III Education
After 1730 the tasks of education were carried out in a new social and cultural setting. The arrival of Scots, Irish, Germans, and Negro slaves, all entering in large numbers for the first time, added human variety and social diversity to the older English and Dutch populations. Accumulations of wealth in commerce and agriculture gave rise to towns and produced more clearly defined social classes. Although the great majority of Americans still lived on farms, influential numbers resided in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and other bustling ports along the coast. The towns drew ambitious and able youths away from the farms and villages with a promise of greater rewards in wealth and status. Young John Adams, who made his way from the family farm in Quincy to Harvard College and then on to a career as a Boston lawyer, and Thomas Hancock, son of a country clergyman who acquired sufficient wealth as a merchant to leave a fortune of £ 100,000 to his nephew John, followed a course that was becoming both a pattern and an ideal. A wealthy colonial aristocracy emerged, exercising political and social leadership. A diverse middle class of professional men, merchants, and independent farmers lived in comfort and esteem and managed local politics. A lower class of servants, artisans, farm laborers, and Negro slaves supplied the muscle and hard work that enabled the colonies to participate in the expanding trade and increasing wealth of the Western world.
In these circumstances naturally there were opportunities and pressures for new departures in education. The academy, a modification of the old grammar school, was the most important attempt to supply a kind of training suitable for a mixed economy and society with commercial as well as professional and agricultural components. It was fitting that the academy movement should have been initiated by Benjamin Franklin, the prophet of the new America. Although private schoolmasters in colonial towns and villages had given instruction in practical and useful subjects, the decision of Franklin and some friends to launch an academy in Philadelphia was the first attempt to create an institution for secondary education designed to complement and implement the more materialistic outlook of the eighteenth-century American. Franklin recognized that any school dependent upon public patronage would have to supply instruction in the ancient languages, but he proposed to include new subjects such as modern languages, and to add substantial amounts of science, mathematics, and history. To his mind the most novel and important proposal was the English school, a separate branch of the academy which would prepare students for careers in trades and professions. Although the academy at Philadelphia did not exactly follow Franklin's model, it roughly conformed to it and, more important, it was imitated throughout America. By a century later several thousand academies had been formed. To describe them as either exclusively private or public schools is misleading. Most, but by no means all, obtained charters from colonial assemblies or, after 1776, from state legislatures. They often received financial assistance in some form from government and their doors were open to all who could pay the fees. They were governed however by private self-perpetuating boards of trustees, and they were free to teach subjects and fix requirements and regulations as they wished. Usually drawing financial support and students from a particular region or vicinity, they are most accurately described as secondary schools of a mixed private and public character.
Colleges remained closely tied to religion although they were by no means immune to secular currents in thought and styles of life. The foundation of new colleges between 1740 and the War for Independence was mainly the result of the impact of the Great Awakening on religious feeling, denominational growth, and rivalry. With the proliferation of schisms in denominations, the weakening of church establishments, and the spread of tolerance, denominations sought to enhance their chances of popular acceptance and support by founding colleges. In these new institutions the children of the faithful would be instructed and a supply of trained ministers assured. New Light Presbyterianism was sufficiently established to open Princeton in 1746. New England Baptists founded Brown in 1764, the Dutch Calvinists established Rutgers in 1766, and frontier Congregationalists secured a charter for Dartmouth in 1769. Only Columbia, the object of an inconclusive denominational struggle, and the University of Pennsylvania, which developed out of the movement for Franklin's academy in Philadelphia, came into existence without benefit of a denominational connection. Since New York and Philadelphia were religiously and socially more diverse than any other colonial cities, it is not surprising that nonsectarianism should have commenced there. Although the denominational colleges maintained a religious connection to the extent of asking for funds from churches and drawing their presidents, board members, and teachers from denominational ranks, none could cavalierly take the position that students should be admitted only from that same source. Both students and funds were too scarce and their supply too precarious for a college to exclude anyone who wanted to come. No tests besides adequate preparation and financial ability were therefore imposed.
Through the second half of the eighteenth century the curriculum of the colleges reflected the progress of rationalism and natural religion. Although all colleges, nonsectarian as well as denominational, continued to foster a way of life and instruction for undergraduates built around Christian piety, they introduced new works and concepts from Newton's science and Locke's philosophy. God was not, of course, dismissed from the colonial college, but He was required to share the stage. The champions of traditional religious and educational views, disturbed by the growth of rival denominations and religious voluntarism as well as by rationalism, vigorously counterattacked the encroachments of a more worldly outlook. Despite the insistence of college officials like Thomas Clap (1703-1767), rector and later president of Yale, that colleges should mainly serve to train prospective ministers, the colleges steadily broadened their intellectual and social perspectives.
The winning of national independence marked an epoch in the history of ideas about public control of education. Before 1776 education was almost entirely a local responsibility. New England colonial governments had obligated towns to supply certain kinds of instruction, but the actual conduct of education was in local hands and the requirements of colonial assemblies were frequently ignored. The mother country provided a model for colonial education and furnished philanthropic assistance for schools and colleges; the British government, however, had not regulated or encouraged education in any way.
Even before the end of the war, thoughtful Americans began to contemplate the kind of education needed for the free citizens of independent republics. Recognizing that self-governing republics resting upon consent were the revolutionary element in the struggle for independence, statesmen looked ahead to the educational system that would secure popular loyalty and release the energy needed to maintain such untried, experimental forms of government. The promises of rights and opportunities had to be given institutional form if the sacrifices of war and the disruption of old loyalties were to be justified. The most imaginative proposal came from Thomas Jefferson in 1779. Jefferson's plan for public education comprised a part of his work as a member of a committee of the Virginia Assembly assigned to revise the laws of the state in accordance with republican principles. He had two objectives: to supply all the children of the commonwealth with the elementary instruction necessary to make them useful, responsible citizens, and to prepare a select group to assume positions of political and social leadership. Jefferson's proposal was only the first of a succession of schemes for educational reform that appeared between the War for Independence and the War of 1812. Both prominent and obscure champions of a republican and national way of life--Noah Webster, Benjamin Rush, George Washington, and William Manning--offered their ideas on the mode of education needed to secure liberty and order among free men.
The effect of these plans on the actual conduct of education is difficult to measure. Jefferson's Virginia proposal was not adopted, nor were the more elaborate plans of some of his successors such as Samuel Harrison Smith and Samuel Knox who, in proposals submitted to the American Philosophical Society in 1797, daringly advocated uniform national school systems.[1a] The more feasible plan of Washington for a national university, endorsed by all of his successors in the presidency before Jackson, likewise failed to be acted on. In each case a commitment of resources was required that was beyond the capability of the young nation. Nevertheless, the projects reveal a serious attempt to come to grips with the social and political needs of a republic: to supply the trained and loyal citizens necessary to make self-government work, and to secure to every citizen the means of self-improvement which would make a republican government worth the effort. They publicized the need for education and furnished a standard for judging current practices. From the Revolution onward, the connection between popular education and a healthy self-governing body politic was acknowledged.
The expansion of national boundaries to include new, largely unsettled areas had important implications for education. The treaty of 1783 recognized the American claim to lands as far as the Mississippi River. Americans were familiar with the various procedures for building new communities in the wilderness, but there was a range of opinion concerning the proper methods for such an undertaking. In the South it had been customary for individuals to venture on the frontier by themselves or in their families with the institutions of civilization left more or less to look after themselves. In practice, this meant that schools and churches were lot established until the populace was sufficiently large and dense to support them out of payments by the settlers who made use of their services. In New England, a more orderly method of community building had often been followed. There bands of like-minded citizens had moved to a frontier location, securing grants of land and governing privileges from the authorities before they went. Almost always the grant included lands for the support of the church and its minister and for support of a school. When the United States government fell heir to the western lands some of the states had claimed under their colonial charters, a choice between the two methods of frontier settlement was necessary. Each had its champions but a group of New England men, accustomed to the land system of that section and committed to the notion that pioneers should not venture into the woods without the accoutrements of civilized life, was influential in obtaining a decision in favor of the New England method of community planting. The Land Ordinance of 1785, the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, and the land contracts subsequently negotiated with the Ohio Company, all followed this method. The reservation of lands for educational purposes set precedents which were followed in virtually all subsequent government grants of land to territories and states. Ultimately the precedents were broadened to include a great variety of federal government financial aids to education.
Another discernible change following the American Revolution was the establishment and strengthening of state administrative agencies. The states, much more powerful than their colonial counterparts, began to assume a part of the responsibility for the promotion, support, and regulation of education within their boundaries. State constitutions uniformly required legislatures to support education, although they rarely stipulated the means to be followed. State legislatures commonly designated certain revenues like excise taxes for support of education or granted private promoters or towns the right to hold lotteries to raise funds; ordinarily state support was confined to aiding the instruction of the children of pauper parents. A few states, with New York in the lead, contemplated the creation of state offices of education to collect statistics about the schools and administer the distribution of the limited state funds that were available. A framework for more efficient and uniform school administration began to be constructed. Southern states such as Georgia and North Carolina, bereft of colleges in comparison with northern states, chartered the first state universities.
Although the American Revolution encouraged the states to stake out claims to greater power and responsibility in education, no substantial shift in the actual balance between private and public enterprise in education occurred. The educational "system" remained a mixed collection of public schools of a limited and specific character in New England and New York, with private schools, often receiving some kind of public recognition and assistance, supplementing public schools in some areas and substituting for them elsewhere. Legal protection for chartered private schools and colleges was secured in the famous Dartmouth College Case of 1819 when the United States Supreme Court blocked the attempt of the State of New Hampshire to establish control over a private college. The decision protected the intentions and donations of the founders of private institutions and, once a charter had been granted, guarded these schools and colleges against almost any state interference with their activities. It helped to assure the future of private education just on the eve of pressures for the expansion and reform of public schooling in the common school revival.