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

In the eighteenth century different English church parishes began to set up workhouse schools of various types, and to maintain these out of parish “rates.” The one established in Bishopsgate Street, London, in 1701, is typical. This cared for about 375 children and in it, by 1720, there had been educated and placed forth 1420 children, and in addition 123 had died. Of this school it is recorded that poor children “being taken into the said Workhouse are there taught to Read and Write, and kept to Work until they are qualified to be put out to be Apprentices, and for the Sea Service, or otherwise disposed; … The Habit of the Children is all the same, being made of Russit Cloth, and a round Badge worn upon their Breast, representing a poor Boy, and a Sheep; the Motto: ‘God’s Providence is our Inheritance.’” …

In this workhouse children were “taught to spin Wool and Flax, to Sow and Knit, to make their own Cloaths, Shoes, and Stockings, and the like Employments; to inure them betimes to labour. They are also taught to read, and such as are capable, to write and cast Accounts; and also the Catechism, to ground them in Principles of Religion and Honesty.” [21]

The school established by Saint John’s parish, Southwark, London, in 1735, and designed to train and “put out” girls for domestic service (R. 241), and which cared for, clothed, and trained forty girls, is also typical of these parish schools “for the children of the industrious poor.”

METHODS OF INSTRUCTION. Throughout the eighteenth century the method of instruction commonly employed in the vernacular schools was what was known as the individual method. This was wasteful of both time and effort, and unpedagogical to a high degree (R. 244). Everywhere the teacher was engaged chiefly in hearing recitations, testing memory, and keeping order.

The pupils came to the master’s desk, one by one (see Figures 98, 99), and recited what they had memorized. Aside from imposing discipline, teaching was an easy task. The pupils learned the assigned lessons and recited what they had learned. Such a thing as methodology—technique of instruction—

was unknown. The dominance of the religious motive, too, precluded any liberal attitude in school instruction, the individual method was time-consuming, school buildings often were lacking, and in general there was an almost complete lack of any teaching equipment, books, or supplies.

Viewed from any modern standpoint the schools of the eighteenth century attained to but a low degree of efficiency (R. 244). The school hours were long, the schoolmaster’s residence or place of work or business was commonly used as a schoolroom, and such regular schoolrooms as did exist were dirty and noisy and but poorly suited to school purposes. Schools everywhere, too, were ungraded, the school of one teacher being like that of any other teacher of that class.

So wasteful of time and effort was the individual method of instruction that children might attend school for years and get only a mere start in reading and writing. Paulsen, [22] writing of schools in German lands at an even later date, says that even in the better type of vernacular schools

many children never achieved anything beyond a little reading and knowing a few things by heart…. The instruction in reading was never anything else but a torture, protracted through years, from saying the alphabet and formation of syllables to the deciphering of complete words, without any real success in the end, while writing was nothing but a wearisome tracing of the letters, the net result of all the toil being the gabbling of the Catechism and a few Bible texts and hymns, learned over and over again.

The imparting of information by the teacher to a class, or a class discussion of a topic, were almost unknown. Hearing lessons, assigning new tasks, setting copies, making quill pens, dictating sums, and imposing order completely absorbed the time and the attention of the teacher.

SCHOOL DISCIPLINE. The discipline everywhere was severe. “A boy has a back; when you hit it he understands,” was a favorite pedagogical maxim of the time. Whipping-posts were sometimes set up in the schoolroom, and practically all pictures of the schoolmasters of the time show a bundle of switches near at hand. Boys in the Latin grammar schools were flogged for petty offenses (R. 245). The ability to impose order on a poorly taught and, in consequence, an unruly school was always an important requisite of the schoolmaster. A Swabian schoolmaster, H�uberle by name, with characteristic Teutonic attention to details, has left on record [23]

that, in the course of his fifty-one years and seven months as a teacher he had, by a moderate computation, given 911,527 blows with a cane, 124,010 blows with a rod, 20,989 blows and raps with a ruler, 136,715

blows with the hand, 10,235 blows over the mouth, 7,905 boxes on the ear, 1,115,800 raps on the head, and 22,763 notabenes with the Bible, Catechism, singing book, and grammar. He had 777 times made boys kneel on peas, 613 times on a triangular piece of wood, had made 3001 wear the jackass, and 1707 hold the rod up, not to mention various more unusual punishments he had contrived on the spur of the occasion. Of the blows with the cane, 800,000 were for Latin words; of the rod 76,000 were for texts from the Bible or verses from the singing book. He also had about 3000 expressions to scold with, two thirds of which were native to the German tongue and the remainder his invention.

[Illustration: FIG. 141. A SCHOOL WHIPPING-POST

Drawn from a picture of a five-foot whipping-post which once stood in the floor of a schoolhouse at Sunderland, Massachusetts. Now in the Deerfield Museum.]

[Illustration: FIG. 142. AN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY GERMAN SCHOOL

Reproduction of an engraving by J. Mettenleiter, now in the Kupferstichkabinet, Munich, and printed in Joh. Ferd. Schlez’s.

Dorfschulen zu Langenhausen. Nuremberg, 1795.]

Another illustration of German school discipline, of many that might be cited, was the reform work of Johann Ernest Christian Haun, who was appointed, in 1783, as inspector of schools in the once famous Gotha (p.

317). Due to warfare and neglect the schools there had fallen into disrepute. Haun drove the incapable teachers from the work, and for a time restored the schools to something of their earlier importance. Among other reforms it is recorded that he forbade teachers to put irons around the boys’ necks, to cover them with mud, to make them kneel on peas, or to brutally beat them. Diesterweg (R. 244) describes similar punishments as characteristic of eighteenth-century German schools. The eighteenth-century German schoolmaster shown in Fig. 142 was probably a good sample of his class.

Pedagogical writers of the time uniformly complain of the severe discipline of the schools, and the literature of the period abounds in allusions to the prevailing harshness of the school discipline. A few writers condemn, but most approve heartily of the use of the rod. “Spare the rod and spoil the child” had for long been a well-grounded pedagogical doctrine. Among many literary extracts that might be cited illustrating this belief, the following poem by the English poet Crabbe (1754-1832) is interesting. He puts the following words into the mouth of his early schoolmaster:

Students like horses on the road,

Must be well lashed before they take the load; They may be willing for a time to run, But you must whip them ere the work be done; To tell a boy, that if he will improve, His friends will praise him, and his parents love, Is doing nothing—he has not a doubt

But they will love him, nay, applaud without; Let no fond sire a boy’s ambition trust, To make him study, let him learn he must.

CONDITIONS SURROUNDING CHILDHOOD. It is difficult for us of today to recreate in imagination the pitiful life-conditions which surrounded children a century and a half ago. Often the lot of the children of the poor, who then constituted the great bulk of all children, was little less than slavery. Wretchedly poor, dirty, unkempt, hard-worked, beaten about, knowing strong drink early, illiterate, often vicious—their lot was a sad one. For the children of the poor there were few, if any, educational opportunities. Writing on the subject David Salmon says: [24]

The imagination of the twentieth century cannot fathom the poverty of the eighteenth. The great development of mines and manufactures, which has brought ease and independence within the reach of industrious labour everywhere, had hardly begun; employment was so scarce and intermittent, and wages were so low, that the working classes lived in hovels, dressed in rags, and were familiar with the pangs of hunger; while those who were forced to look to the rates for hovels, rags, and food sufficient to maintain a miserable life numbered a sixth of the whole population.

In the towns children were apprenticed out early in life, and for long hours of daily labor. Child welfare was almost entirely neglected, children were cuffed about and beaten at their work, juvenile delinquency was a common condition, child mortality was heavy, and ignorance was the rule. Schools generally were pay institutions or a charity, and not a birthright, and usually existed only for the middle and lower-middle classes in the population who were attendants at the churches and could afford to pay a little for the schooling given. Reading and religion were usually the only free subjects. Only in the New England Colonies, where the beginnings of town and colony school systems were evident, and in a few of the German States where state control was beginning to be exercised, was a better condition to be found.

[Illustration: FIG. 143. CHILDREN AS MINIATURE ADULTS

Children leaving school, from an eighteenth-century drawing by Saint Aubin.]

Among the middle and upper social classes, particularly on the continent of Europe, a stiff artificiality everywhere prevailed. Children were dressed and treated as miniature adults, the normal activities of childhood were suppressed, and the natural interests and emotions of children found little opportunity for expression. Wearing powdered and braided hair, long gold-braided coats, embroidered waistcoats, cockaded hats, and swords, boys were treated more as adults than as children.

Girls, too, with their long dresses, hoops, powdered hair, rouged faces, and demure manner, were trained in a, for children, most unnatural manner.

[25]

The dancing master for their manners and graces, and the religious instructor to develop in them the ability to read and to go through a largely meaningless ceremonial, were the chief guides for the period of their childhood.

SCHOOL SUPPORT. No uniform plan, in any country, had as yet been evolved for even the meager support which the schools of the time received. The Latin grammar schools were in nearly all cases supported by the income from old “foundations” and from students’ fees, with here and there some state aid. The new elementary vernacular schools, though, had had assigned to them few old foundations upon which to draw for maintenance, and in consequence support for elementary schools had to be built up from new sources, and this required time.

In England the Act of Conformity of 1662 (R. 166), it will be remembered (p. 324), had laid a heavy hand on the schools by driving all Dissenters from positions in them, and the Five Mile Act of 1665 had borne even more severely on the teachers in the schools of the Dissenters. Fortunately for elementary education in England, however, the English courts, in 1670, had decided in a test case that the teacher in an elementary school could not be deprived of his position by failure of the bishop to license him, if he were a nominee of the