examined the teachers and the instruction in the schools. After the establishment of the National Government this relationship for a time continued. [10] New York and the New England States specifically set aside lands to help both church and school. After about 1800 these land endowments for religion ceased, but grants of state aid for religious schools continued for nearly a half-century longer. Then it became common for a town or city to build a schoolhouse from city taxation, and let it out rent-free to any responsible person who would conduct a tuition school in it, with a few free places for selected poor children. Still later, with the rise of the state schools, it became quite common to take over church and private schools and aid them on the same basis as the new state schools.

 

In colonial times, too, and for some decades into our national period, the warmest advocates of the establishment of schools were those who had in view the needs of the Church. Then gradually the emphasis shifted to the needs of the State, and a new class of advocates of public education now arose. Still later the emphasis has been shifted to industrial and civic and national needs, and the religious aim has been almost completely eliminated. This change is known as the secularization of American education. It also required many a bitter struggle, and was accomplished in the different States but slowly. The two great factors which served to produce this change were:

 

1. The conviction that the life of the Republic demanded an educated and intelligent citizenship, and hence the general education of all in common schools controlled by the State; and 2. The great diversity of religious beliefs among the people, which forced tolerance and religious freedom through a consideration of the rights of minorities.

 

The secularization of education must not be regarded either as a deliberate or a wanton violation of the rights of the Church, but rather as an unavoidable incident connected with the coming to self-consciousness and self-government of a great people.

 

THE FIGHT IN MASSACHUSETTS. The educational awakening in Massachusetts, brought on largely by the work of Horace Mann, was to many a rude awakening. Among other things, it revealed that the old school of the Puritans had gradually been replaced by a new and purely American type of school, with instruction adapted to democratic and national rather than religious ends. Mr. Mann stood strongly for such a conception of public education, and being a Unitarian, and the new State Board of Education being almost entirely liberal in religion, an attack was launched against them, and for the first time in our history the cry was raised that “The public schools are Godless schools.” Those who believed in the old system of religious instruction, those who bore the Board or its Secretary personal ill-will, and those who desired to break down the Board’s authority and stop the development of the public schools, united their forces in this first big attack against secular education. Horace Mann was the first prominent educator in America to meet and answer the religious onslaught.

 

A violent attack was opened in both the pulpit and the press. It was claimed that the Board was trying to eliminate the Bible from the schools, to abolish correction, and to “make the schools a counterpoise to religious instruction at home and in Sabbath schools.” The local right to demand religious instruction was insisted upon.

 

Mr. Mann felt that a great public issue had been raised which should be answered carefully and fully. In three public statements he answered the criticisms and pointed out the errors in the argument (R. 322). The Bible, he said, was an invaluable book for forming the character of children, and should be read without comment in the schools, but it was not necessary to teach it there. He showed that most of the towns had given up the teaching of the Catechism before the establishment of the Board of Education. He contended that any attempt to decide what creed or doctrine should be taught would mean the ruin of the schools. The attack culminated in the attempts of the religious forces to abolish the State Board of Education, in the legislatures of 1840 and 1841, which failed dismally. Most of the orthodox people of the State took Mr. Mann’s side, and Governor Briggs, in one of his messages, commended his stand by inserting the following: Justice to a faithful public officer leads me to say that the indefatigable and accomplished Secretary of the Board of Education has performed services in the cause of common schools which will earn him the lasting gratitude of the generation to which he belongs.

 

THE ATTEMPT TO DIVIDE THE SCHOOL FUNDS. As was stated earlier, in the beginning it was common to aid church schools on the same basis as the state schools, and sometimes, in the beginnings of state aid, the money was distributed among existing schools without at first establishing any public schools. In many Eastern cities church schools at first shared in the public funds. In Pennsylvania church and private schools were aided from poor-law funds up to 1834. In New Jersey the first general school law of 1829 had been repealed a year later through the united efforts of church and private-school interests, who unitedly fought the development of state schools, and in 1830 and 1831 new laws had permitted all private and parochial schools to share in the small state appropriation for education.

 

After the beginning of the forties, when the Roman Catholic influence came in strongly with the increase in Irish immigration to the United States, a new factor was introduced and the problem, which had previously been a Protestant problem, took on a somewhat different aspect in the form of a demand for a division of the school funds. Between 1825 and 1842 the fight was especially severe in New York City. In 1825 the City Council refused to grant public money to any religious Society, [11] and in 1840 the Catholics carried the matter to the State Legislature.

 

The legislature deferred action until 1842, and then did the unexpected thing. The heated discussion of the question in the city and in the legislature had made it evident that, while it might not be desirable to continue to give funds to a privately organized corporation, to divide them among the quarreling and envious religious sects would be much worse.

The result was that the legislature created for the city a City Board of Education, to establish real public schools, and stopped the debate on the question of aid to religious schools by enacting that no portion of the school funds was in the future to be given to any school in which “any religious sectarian doctrine or tenet should be taught, inculcated, or practiced.” Thus the real public-school system of New York City was evolved out of this attempt to divide the public funds among the churches.

The Public School Society continued for a time, but its work was now done, and, in 1853, surrendered its buildings and property to the City Board of Education and disbanded.

 

THE CONTEST IN OTHER STATES. As early as 1830, Lowell, Massachusetts, had granted aid to the Irish Catholic parochial schools in the city, and in 1835 had taken over two such schools and maintained them as public schools. In 1853 the representatives of the Roman Catholic Church made a demand on the state legislature for a division of the school fund of the State. To settle the question once for all a constitutional amendment was submitted by the legislature to the people, providing that all state and town moneys raised or appropriated for education must be expended only on regularly organized and conducted public schools, and that no religious sect should ever share in such funds. This measure failed of adoption at the election of 1853 by a vote of 65,111 for and 65,512 against, but was re-proposed and adopted in 1855. This settled the question in Massachusetts, as Mann had tried to settle it earlier, and as New Hampshire had settled it in its constitution of 1792, Connecticut in its constitution of 1818, and Rhode Island in its constitution of 1842.

 

Other States now faced similar demands, but no demand for a share in or a division of the public-school funds,