The History Of Education by Ellwood P. Cubberley (epub e reader .txt) 📖

New England many of these places were in the vicinity of some waterfall, where cheap power made manufacturing on a large scale possible. Lowell, Massachusetts, which in 1820 did not exist and in 1840

had a population of over twenty thousand people, collected there largely to work in the mills, is a good illustration. Other cities, such as Cincinnati and Detroit, grew because of their advantageous situation as exchange and wholesale centers. With the revival of trade and commerce after the second war with Great Britain the cities grew rapidly both in number and size.

 

The rise of the new cities and the rapid growth of the older ones materially changed the nature of the educational problem, by producing an entirely new set of social and educational conditions for the people of the Central and Northern States to solve. The South, with its plantation life, negro slavery, and absence of manufacturing was largely unaffected by these changed conditions until well after the close of the Civil War.

In consequence the educational awakening there did not come for nearly half a century after it came in the North. In the cities in the coast States north of Maryland, but particularly in those of New York and New England, manufacturing developed very rapidly. Cotton-spinning in particular became a New England industry, as did also the weaving of wool, while Pennsylvania became the center of the iron manufacturing industries.

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The development of this new type of factory work meant the beginnings of the breakdown of the old home and village industries, the eventual abandonment of the age-old apprenticeship system (Rs. 200, 201), the start of the cityward movement of the rural population, and the concentration of manufacturing in large establishments, employing many hands to perform continuously certain limited phases of the manufacturing process. This in time was certain to mean a change in educational methods. It also called for the concentration of both capital and labor. The rise of the factory system, business on a large scale, and cheap and rapid transportation, all combined to diminish the importance of agriculture and to change the city from an unimportant to a very important position in our national life. The 13 cities of 1820 increased to 44 by 1840, and to 141 by 1860. There were four times as many cities in the North, too, where manufacturing had found a home, as in the South, which remained essentially agricultural.

 

NEW SOCIAL PROBLEMS IN THE CITIES. The many changes in the nature of industry and of village and home life, effected by the development of the factory system and the concentration of manufacturing and population in the cities, also contributed materially in changing the character of the old educational problem. When the cities were as yet but little villages in size and character, homogeneous in their populations, and the many social and moral problems incident to the congestion of peoples of mixed character had not as yet arisen, the church and charity and private school solution of the educational problem was reasonably satisfactory. As the cities now increased rapidly in size, became more city-like in character, drew to them diverse elements previously largely unknown, and were required by state laws to extend the right of suffrage to all their citizens, the need for a new type of educational organization began slowly but clearly to manifest itself to an increasing number of citizens. The church, charity, and private school system completely broke down under the new strain. School Societies and Educational Associations, organized for propaganda, now arose in the cities; grants of city or state funds for the partial support of both church and society schools were demanded and obtained; and numbers of charity organizations began to be established in the different cities to enable them to handle better the new problems of pauperism, intemperance, and juvenile delinquency which arose.

 

THE EXTENSION OF THE SUFFRAGE. The Constitution of the United States, though framed by the ablest men of the time, was framed by men who represented the old aristocratic conception of education and government.

The same was true of the conventions which framed practically all the early state constitutions. The early period of the national life was thus characterized by the rule of a class—a very well-educated and a very capable class, to be sure—but a class elected by a ballot based on property qualifications and belonging to the older type of political and social thinking.

 

Notwithstanding the statements of the Declaration of Independence, the change came but slowly. Up to 1815 but four States had granted the right to vote to all male citizens, regardless of property holdings or other somewhat similar restrictions. After 1815 a democratic movement, which sought to abolish all class rule and all political inequalities, arose and rapidly gained strength. In this the new States to the westward, with their absence of old estates or large fortunes, and where men were judged more on their merits than in an older society, were the leaders. As will be seen from the map, every new State admitted east of the Mississippi River, except Ohio (admitted in 1802), where the New England element predominated, and Louisiana (1812), provided for full manhood suffrage at the time of its admission to statehood. Seven additional Eastern States had extended the same full voting privileges to their citizens by 1845, while the old requirements had been materially modified in most of the other Northern States. This democratic movement for the leveling of all class distinctions between white men became very marked, after 1820; came to a head in the election of Andrew Jackson as President, in 1828; and the final result was full manhood suffrage in all the States. This gave the farmer in the West and the new manufacturing classes in the cities a preponderating influence in the affairs of government.

 

[Illustration: FIG. 199. DATES OF THE GRANTING OF FULL MANHOOD SUFFRAGE

Some of the older States granted almost full manhood suffrage at an earlier date, retaining a few minor restrictions until the date given on the map. States shaded granted full suffrage at the time of admission to the Union.]

 

EDUCATIONAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE EXTENSION OF SUFFRAGE. The educational significance of the extension of full manhood suffrage to all was enormous and far-reaching.

 

There now took place in the United States, after about 1825, what took place in England after the passage of the Second Reform Act (p. 642) of 1867. With the extension of the suffrage to all classes of the population, poor as well as rich, laborer, as well as employer, there came to thinking men, often for the first time, a realization that general education had become a fundamental necessity for the State, and that the general education of all in the elements of knowledge and civic virtue must now assume that importance in the minds of the leaders of the State that the education of a few for the service of the Church and of the many for simple church membership had once held in the minds of ecclesiastics.

 

This new conception is well expressed in the preamble to the first (optional) school law enacted in Illinois (1825), which declares: To enjoy our rights and liberties, we must understand them; their security and protection ought to be the first object of a free people; and it is a well-established fact that no nation has ever continued long in the enjoyment of civil and political freedom, which was not both virtuous and enlightened; and believing that the advancement of literature always has been, and ever will be the means of developing more fully the rights of man, that the mind of every citizen in a republic is the common property of society, and constitutes the basis of its strength and happiness; it is therefore considered the peculiar duty of a free government, like ours, to encourage and extend the improvement and cultivation of the intellectual energies of the whole.

 

UTTERANCES OF PUBLIC MEN AND WORKINGMEN. Governors now began to recommend to their legislatures the establishment of tax-supported schools, and public men began to urge state action and state control. An utterance by De Witt Clinton, for nine years governor of New York, may be taken as an example of many. In a message to the legislature, in 1826, defending the schools established, he said:

 

The first duty of government, and the surest evidence of good government, is the encouragement of education. A general diffusion of knowledge is a precursor and protector of republican institutions, and in it we must confide as the conservative power that will watch over our liberties and guard them against fraud, intrigue, corruption, and violence. I consider the system of our common schools as the palladium of our freedom, for no reasonable apprehension can be entertained of its subversion as long as the great body of the people are enlightened by education.

 

After about 1825 many labor unions were formed, and the representatives of these new organizations joined in the demands for schools and education, urging the free education of their children as a natural right. In 1829

the workingmen of Philadelphia asked each candidate for the legislature for a formal declaration of the attitude he would assume toward the provision of “an equal and a general system of education” for the State.

In 1830 the Workingmen’s Committee of Philadelphia submitted a detailed report (R. 315), after five months spent in investigating educational conditions in Pennsylvania, vigorously condemning the lack of provision for education in the State, and the utterly inadequate provision where any was made. Seth Luther, in an address on “The Education of Workingmen,”

delivered in 1832, declared that “a large body of human beings are ruined by a neglect of education, rendered miserable in the extreme, and incapable of self-government.” Stephen Simpson, in his A Manual for Workingmen, published in 1831, declared that “it is to education, therefore, that we must mainly look for redress of that perverted system of society, which dooms the producer to ignorance, to toil, and to penury, to moral degradation, physical want, and social barbarism.” Many resolutions were adopted by these organizations demanding free state-supported schools. [8]

 

IV. ALIGNMENT OF INTERESTS, AND PROPAGANDA THE ALIGNMENT OF INTERESTS. The second quarter of the nineteenth century may be said to have witnessed the battle for tax-supported, publicly controlled and directed, and non-sectarian common schools. In 1825 such schools were still the distant hope of statesmen and reformers; in 1850

they had become an actuality in almost every Northern State. The twenty-five years intervening marked a period of public agitation and educational propaganda; of many hard legislative fights; of a struggle to secure desired legislation, and then to hold what had been secured; of many bitter contests with church and private-school interests, which felt that their “vested rights” were being taken from them; and of occasional referenda in which the people were asked, at the next election, to advise the legislature as to what to do. Excepting the battle for the abolition of slavery, perhaps no question has ever been before the American people for settlement which caused so much feeling or aroused such bitter antagonisms. The friends of free schools were at first commonly regarded as fanatics, dangerous to the State, and the opponents of free schools were considered by them as old-time conservatives or as selfish members of society.

 

Naturally such a bitter discussion of a public question forced an alignment of the people for or against publicly supported and controlled schools, and this alignment of interests may be roughly stated to have been about as follows:

 

I. For Public Schools.

Men considered as:

1. “Citizens of the Republic.”

2. Philanthropists and humanitarians.

3. Public men of large vision.

4. City residents.

5. The intelligent workingmen in the cities.

6. Non-taxpayers.

7. Calvinists.

8. “New England men.”

 

II. Lukewarm, or against Public Schools.