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reproduced in the American colonies the main type of schools existing at the time of their migration in the mother land from which they came. They were also dominated by the same deep religious purpose.
The dominance of this religious purpose in all instruction is well illustrated by the great beginning-school book of the time, The New England Primer. A digest of the contents of this, with a few pages reproduced, is given in R. 202. This book, from which all children learned to read, was used by Dissenters and Lutherans alike in the American colonies. This book Ford well characterizes in the following words: As one glances over what may truly be called “The Little Bible of New England,” and reads its stern lessons, the Puritan mood is caught with absolute faithfulness. Here was no easy road to knowledge and salvation; but with prose as bare of beauty as the whitewash of their churches, with poetry as rough and stern as their storm-torn coast, with pictures as crude and unfinished as their own glacial-smoothed boulders, between stiff oak covers which symbolized the contents, the children were tutored, until, from being unregenerate, and as Jonathan Edwards said, “young vipers, and infinitely more hateful than vipers” to God, they attained that happy state when, as expressed by Judge Sewell’s child, they were afraid that they “should goe to hell,” and were “stirred up dreadfully to seek God.” God was made sterner and more cruel than any living judge, that all might be brought to realize how slight a chance even the least erring had of escaping eternal damnation.
One learned to read chiefly that one might be able to read the Catechism and the Bible, and to know the will of the Heavenly Father. There was scarcely any other purpose in the maintenance of elementary schools. In the grammar schools and the colleges students were “instructed to consider well the main end of life and studies.” These institutions existed mainly to insure a supply of learned ministers for service in Church and State.
Such studies as history, geography, science, music, drawing, secular literature, and organized play were unknown. Children were constantly surrounded, week days and Sundays, by the somber Calvinistic religious atmosphere in New England, [16] and by the careful religious oversight of the pastors and elders in the colonies where the parochial-school system was the ruling plan for education. Schoolmasters were required to “catechise their scholars in the principles of the Christian religion,”
and it was made “a chief part of the schoolmaster’s religious care to commend his scholars and his labors amongst them unto God by prayer morning and evening, taking care that his scholars do reverently attend during the same.” Religious matter constituted the only reading matter, outside the instruction in Latin in the grammar schools. The Catechism was taught, and the Bible was read and expounded. Church attendance was required, and grammar-school pupils were obliged to report each week on the Sunday sermon. This insistence on the religious element was more prominent in Calvinistic New England than in the colonies to the south, but everywhere the religious purpose was dominant. The church parochial and charity schools were essentially schools for instilling the church practices and beliefs of the church maintaining them. This state of affairs continued until well toward the beginning of the nineteenth century.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. Compare the conservative and radical groups in the English purification movement with the conservative and radical groups, as typified by Erasmus and Luther, at the time of the Reformation.
2. Show how, for each group, the schools established were merely homeland foreign-type religious schools, with nothing distinctively American about them.
3. Show why such copying of homeland types, even to the Latin grammar school, was perfectly natural.
4. The provision of the Law of 1642 requiring instruction in “the capital laws of the country” was new. How do you explain this addition to motherland practices?
5. Show why the Law of 1642 was Calvinistic rather than Anglican in its origin.
6. Explain the meaning of the preamble to the Law of 1647.
7. Show how the Law of 1647 must go back for precedents to German, Dutch, and Scotch sources.
8. Apply the six principles stated by Mr. Martin, as embodied in the legislation of 1647, to modern state school practice, and show how we have adopted each in our laws.
9. Show also that the Law of 1647, as well as modern state school laws, is neither paternalistic nor socialistic in essential purpose.
10. Show that, though the mixture of religious sects in Pennsylvania made colonial legislation difficult, still it would have been possible to have enforced the Massachusetts Law of 1642, or the Pennsylvania laws of 1683
or 1693, in the colony. How do you explain the opposition and failure to do so?
11. Show how the charity schools for the poor, and church missionary-society schools, were the natural outcome of the English attitude toward elementary education.
12. Which of the three type plans in the American colonies by 1750 most influenced educational development in your State?
13. State the important contribution of Calvinism to our new-world life.
14. Explain the indifference of the Anglican Church to general education during the whole of our colonial period.
15. Explain what is meant by “The Puritan Church applied to its servant, the State,” etc.
SELECTED READINGS
In the accompanying Book of Readings the following selections are reproduced:
183. Nichols: The Puritan Attitude.
184. Gov. Bradford: The Puritans leave England.
185. First Fruits: The Founding of Harvard College.
186. First Fruits: The First Rules for Harvard College.
(a) Entrance Requirements.
(b) Rules and Precepts.
(c) Time and Order of Studies.
(d) Requirements for Degrees.
187. College Charters: Extracts from, showing Privileges.
(a) Harvard College, 1650.
(b) Brown College, 1764.
188. Dillaway: Founding of the Free School at Roxburie.
189. Baird: Rules and Regulations for Hopkins Grammar School.
190. Statutes: The Massachusetts Law of 1642.
191. Statutes: The Massachusetts Law of 1647.
192. Court Records: Presentment of Topsfield for Violating the Law of 1642.
193. Statutes: The Connecticut Law of 1650.
194. Statutes: Plymouth Colony Legislation.
195. Flatbush: Contract with a Dutch Schoolmaster.
196. New Amsterdam: Rules for a Schoolmaster in.
197. Statutes: The Pennsylvania. Law of 1683.
198. Minutes of Council: The First School in Philadelphia.
199. Murray: Early Quaker Injunctions regarding Schools.
200. Statutes: Apprenticeship Laws in the Southern Colonies.
(a) Virginia Statutes.
(b) North Carolina Court Records.
201. Stiles: A New England Indenture of Apprenticeship.
202. The New England Primer: Description and Digest.
QUESTIONS ON THE READINGS
1. What does the selection on The Puritan Attitude (183) reveal as to the extent and depth of the Reformation in England?
2. Characterize the feelings and emotions and desires of the Puritans, as expressed in the extract (184) from Governor Bradford’s narrative.
3. Characterize the spirit behind the founding of Harvard College, as expressed in the extract from New England’s First Fruits (185).
4. What was the nature and purpose of the Harvard College instruction as shown by the selection 186 a-d?
5. Point out the similarity between the exemptions granted to Harvard College by the Legislature of the colony (187 a) and those granted to mediaeval universities (103-105). Compare the privileges granted Brown (187 b) and those contained in 104.
6. Compare the founding of the Free School at Roxbury (188) with the founding of an English Grammar School (141-43).
7. What does the distribution of scholars at Roxbury (188) show as to the character of the school?
8. State the essentials of the Massachusetts Law of 1642 (190).
9. Compare the Massachusetts Law of 1642 and the English Poor-Law of 1601
(190 with 174) as to fundamental principles involved in each.
10. What does the court citation of Topsfield (192) show?
11. What new principle is added (191) by the Law of 1647, and what does this new law indicate as to needs in the colony for classical learning?
12. Show how the Connecticut Law of 1650 (193) was based on the Massachusetts Law (190) of 1642.
13. What does the Plymouth Colony appeal for Harvard College (194 b) indicate as to community of ideas in early New England?
14. What type of school was it intended to endow from the Cape Cod fisheries (194 c)?
15. What is the difference between the Plymouth requirement as to grammar schools (194 d) and the Massachusetts requirement (191)?
16. Compare the rules for the New Haven Grammar School (189) with those for Colet’s London School (138 a-c).
17. Characterize the early Dutch schools as shown by the rules for the schoolmaster (196) and the Flatbush contract (195).
18. Just what type of education did the Quakers mean to provide for, as shown in the extract from their Rules of Discipline (199)?
19. What kind of a school was the first one established in Philadelphia (198)?
20. Compare the proposed Pennsylvania Law of 1683 (197) and the Massachusetts Law of 1642 (190).
21. What conception of education is revealed by the Virginia apprenticeship laws (200 a, 1-3) and the North Carolina court records (200
b, 1-3)?
22. Characterize the New England Indenture of Apprenticeship given in 201.
SUPPLEMENTARY REFERENCES
Boone, R. G. Education in the United States.
Brown, S. W. The Secularization of American Education.
Cheyney, Edw. P. European Background of American Education.
Dexter, E.G. A History of Education in the United States.
* Eggleston, Edw. The Transit of Civilization.
Fisk, C. R. “The English Parish and Education at the Beginning of American Civilization”; in School Review, vol. 23, pp. 433-49.
(September, 1915.)
* Ford, P. L. The New England Primer.
* Heatwole, C. J. A History of Education in Virginia.
Jackson, G. L. The Development of School Support in Colonial Massachusetts.
* Kilpatrick, Wm. H. The Dutch Schools of New Netherlands and Colonial New York.
* Knight, E. W. Public School Education in North Carolina.
* Martin, Geo. H. Evolution of the Massachusetts Public School System.
Seybolt, R. F. Apprenticeship and Apprentice Education in Colonial New York and New England.
* Small, W. H. “The New England Grammar School”; in School Review, vol. 10, pp. 513-31. (September, 1902.) Small, W. H. Early New England Schools.
THE RISE OF SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY
NEW ATTITUDES AFTER THE ELEVENTH CENTURY. From the beginning of the twelfth century onward, as we have already noted, there had been a slow but gradual change in the character of human thinking, and a slow but certain disintegration of the Mediaeval System, with its repressive attitude toward all independent thinking. Many different influences and movements had contributed to this change—the Moslem learning and civilization in Spain, the recovery of the old legal and medical knowledge, the revival of city life, the beginnings anew of commerce and industry, the evolution of the universities, the rise of a small scholarly class, the new consciousness of nationality, the evolution of the modern languages, the beginnings of a small but important vernacular literature, and the beginnings of travel and exploration following the Crusades—all of which had tended to transform the mediaeval man and change his ways of thinking. New objects of interest slowly came to the front, and new standards of judgment gradually were applied. In consequence the mediaeval man, with his feeling of personal insignificance and lack of self-confidence, came to be replaced by
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