Читать книгу Child Life in Colonial Days - Alice Morse Earle - Страница 9

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First mark whereof scholes were erected, And what the founders did intend. And then doe thou thy study directe For to obtain unto that end.

Doubtless this was all their meaning, To have their countrie founded With all poyntes of honest lernynge Whereof the public weal had nede.

—The Last Trumpet. R. Crowley, 1550.

No greater contrast of conditions could exist than between the school life of what we love to call the "good old times," and that of the far better times of to-day. Poor, small, and uncomfortable schoolhouses, scant furnishings, few and uninteresting books, tiresome and indifferent methods of teaching, great severity of discipline, were the accompaniments of school days until this century. Yet with all these disadvantages children obtained an education, for an education was warmly desired; no difficulties could chill that deep-lying longing for learning. "Child," said one noble New England mother of the olden days, "if God make thee a good Christian and a good scholar, 'tis all thy mother ever asked for thee."

Not only did parents strive for the education of their children, but the colonies assisted by commanding the building and maintaining of a school in each town where there was a sufficient number of families and scholars. Rhode Island was the only New England colony that did not compel the building of schoolhouses and the education of children.

So determined was Massachusetts to have schools that in 1636, only six years after the settlement of Boston, the General Court, which was composed of representatives from every settlement in the Bay Colony, and which was the same as our House of Representatives to-day, gave over half the annual income of the entire colony to establish the school which two years later became Harvard College. This event should be remembered; it is distinguished in history as the first time any body of people in any country ever gave through its representatives its own money to found a place of education.

In Virginia schoolhouses were few for over a century. Governor Berkeley, an obstinate and narrow-minded Englishman, wrote home to England in 1670,

"I thank God there are in Virginia no free schools nor printing, and I hope we shall not have, for learning hath brought disobedience and heresy into the world." Some Virginia gentlemen did not agree with him, however, and gave money to try to establish free schools for poor children. A far greater hindrance to the establishment of schools than the governor's stupid opposition, was the fact that there was no town or village life in Virginia; the houses and plantations were scattered; previous to the year 1700 Jamestown was the only Virginia town, and it was but a petty settlement. Williamsburg was not even laid out; a few seaports had been planned, but had not been built. Hence the children of wealthy planters were taught by private tutors at home, or were sent to school in England.

Occasionally, as years passed on, there might be found in Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia, what was called an old-field school, the uniting of a few neighbors to hire a teacher, too often a poor one, like the "hedge-teachers" of Europe, for a short term of teaching, in a shabby building placed on an old exhausted tobacco field.

In one of these old-field schools kept by Hobby—sexton, pedagogue, and "the most conceited man in three parishes"—George Washington obtained most of his education. A daily ride on horseback for a year to a similar school ten miles away, and for another year a row morning and night even in roughest weather across the river to a Fredericksburg teacher, ended his school career when he was thirteen; but he had then made a big pile of neatly written manuscript school books, which may now be seen in the Library at Washington; and he had acquired a passionate longing to be educated, which accompanied him through life.

An "advisive narrative" sent from America to the Bishop of London, toward the end of the seventeenth century, says:—

"This lack of schools in Virginia is a consequence of their scattered planting. It renders a very numerous generation of Christian's Children born in Virginia, who naturally are of beautiful and comely Persons, and generally of more ingenious Spirits than those in England, unserviceable for any great Employment in Church or State."

Mary Lord, 1710 circa

This statement was not wholly correct; for though Virginians were not usually fitted to be parsons, they certainly proved suited to state and government. When the war of the Revolution broke out, the noblest number of great statesmen, orators, and generals, who certainly were men of genius if not of conventional school education, came from the southern provinces. These brilliant Virginians were strong evidence and proof of what the great orator, Patrick Henry, called, in his singular pronunciation, "naiteral pairts"; which he declared was of more account than "all the book-lairnin' on the airth." Different climates and surroundings soon bring out different traits in the same race of people. The warm climate and fruitful soil in the southern colonies developed from English stock an easy-living race who needed the great stimulus and noble excitement of the Revolution to exhibit the highest qualities of brain. The Puritan minister, Cotton Mather, said in 1685, in a sermon before the Governor and Council in Massachusetts, "The Youth in this Country are verie Sharp and early Ripe in their Capacities." Thus speedily had keen New England air and hard New England life developed these characteristic New England traits.

New England at that time was controlled, both in public and private life, by the Puritan ministers, who felt, as one of them said, that "unless school and college flourish, church and state cannot live." The ministers were accredited guardians of the schools; and when Boston chose five school inspectors to visit the Latin School with the ministers, many of the latter were highly incensed, and Increase Mather refused to go with these lay visitors.

By a law of Massachusetts, passed in 1647, it was ordered that every town of fifty families should provide a school where children could be taught to read and write; while every town of one hundred householders was required to have a grammar school. In the Connecticut Code of Laws of 1650 were the same orders. These schools were public, but were not free; they were supported at the expense of the parents.

In 1644 the town of Salem ordered "that a note be published the next lecture day, that such as have children to be kept at school, would bring in their names, and what they will give for a whole year; and also that if any poor body hath children or a child to be put to school, and not able to pay for their schooling, that the town will pay it by a rate." Lists of children were made out in towns, and if the parents were well-to-do, they had to pay whether their children attended school or not.

Land was sometimes set aside to support partly the school; it was called the "school-meadows," or "school-fields," and was let out for an income to help to pay the teacher. This was a grant made on the same principle that grants were made to physicians, tanners, and other useful persons, not to establish free education. At a later date lotteries were a favorite method of raising money for schools.

It was not until about the time of the Revolution that the modern signification of the word "free"—a school paid for entirely by general town taxes—could be applied to the public schools of most Massachusetts towns, and when the schools of Boston were made free, that community stood alone for its liberality not only in America, but in the world.

The pay was given in any of the inconvenient exchanges which had to pass as money at that time,—in wampum, beaver skins, Indian corn, wheat, peas, beans, or any country product known as "truck." It is told of a Salem school, that one scholar was always seated at the window to study and also to hail passers-by, and endeavor to sell to them the accumulation of corn, vegetables, etc., which had been given in payment to the teacher.

The logs for the great fireplace were furnished by the parents or guardians of the scholars as a part of the pay for schooling; and an important part it was in the northern colonies, in the bitter winter, in the poorly built schoolhouses. Some schoolmasters, indignant at the carelessness of parents who failed to send the expected load of wood early in the winter, banished the unfortunate child of the tardy parent to the coldest corner of the schoolroom. The town of Windsor, Connecticut, voted "that the committee be empowered to exclude any scholar that shall not carry his share of wood for the use of the said school." In 1736 West Hartford ordered every child "barred from the fire" whose parents had not sent wood.

"Erudition" Schoolhouse, Bath, Maine, 1797

The school laws of the State of Massachusetts, framed in 1789, crystallized all the principles, practice, and hopes that had been developed by a hundred and fifty years of school life. The standard set by these laws was decidedly lower than those of colonial days. Where a permanent English school had been imperative, six months schooling a year might be permitted to take its place; where every town of a hundred families had had a grammar school in which boys could be fitted for the university, only towns of two hundred families were compelled to have such schools. Thus the open path to the university was closed in a hundred and twenty Massachusetts towns.

Judge Thomas Holme composed in grammarless rhyme, in 1696, a True Relation of the Flourishing State of Philadelphia. In it he says:—

"Here are schools of divers sorts

To which our youth daily resorts,

Good women, who do very well

Bring little ones to read and spell,

Which fits them for writing; and then

Here's men to bring them to their pen,

And to instruct and make them quick

In all sorts of Arithmetick."

These statements were scarcely carried out in fact; in Pennsylvania educational advantages were few, and among some classes education was sorely hampered. The Quakers did not encourage absolute illiteracy, but they thought knowledge of the "three R's" was enough; they distinctly disapproved of any extended scholarship, as it fostered undue pride and provoked idleness. The Germans were worse; their own historians, the Calvinist and Lutheran preachers, Schlatter and Muhlenberg, are authority; there were among them a few schools of low grade; but the introduction of the public school system among the Germans was resisted by indignation meetings and litigation. The Tunkers degenerated so that they did not desire a membership of educated persons, and would have liked to destroy all books but religious ones. It was said by these German settlers that schooling made boys lazy and dissatisfied on the farms, and that religion would suffer by too much learning. As Bayard Taylor puts it in his Pennsylvania Farmer:—

"Book learning gets the upper hand and work is slow and slack,

And they that come long after us will find things gone to wrack."

School-teachers in the middle and southern colonies were frequently found in degraded circumstances; many of them were redemptioners and exported convicts. I have frequently noted such newspaper advertisements as this from the Maryland Gazette:—

"Ran away: A Servant man who followed the occupation of a Schoolmaster, much given to drinking and gambling."

So universal was drunkenness among schoolmasters that a chorus of colonial "gerund-grinders" might sing in Goldsmith's words:—