Читать книгу Introduction to the scientific study of education - Charles Hubbard Judd - Страница 35

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The first period of our national life, during which we were very gradually evolving the conception of a need for public education and were setting up the requirement of schools in every community, extended down to the decade before the Civil War. Professor Cubberley has given a very illuminating description of this period, from which we may quote the following extracts:

During the early decades of the nineteenth century, schools and the means of education made little progress. There were among the founders of our states certain far-seeing men who wished for general public education, but it was well along toward the middle of the century before these men represented more than a hopeful minority in most of our states, and in the South little was done until after the Civil War....

To be illiterate was no reproach, and it was possible to follow many pursuits successfully without having received any other education than the education of daily work and experience. A large proportion of the people felt that those who desired an education should pay for it. As the Rhode Island farmer expressed it to Henry Barnard in 1844, it would be as sensible to propose to take his plough away from him to plough his neighbor’s field as to take his money to educate his neighbor’s child. Others felt that at most free education should be extended only to the children of the poor, and for the rudiments of learning only. Still others felt that all forms of education would be conducted best if turned over to the various religious and educational societies of the time. A system of public instruction maintained by general taxation, such as we to-day enjoy, would not only have been declared unnecessary, but would have been stoutly resisted as well. The best schools, and often the only schools, were private schools supported by the tuition fees of those who could afford to use them, and most of these were more or less directly under church control.

Not until after the beginning of the nineteenth century was education regarded at all as a legitimate public function....

The different humanitarian movements which arose after 1820, and which, among other things, demanded public tax-supported schools for all, had not as yet made themselves felt. The people were poor, and indifferent as to education.

Gradually, and only after great effort, this condition of apathy and indifference was changed to one of active interest, though the change took place but slowly, and differed in point of time in different parts of the country. The Lancastrian system of monitorial instruction (by which a single teacher with the assistance of his best students, called monitors, taught hundreds of pupils), introduced into this country from England about 1806, for the first time made an elementary school training for all seem possible, from a financial point of view....

The idea that free education was a right, and that universal education was a necessity, began to be urged and to find acceptance. The land grants of Congress to the new states for the benefit of common schools greatly stimulated the movement. The published reports of those who had visited Pestalozzi’s school in Switzerland, and had examined the new state school system in Prussia, were extensively read. The moral and economic advantages of schools were set forth at length in resolutions, speeches, pamphlets, magazines, and books.

Just when this change took place cannot be definitely stated. Roughly speaking, it began about 1825 and was accomplished by 1850 in the Northern states. It was a gradual change rather than a sudden one, though rapid advances were at times made. The movement everywhere was greatly stimulated by the educational revival inaugurated by Horace Mann in Massachusetts in 1837. In the Southern states, with one or two exceptions, little was accomplished until after the Civil War and the Reconstruction Period were over. Almost everywhere it took place only after prolonged agitation, and ofttimes only after a bitter struggle. The indifference of legislatures, the unwillingness of taxpayers to assume the burdens of general taxation, the small sense of local responsibility, the satisfaction with existing conditions, the old aristocratic conception of education, the pauper and charity-school idea, and frequently the opposition of denominational and private schools,—all of these had to be met and overcome. The referendum was tried in a number of states, and sometimes more than once; in others, the question of free schools became a vital political issue....

By 1850, the principle of tax-supported schools had been generally accepted in all of the Northern states, and the beginnings of free schools made in some of the Southern states. Six state normal schools had been established, a number of states had provided for State Superintendents of Common Schools and for ex-officio State Boards of Education, and the movement for state control of education had begun. It may be said that it had not become a settled conviction with a majority of the people that the provision of some form of free education was a duty of the state, and that such education contributed in a general way, though just how was not at that time clear, to the moral uplift of the people, to a higher civic virtue, and to increased economic returns to the state. A new conception of free public education as a birthright of the child on the one hand, and as an exercise of the state’s inherent right to self-preservation and improvement on the other, had taken the place of the earlier conception of schools as merely a coöperative effort, based on economy, and for the instruction of youth merely in the rudiments of learning.9