UNITED STATES.]
E D U C A. T I O N 677 of the Royal Commission of 1895. “Education,” says Education in the United States. the Report (vol. i. p. 120), “needs organization, but it would be destroyed by uniformity: it is stimulated by The first white settlers who came to North America were inspection, but it would be crushed by a Code. In the typical representatives of those European peoples who had public service, where the chief object is administrative made more progress in civilization than any other efficiency, the individual officer is necessarily subordinate j in the world. Those settlers, in particular those Beginn,a s in education, where a chief object is the discovery of more from England and from Holland, brought with £perfect methods of teaching, the individual teacher must them the most advanced ideas of the time on the subject of be left comparatively free. Every good teacher is a dis- education. The conditions of life in the New World emphascoverer, and in order to make discoveries he must have ized the need of schools and colleges, and among the earliest liberty of experiment.” It is not by larger grants of public acts of the settlers were provisions to establish them. public money alone that educational progress can be The steps taken between 1619 and 1622 to provide schools secured. The subsidies already paid out of the Treasury for the colony of Virginia were frustrated by the Indian war to elementary schools are very liberal, and the various which broke out in the latter year, and were never successreligious bodies cannot reasonably ask for more pecuniary fully renewed during the colonial period. In New York, help than they at present receive, unless they are prepared where the influence of the Dutch was at first predominant, to give their schools a more national character by accept- elementary schools were maintained at the public expense, ing representatives of the public as colleagues in the and were intended for the education of all classes of the management. But public funds for the erection of good population. This policy reflected the very advanced views secondary, technical, and commercial schools will, however, as to public elementary education which were then held in be needed, and the source from which these funds will be the Netherlands. The assumption of control in the colony derived, and the constitution of the authority which is to of New York by the English was a distinct check to the control their administration, have yet to be determined. development of public elementary education, and little or Endowments for schools and scholarships need to be no further progress was made until after the Revolution. made still more efficient; they are inadequate in amount, The most systematic educational policy was pursued in the and too capriciously distributed, to supply all modern colony of Massachusetts. As early as 1635, five years after needs. The parent who does not desire to avail himself it was founded, the town of Boston took action to the end of the public elementary school, and whose sons are not that “ our brother Philemon Pormort shall be entreated to likely to succeed in a competitive examination, has still to become schoolmaster for the teaching and nurturing children complain that advanced education is more costly in Eng- with us.” The General Court of the colony in 1636 made land than in any other country, and that institutions the first appropriation for what was to become Harvard with moderate fees such as the Lycees of France, or the College, taking its name in honour of the minister, John Realschulen or the Gymnasien of Germany, are not Harvard, who died in 1638, leaving his library and oneaccessible to him. There is therefore room for some half of his property, having a value of £800, to the new further action on the part of the State. But it is not institution. The amount of this appropriation of 1636 to legislation exclusively, or even mainly, that we must (£400) was remarkable in that it was probably equal to look for the completion of the edifice of public education. the whole colony tax for a year. In 1642 followed a That part of the work of the future “ which kings or laws legislative Act which, while saying nothing of schools, gave can cause or cure ” is comparatively a small part. Parlia- to the selectmen in every town power to oversee both the ment must in the last resort receive its mandate from the education and the employment of children. It is made people, and can do little more than seek to fulfil the the duty of the selectmen to see that the children can read national ideals. The motive force which we need must be and understand the principles of religion and the capital found in a higher and truer popular conception of a liberal laws of the country, and that they are put to some useful education, and of its relation to the formation of character work. Five years later, in 1647, was enacted the law and to the duties of industrial, civic, and family life. which is not only the real foundation of the Massachusetts That the acquisition of knowledge, though obviously the school system, but the type of later legislation throughout prominent business of a school, is not the whole of the United States. This epoch-making Act, the first of its education, and that knowledge consciously directed to the kind in the world, represented the public opinion of a special professional and industrial needs of life is of far colony of about 20,000 persons, living in thirty towns. It less real value than the knowledge which helps to bring required every town of fifty householders to establish a out the best powers of the reflective and accomplished school, the master of which should be paid either by the man, are truths which are yet imperfectly recognized. parents of the children taught or by public tax, as the We yet need a more general agreement as to the place majority of the town committee might decide; and it which the training of the hand and eye, and the construct- further required every town of one hundred families or ive and inventive faculties, should hold in a scheme of householders to set up a grammar school in which pupils intellectual culture. And in an age in which merely might be prepared for the “ University,” as the new instituecclesiastical influence over public education is waning, tion at Cambridge was designated. Moreover, a penalty we need to hold fast by all such agencies as exist for the was attached to neglect of this legislative requirement, in cultivation of the spiritual part of man, his emotions, the form of a fine to be devoted to the maintenance of the and his aspirations after goodness, and his love of truth. nearest school. Horace Mann said of the Act of 1647 :“ It How to cultivate in schools a genuine yet modest patriot- is impossible for us adequately to conceive the boldness of ism, and a desire to render service in municipal or public the measure, which aimed at universal education through life; how to give to parents a stronger interest in the the establishment of free schools. As a fact, it had no education of their children, and increased opportunities precedent in the world’s history; and, as a theory, it could of co-operating with the teachers; how to enlarge the have been refuted and silenced by a more formidable array boundaries of educational science, and to give increased of argument and experience than was ever marshalled freshness and vitality to the methods of instruction—all against any other institution of human origin. But time these are problems which await solution in the 20th cen- has ratified its soundness. Two centuries of successful tury. They were only partially and imperfectly solved in operation now proclaim it to be as wise as it was courageous, the 19th. (j. (j. p.) and as beneficent as it was disinterested.” The significance
