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

General Court ordered the Selectmen of the towns to ascertain if parents and the masters of apprentices (R. 190) were training their children “in learning and labor” and “to read and understand the principles of religion and the capital laws of the country.” This latter law 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.

Five years later (1647) the Massachusetts Court ordered the establishment of schools (R. 191) better to enforce the compulsion, and thus laid the foundations upon which the American public-school systems have since been built. In Holland, the Synod of Dort (1618) had tried to institute the idea of compulsory education (R. 176), and in 1646 the Scotch Parliament had ordered the compulsory establishment of schools (R. 179).

 

In German lands the compulsory-attendance idea took deep root, and in consequence the Germans were the first important modern nation to enforce, thoroughly, the education of all. In 1717 King Frederick William I issued (p. 555) the first compulsory-education law for Prussia, ordering that “hereafter wherever there are schools in the place the parents shall be obliged, under severe penalties, to send their children to school,…

daily in winter, but in summer at least twice a week.” He further ordered that the fees for the poor were to be paid “from the community’s funds.”

Finally Frederick the Great organized the earlier procedure into comprehensive codes, and made (1763, R. 274, Section 10; 1765, R. 275 d) detailed provisions relating to the compulsion to attend the schools. In the Code of 1794 (p. 565) the final legislative step was taken when it was ordered that “the instruction in school must be continued until the child is found to possess the knowledge necessary to every rational being.” By the middle of the eighteenth century the basis was clearly laid in Prussia for that enforcement of the compulsion to attend schools which, by the middle of the nineteenth century, had become such a notable characteristic of all German education. The same compulsory idea early took deep root among the Scandinavian peoples. In consequence the lowest illiteracy in Europe, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, was to be found (see map, p. 714) among the Finns, Swedes, Norwegians, Danes, and Germans.

 

The compulsory-attendance idea died out in America, in the Netherlands, and in part in Scotland. In England and in the Anglican Colonies in America it never took root. In France the idea awaited the work of the National Convention, which (1792) ordered three years of education compulsory for all. War and the lack of interest of Napoleon in primary education caused the requirement, however, to become a dead letter. The Law of 1833 provided for but did not enforce it, and real compulsory education in France did not come until 1882. In England the compulsory idea received but little attention until after 1870, met with much opposition, and only recently have comprehensive reforms been provided. In the United States the new beginnings of compulsory-attendance legislation date from the Rhode Island child-labor law of 1840, and the first modern compulsory-attendance law enacted by Massachusetts, in 1852. By 1885, fourteen American States and six Territories had enacted some form of compulsory-attendance law. Since 1900 there has been a general revision of American state legislation on the subject, with a view to increasing and the better enforcement of the compulsory-attendance requirements, and with a general demand that the National Congress should enact a national child-labor law.

 

As a result of this legislation the labor of young children has been greatly restricted; work in many industries has been prohibited entirely, because of the danger to life and health; compulsory education has been extended in a majority of the American States to cover the full school year; poverty, or dependent parents, in many States no longer serves as an excuse for non-attendance; often those having physical or mental defects also are included in the compulsion to attend, if their wants can be provided for; the school census has been changed so as to aid in the location of children of compulsory school-attendance age; and special officers have been authorized or ordered appointed to assist school authorities in enforcing the compulsory-attendance and child-labor laws.

Having taxed their citizens to provide schools, the different States now require children to attend and partake of the advantages provided. The schools, too, have made a close study of retarded pupils, because of the close connection found to exist between retardation in school and truancy and juvenile delinquency.

 

ONE RESULT OF THIS LEGISLATION. One of the results of all this legislation has been to throw, during the past quarter of a century, an entirely new burden on schools everywhere. Such legislation has brought into the schools not only the truant and the incorrigible, who under former conditions either left early or were expelled, but also many children who have no aptitude for book learning, and many of inferior mental qualities who do not profit by ordinary classroom procedure. Still more, they have brought into the school the crippled, tubercular, deaf, epileptic, and blind, as well as the sick, needy, and physically unfit. By steadily raising the age at which children may leave school, from ten or twelve up to fourteen and sixteen, schools everywhere have come to contain many children who, having no natural aptitude for study, would at once, unless specially handled, become a nuisance in the school and tend to demoralize schoolroom procedure. These laws have thrown upon the school a new burden in the form of public expectancy for results, whereas a compulsory-education law cannot create capacity to profit from education. Under the earlier educational conditions the school, unable to handle or educate such children, dealt with them much as the Church of the time dealt with religious delinquents. It simply expelled them or let them drop from school, and no longer concerned itself about them. To-day the public expects the school to retain and get results with them. Consequently, within the past twenty-five years the whole attitude of the school toward such children has undergone a change; many different kinds of classes and courses, that might serve better to handle them, have been introduced; and an attempt has been made to salvage them and turn back to society as many of them as possible, trained for some form of social and personal usefulness.

 

THE EDUCATION OF DEFECTIVES. Another nineteenth-century expansion of state education has come in the provision now generally made for the education of defectives. To-day the state school systems of Christian nations generally make some provision for state institutional care, and often for local classes as well, for the training of children who belong to the seriously defective classes of society. This work is almost entirely a product of the new humanitarianism of modern times. Excepting the education of the deaf, seriously begun a little earlier, all effective work dates from the first half of the nineteenth century. At first the feasibility of all such instruction was doubted, and the work generally was commenced privately. Out of successes thus achieved, public institutions have been built up to carry on, on a large scale, what was begun privately on a small scale. It is now felt to be better for the State, as well as for the unfortunates themselves, that they be cared for and educated, as suitably and well as possible, for self-respect, self-support, and some form of social and vocational usefulness. In consequence, the compulsory-attendance laws of the leading world States to-day require that defectives, between certain ages at least, be sent to a state institution or be enrolled in a public-school class specialized for their training.

 

[Illustration: FIG. 235. ABB� DE L’�P�E (1712-89)]

 

BEGINNINGS OF THE WORK. Up to the middle of the eighteenth century a number of private efforts at the education of the deaf are on record, all dating however from the pioneer work of a Spanish Benedictine, in 1578. In 1760 a new era in the education of the deaf was begun when Abb� de l’�p�e opened a school at Paris for the oral instruction of poor deaf mutes, and Thomas Braidwood (1715-1806) began similar work at Edinburgh. A few years later (1778) a third school was opened at Leipzig. This last was established under the patronage of the Elector of Saxony, and was the first school of its kind in the world to receive government recognition.

The Paris school was taken over as a state institution by the Constituent Assembly, in 1791. In England the instruction of the deaf remained a private and a family monopoly until 1819. In 1817 the first school in America was opened, at Hartford, Connecticut, by the Reverend Thomas H.

Gallaudet, and Massachusetts, in 1819, sent the first pupils paid for at state expense to this institution. In 1823 Kentucky created the first state school for the training of the deaf established in the new world, and Ohio the second, in 1827.

 

[Illustration: FIG. 236. REV. THOMAS H. GALLAUDET TEACHING THE DEAF AND

DUMB

From a bas-relief on the monument of Gallaudet, erected by the deaf and dumb of the United States, in the grounds of the American Asylum, at Hartford, Connecticut.]

 

The education of the blind began in France, in 1784; England, in 1791; Austria, in 1804; Prussia, in 1806; Holland, in 1808; Sweden, in 1810; Denmark, in 1811; Scotland, in 1812; in Boston and New York, in 1832; and in Philadelphia, in 1833. All were private institutions, and general interest in the education of the blind was awakened later by exhibiting the pupils trained. The first book for the blind was printed in Paris, in 1786. The first kindergarten for the blind was established in Germany, in 1861; the first school for the colored blind, by North Carolina, in 1869.

 

[Illustration: FIG. 237. EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS MAINTAINED BY THE STATE

As state institutions, other than public schools.]

 

Before the nineteenth century the feeble-minded and idiotic were the laughing-stock of society, and no one thought of being able to do anything for them. In 1811 Napoleon ordered a census of such individuals, and in 1816 the first school for their training was opened at Salzburg, Austria.

The school was unsuccessful, and closed in 1835. The real beginning of the training of the feeble-minded was made in France, by Edouard S�guin, “The Apostle of the Idiot,” in 1837, when he began a lifelong study of such defectives. By 1845 three or four institutions had been opened in Switzerland and Great Britain for their study and training, and for a time an attempt was made to effect cures. Gallaudet had tried to educate such children at Hartford, about 1820, and a class for idiots was established at the Blind Asylum in Boston, in 1848. The interest thus aroused led to the creation of the Massachusetts School for Idiotic and Feeble-Minded Youth, in 1851, the first institution of its kind in the United States. In 1867 the first city school class to train children of low-grade intelligence was organized in Germany, and all the larger cities of Germany later organized such special classes. Norway followed with a similar city organization, in 1874; and England, Switzerland, and Austria, about 1892. The first American city to organize such classes was Providence, Rhode Island, in 1893. Since that time special classes for children of low-grade mentality have become a common feature of the large city school systems in most American cities.

 

In 1832 the first attempt to educate crippled children, as such, was made in Munich. The model school in Europe for the education of cripples was established in Copenhagen, in 1872. The work was begun privately in New York City, in 1861, and first publicly in Chicago, in 1899. The London School Board first began such classes in England, in 1898.

 

Dependents, orphans, children of soldiers and sailors,