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

founder or the lay patron of the school. The result of this decision was that, between 1660 and 1730, 905 endowed elementary schools were founded in England, and 72 others previously founded had their endowments increased. The number continued to increase throughout the eighteenth century, and by 1842 had reached a total of 2194. These new foundations probably gave the best schooling of the time, and tended to stir the Established Church to action. Accordingly we find that during the eighteenth century the vestries of the different church parishes began the creation of parish elementary schools for the children of the poor of the parish, supporting a teacher for them out of the parish rates, and without specific legal authorization to do so. These new parish schools also contributed somewhat to the provision of elementary education, and mark the beginning of the church “voluntary schools” which were such a characteristic feature of nineteenth-century English education. We thus have, in England, endowed elementary schools, parish schools, dame schools, private-adventure schools of many types, and charity-schools, all existing side by side, and drawing such support as they could from endowment funds, parish rates, church tithes, subscriptions, and tuition fees. The support of schools by subscription lists (R. 240) was a very common proceeding. Education in England, more than in any other Protestant land, early came to be regarded as a benevolence which the State was under no obligation to support. Only workhouse schools were provided for by the general taxation of all property.

 

In the Netherlands and in German lands church funds, town funds, and tuition fees were the chief means of support, though here and there some prince had provided for something approaching state support for the schools of his little principality. Frederick the Great had ordered schools established generally (1763) and had decreed the compulsory attendance of children (R. 274), but he had depended largely on church funds and tuition fees (�7) for maintenance, with a proviso that the tuition of poor and orphaned children should be paid from “any funds of the church or town, that the schoolmaster may get his income” (�8). In Scotland the church parish school was the prevailing type. In France the religious societies (p. 345) provided nearly all the elementary vernacular religious education that was obtainable.

 

In the Dutch Provinces, in the New England Colonies, and in some of the minor German States, we find the clearest examples of the beginnings of state control and maintenance of elementary schools—something destined to grow rapidly and in the nineteenth century take over the school from the Church and maintain it as a function of the State. The Prussian kings early made grants of land and money for endowment funds and support, and state aid was ordered granted by Maria Theresa for Austria (R. 274 a), in 1774. In the New England Colonies the separation of the school from the Church, and the beginnings of state support and control of education, found perhaps their earliest and clearest exemplification. In the other Colonies the lottery was much used (R. 246) to raise funds for schools, while church tithes, subscription lists, and school societies after the English pattern also helped in many places to start and support a school or schools.

 

Only by some such means was it possible in the eighteenth century that the children of the poor could ever enjoy any opportunities for education. The parents of the poor children, themselves uneducated, could hardly be expected to provide what they had never come to appreciate themselves. On the other hand, few of the well-to-do classes felt under any obligation to provide education for children not their own. There was as yet no realization that the diffusion of education contributed to the welfare of the State, or that the ignorance of the masses might be in any way a public peril. This attitude is well shown for England by the fact that not a single law relating to the education of the people, aside from workhouse schools, was enacted by Parliament during the whole of the eighteenth century. The same was true of France until the coming of the Revolution.

It is to a few of the German States and to the American Colonies that we must turn for the beginnings of legislation directing school support. This we shall describe more in detail in later chapters.

 

THE LATIN SECONDARY SCHOOL. The great progress made in education during the eighteenth century, nevertheless, was in elementary education.

Concerning the secondary schools and the universities there is little to add to what has previously been said. During this century the secondary school, outside of German lands, remained largely stationary. Having become formal and lifeless in its teaching (p. 283), and in England and France crushed by religious-uniformity legislation, the Latin grammar school of England and the surviving colleges in France practically ceased to exert any influence on the national life. The Jesuit schools, which once had afforded the best secondary education in Europe, had so declined in usefulness everywhere that they were about to be driven from all lands.

The Act of Conformity of 1662 (R. 166) had dealt the grammar schools of England a heavy blow, and the eighteenth century found them in a most wretched condition, with few scholars, and their endowments shamefully abused. The Law of 1662, says Montmorency, “involved such a peering into the lives of schoolmasters, such a course of inquisitorial folly, that the position became intolerable. Men would not become schoolmasters….

Education had no meaning when none but political and religious hypocrites were allowed to teach…. National education was destroyed.” and the grammar schools of England were “practically withdrawn during more than two centuries (1662-1870) from the national life.” [26]

 

In German lands the old Latin schools continued largely unchanged until near the middle of the eighteenth century, with Latin, taught as it had been for a century or more, as the chief subject of study. Shortly after the coming of Frederick the Great to the throne (1740) the Latin schools of Prussia, and after them the Latin schools in other German States, were reorganized and given a new life. The influence of Francke’s school at Halle (p. 418), and the new types of teaching developed there and by his followers elsewhere, began to be felt. German, French, and mathematics were given recognition, and some science work was here and there introduced. Above all, though, Greek now attained to the place of first importance in the reorganized Latin schools.

 

It was not until after 1740 that the German people awakened to the possibility of an independent national life. Then, under the new impulse toward nationality, French influence and manners were thrown off, German literature attained its Golden Age, the Ritterakademieen (p. 405) were discarded, and a number of the German Principalities and States revised their school regulations and erected, out of the old Latin schools, a series of humanistic gymnasia in which the study of Greek life and culture occupied the foremost place. New methods in classical study were thought out and applied, and a new pedagogical purpose—culture and discipline—was given to the regenerated Latin schools. A new Renaissance, in a way, took place in German lands, [27] and a knowledge of Greek was proclaimed by German university and gymnasial teachers as indispensable to a liberal education with an earnestness of conviction not exceeded by Battista Guarino (p. 268) four centuries before. To know Greek and to have some familiarity with Greek literature and history now came to be regarded as necessary to the highest culture, [28] and a pedagogical theory for such study was erected, based on the discipline of the mind, [29] which dominated the German classical school throughout the entire nineteenth century. It was in the eighteenth century also that the German States began the development of the scientific secondary school (Realschule), see p. 420, as described in a preceding chapter.

 

[Illustration: FIG. 144. A PENNSYLVANIA ACADEMY

York Academy, York, Pennsylvania, founded by the Protestant Episcopal Church, in 1787.]

 

RISE OF THE ACADEMY IN AMERICA. As we have seen (p. 361), the English Latin grammar school was early (1635) carried to New England, and set up there and elsewhere in the Colonies, but after the close of the seventeenth century its continued maintenance was something of a struggle.

Particularly in the central and southern colonies, where commercial demands early made themselves felt, the tendency was to teach more practical subjects. This tendency led to the evolution, about the middle of the eighteenth century, of the distinctively American Academy, with a more practical curriculum, and by the close of the century it was rapidly superseding the older Latin grammar school. Franklin’s Academy at Philadelphia, which began instruction in 1751, and which later evolved into the University of Pennsylvania, was probably the first American Academy. The first in Massachusetts was founded in 1761, and by 1800 there were seventeen in Massachusetts alone. The great period of academy development was the first half of the nineteenth century. The Phillips Academy, at Andover, Massachusetts, founded in 1788, reveals clearly the newer purpose of these American secondary schools. The foundation grant of this school gives the purpose to be:

 

to lay the foundation of a public free school or ACADEMY for the purposes of instructing Youth, not only in English and Latin Grammar, Writing, Arithmetic, and those Sciences wherein they are commonly taught; but more especially to learn them the GREAT END AND REAL

BUSINESS OF LIVING … it is again declared that the first and principle object of this Institution is the promotion of TRUE

PIETY and VIRTUE; the second, instruction in the English, Latin, and Greek Languages, together with Writing, Arithmetic, Music, and the Art of Speaking; the third, practical Geometry, Logic, and Geography; and the fourth, such other liberal Arts and Sciences or Languages, as opportunity and ability may hereafter admit, and as the TRUSTEES shall direct.

 

Though still deeply religious, these new schools usually were free from denominationalism. Though retaining the study of Latin, they made most of new subjects of more practical value. A study of real things rather than words about things, and a new emphasis on native English and on science were prominent features of their work. They were also usually open to girls, as well as boys,—an innovation in secondary education before almost wholly unknown. Many were organized later for girls only. These institutions were the precursors of the American public high school, itself a type of the most democratic institution for secondary education the world has ever known.

 

THE UNIVERSITIES. The condition of the universities by the middle of the eighteenth century we traced in the preceding chapter. They had lost their earlier importance as institutions of learning, but in a few places the sciences were slowly gaining a foothold, and in German lands we noted the appearance of the first two modern universities—institutions destined deeply to influence subsequent university development, as we shall point out in a later chapter.

 

END OF THE TRANSITION PERIOD. We have now reached, in our study of the history of educational progress, the end of the transition period which marked the change in thinking from mediaeval to modern attitudes. The period was ushered in with the beginnings of the Revival of Learning in Italy in the fourteenth century, and it may fittingly close about the middle of the eighteenth.

 

We now stand on the threshold of a new era in world history. The same questioning spirit that animated the scholars of the Revival of Learning, now full-grown and become bold and self-confident, is about to be applied to affairs of politics and government, and we are soon to see absolutism and mediaeval attitudes in both Church and State questioned and overthrown. New political theories are to be advanced, and the divine right of the people is to be asserted and established