Historical Views of Education

Historical Views of Education

Rosalie M Romano

Introduction

The philosopher George Santayana (1905) warned, “Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.” For you as future educators, this is a significant motivation to read about how education has developed in the United States. The path to our 21st Century public school education system is a confounded, complicated, and contested one. Since the start of education even from the beginning of our nation has always had a purpose and an aim. But whose purpose? And what aim? Depending on your gender, on your ethnic background and socio-economic class, the purpose, aim and outcome could be different.

Contrary to popular myth, education has never been delivered the same to everyone. The social, economic and political context determined, and still does, the level of education you are given. In learning about the history of education, you will appreciate how many issues that are controversial today, e.g. religion, curriculum, funding, and more have been wrestled with in the past. If you try to understand the past, you have an insight into today, for you to think more clearly and realistically about as a teacher.

The need for a society to educate its young is universal to all cultures everywhere. How we educate is what is in question. For it is in the how those ideologies are revealed. Who should be educated and at what level has been decided by those in authority. Questions about who should be taught what are accepted by the society as it seeks to maintain itself as a culture. For example, in Colonial times the sons of the privileged were given access to formal education of reading and writing. This assured a level of knowledge and understanding for those who were destined for leadership in courts, politics and state government, and the church.

Education’s beginnings in the Colonies

Massachusetts Bay, New Hampshire and Connecticut created schools that taught children to read and write so they could worship and read the scriptures. Hence, school interconnected church and the curriculum. In 1642, as you read on page 143 of your text, Massachusetts Bay Colony passed a law that children should learn to read the Bible, lest they be ignorant of the laws of God. Religion was the reason for many Colonists to leave England and travel to America in search of freedom to worship. For people to worship and continue in their beliefs, they had to be able to read the Bible.

The first schools were to assure that the new generation would sustain their religious beliefs and acquire necessary basic skills. Literacy was important to these new Americans in order to assure religious salvation. Reading and religion formed the basis of the curriculum. Sometimes the curriculum included Latin and Greek, as well. Latin Grammar Schools were available for the wealthy sons of community leaders. But for everyone child, free school was available. This was in 1635!

The middle colonies, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware, took a different path than New England. People in the middle colonies came from groups such as the Irish, Scots, Danes, Germans, and other White European groups. Less homogeneous in terms of religion and politics than their northern counterparts, schools reflected this diversity. Parochial schools based on the myriad religious beliefs, e.g. Quakers, Jews, Catholics, and different Christian sects were created so religious groups might teach their particular catechism to children.

Even at the start of this country we find that schools themselves were common but what was taught, the reason for schools in the first place, and how teaching occurred, and who had access to schools was reflected in the local area. For example, African slaves in the south received no schooling except as necessary to labor for the owners.

For boys, and in some cases, girls, there was the Dame School, a precursor to the primary school. Here older women, such as widows and housewives, would teach the children their letters, frequently in the kitchen area of their homes. If girls were given any education, it was at a Dame School, and likely it was in sewing and homemaking skills. Rudimentary mathematics and numbers were not viewed as having importance in the early years, at least not as important as reading and some writing and it was predominantly boys who were taught this. School could last for a week, several months, or a year, depending on the need of the community.

In all colonies, some boys were offered an education beyond what the Dame school and their parents could teach them. Schools for reading and writing were supported by parents, who paid some fees as they had in the Dame School. These schools had materials called a Primer, which is like a textbook. The Primer was steeped in moral and religious teachings for boys to read, copy, memorize, and recite.

For those privileged to do well in school and come from parents who could afford to continue their child’s education, Latin Grammar Schools were founded. The boys who attended Latin Grammar Schools continued into the first college, Harvard (1636) and onto leadership roles in the community, the state and often in government.

Summary

The Puritans placed importance in reading. If people could read, then they would abide by the laws of the commonwealth. Here is a good example of how religion, education, and leadership coincided to be sure children were educated. In 1647, the Deluder Satan Act proclaimed children should be taught formal reading and writing, and in larger towns, a Latin Grammar schoolmaster be hired to prepare youngsters for Harvard College which had been established in 1636. Education in some formal program was important to those who settled in the New World, and this legacy of educating for a good life has influenced many thinkers and educators throughout our nation’s history. To read more about the Massachusetts’s laws of 1642 and 1647 see: http://www.ux1.eiu.edu/%7Ecfrnb/masslaws.html

Mandated Education

But unregulated and voluntary schools were insufficient to meet the needs of a growing new society, one which relied on common understandings of its people. By the mid 1700s, academies developed to meet the needs of children in the American colonies. These academies were not free, however, charging tuition but also teaching broader curriculum that included mathematics and science, as well as practical subject matter like agriculture or mapping and geography. These academies became increasingly popular, and pushed out the Latin Grammar Schools because their mission was larger in scope than to teach letters and religion. Academies filled a necessary niche in the new America, which was developing rapidly in formal institutions such as government, trade and economics, and required an active, participatory, and literate populace. Education was viewed as the best defense against sin and as a way to preserve religious beliefs. Moreover, education was established as the measure of a citizen of a community. There were some colonies that imposed fines or more severe penalties on parents and schoolmasters if a child were found to be illiterate.

Literacy and civil society

In 1751, Benjamin Franklin proposed a different kind of school: The Academy of Philadelphia. The curriculum was distinct from the classical tradition.

“An advertisement at the time of its opening in January of 1751 offered teaching in the following areas:

· writing, arithmetic, and mathematics (merchants' accounts, geometry, algebra, surveying, gauging, navigation, astronomy, drawing in perspective, and other mathematical sciences)

· natural and mechanical philosophy

· Latin, Greek, English, French and German, history, geography, chronology, logic and rhetoric (http://www.archives.upenn.edu/histy/features/1700s/acad_curric.html)

Franklin argued that all subjects should be taught in the English language to all students. Moreover, he advocated for a practical nature of learning to be included, skills that would assist the young person later in life in his daily life and work. For Franklin, education for this new society must include knowledge that would serve citizens in their endeavors. It made sense to have English as the medium of instruction, to emphasize mathematics and science (natural philosophy as it was called) as the core curriculum. Today we can see how this influence continues, and is debated about, just as it was when Franklin introduced his ideas. Should school curriculum be traditional, classical subjects or should it include the day to day wisdom and practical skills people use in their lives? To read more on this see: "Idea of the English School, Sketch'd out for the Consideration of the Trustees of the Philadelphia Academy,"

Latin grammar schools mainly in New England and the Middle Colonies, with some in the South evolved into English grammar schools. These schools were primarily for young men whose family had means, wealth and education to support their sons going to college. As with Latin grammar schools, English grammar schools prepared young men in classical studies of Latin and Greek languages, mathematics, philosophy, history, geography, rhetoric, and, of course, the English language arts of literacy, recitation, writing, grammar, and so forth.

For a view of one student’s experiences see the memoirs of Alexander Graydon, a student from 1760-1766 in the Academy school. This excerpt from his diary reveals an acute sense of which of his tutors were “good” teachers, and how life at this school amongst the students revolved around sports as well as the subjects they were learning. When Graydon left school by his own volition at the age of fourteen, he had “passed through Ovid, Virgil, Caesar and Sallust, and was learning Horace and Cicero.”

The colonists viewed education as important for the maintaining of their culture, including religious beliefs and traditions. After the Revolutionary War (1775), an independent people had to think about the purposes of education as it now applied in their new circumstance of being free from domination by England and King George IV. Thomas Jefferson argued amongst those who were collaborating in forming a new government that only with an educated populace could a free government and foundation of democracy is secure. For Jefferson, the integration of education and government became the theme of many of his writings. He submitted to congress an amendment to the Constitution during his State of the Union address, December 2, 1806:

Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves are its only safe depositories. And to render even them safe, their minds must be improved to a certain degree. . . . An amendment to our constitution must here come in aid of the public education. The influence over government must be shared among all people. (as cited in Padover, 1939, p. 87)

This amendment did not pass congress, but the issue of how public education is funded is still debated today, currently in the No Child Left Behind Act (2000).

Private schools

Why would the congress in 1803 not pass an amendment that funded public school education for all citizens in this new nation? One reason was that the new congress was composed of representatives from all the thirteen new states, all of which had experience with local control of education. To give over to the central government the responsibility to fund education in all the states was to also give over control of what form schools, teachers, and the curriculum would take.

By the early 1800s, citizens were used to being able to determine what type of education they wanted. And so private schools played a role in education from the earliest part of our nation’s history. We have seen that private schools were used to maintain religious beliefs and different denominations of Christianity supported their own schools and curriculum. Privileged, wealthy parents wanted a highly traditional, classical education for their children, and were willing to pay for special tutors privately or in schools that charged high tuition to provide children of the wealthy an education built on classical European traditions. Today we might be surprised to learn that the Roman Catholic church schools had the largest enrollments of all other private schools. Catholic schools were often important ways that new immigrants throughout the 1800s and into the 1900s maintained their religious and cultural identity. Immigrants from countries that were predominantly Catholic found refuge in these parochial schools. Children of Irish, Italian, German, and other immigrant groups supported parochial schools, especially in the North and in the Eastern part of the United States, where by the late 1800s thousands of Catholic schools could be found up and down the Eastern seaboard and inland.

But there was another reason for private schools beyond seeking one for high classical or religious curriculum. There were some people who did not wish either a religious curriculum or a high classical one for their children. Instead they sought alternative forms that suited what they thought their children needed in order to succeed in their lives. In fact, all of these different types of schools you have been reading about above usually did need to charge the parents in some way in order to maintain the school. Tuition might be in money or exchange of goods, but parents did need to pay something in order to keep the school and the teachers.

Funding of schools

The issue of how to fund schools, whether private or public, has not been fully resolved in our country. Should public schools be fully and completely funded by the federal government, such that all students have equal access to schools, curriculum, resources and teachers? How are schools funded today in your state? If you live in a state that relies on property taxes as a way of funding public schools, then you may discover that there is distinct and dramatic unequal funding in your state, since most states have both rural and urban areas, with urban areas drawing far more revenue than rural to support public schools. As a prospective teacher, your understanding of how your state funds its public schools is an important one. Not all states fund schools in the same way. Some states, for example, have a comprehensive salary schedule so that no matter where you teach in the state, you will be earning the same level as all other teachers of your years of experience and professional education. On the other hand, some teachers who teach in states that use property taxes to fund public education find that there can be thousands of dollars difference in salary for comparable experience and education for teachers depending on what part of the state they teach in.