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ARTICLE VII.-CONGREGATIONALISM AND EDUCA

TION.

THE fact has become well-nigh universally recognized that popular education in this country originated in New England. But what is implied in this has not been so long or so clearly discerned, viz: that it was of Christian, and substantially of Congregational, origin. Implied, because the beginnings which were locally in New England were religiously, for the most part, under Congregational prompting, of necessity. For they have all been traced to that very early date when, as yet, no considerable number of inhabitants were outside the pale of Congregational churches-the only churches then in existence there, and before any of that secular public action in education which, for forty or fifty years, was also limited by law to Congregational church members, and for a long period afterwards was controlled by them.

It is very obvious to those who understand Congregationalism and its history, how this came to pass. The strenuous struggle in England, first in thought and then in action, which resulted in the Puritan exodus to Holland and thence to America, required and begat vigorous intelligence in all who shared in it or followed it. Then, too, that popular feature of the New England colonial constitutions which made "the freemen the fountain of power," was clearly impossible without thoughtful and well informed citizens; the decision of all questions in church and colonial meetings by common vote of the same persons, the admission of members and the election of ministers in each-but, above all, the adoption of articles of faith-in the same manner, all joined to create the same necessity of more than average education. Decisions, religious or secular, by a foreign or even a representative body, could not produce the results which the polity of our fathers, in both relations, always and every where produces. Naturally, while illiterate servants were being transported to Virginia, educated

* Palfrey, History of New England, ii. 6.

persons of much higher social standing emigrated to the Northern colonies. When there were thirty or forty graduates of Oxford and Cambridge, among the first New England ministers-one to two hundred or two hundred and fifty inhabitants-there were other university men also among the laity, Greek and Hebrew scholars. All the elements of the problem of the education of the people by the people, made it certain that it would be solved in the Northern English colonies, and not in the Middle or Southern.

It is true, indeed, that some attempts at education of Indians and whites southward were earlier than the New England education. But this was simply because Jamestown was settled before Plymouth. For they were from without-not made by the colonists themselves, not originating in their love of intelligence and they failed. This is true of the London Virginia Company projects for a university at Henrico (1619) and for a "collegiate or free school"-the "East India School"-at Charles City (1621).* These projects, foreign in a sense, looked to the education of a few, rather than of all or of the many; the chief aim was the higher education of the day, rather than the elementary in the interest of all; the "free school was to have dependence upon the college in Virginia, which should be made capable of receiving scholars from the school into scholarships" and fellowships; and the "East India benefactors" were to have precedence in its benefits.†

* General contributions, under royal license were made in England, to the amount of more than £2000, other gifts proposed, and ten thousand acres set apart for the university; a thousand acres were allotted to the school, and over £1000 contributed, with books. But none of the buildings for the school, as Sir Edwin Sandys said in 1621-2, "prospered by reason that as yet, through their doting so much upon tobacco, no fit workmen could be had but at intolerable rates." The attempts to obtain teachers for the school also failed. The only action in the colony was a petition (1619) to the first assembly at Jamestown in support of the Company's plan for a university. The plan was earlier than the King's license of 1618, and the occasion of it. In June, 1622, a carpenter and five apprentices sailed from England for the purpose of erecting the school at Charles City, and in 1624 (after the Company dissolved) an usher came over, but proved unsuitable.-Neill's English Colonization of America.

Such of the "infidels' children," the Indians, as were found capable were to be "put in the college and brought up to be Fellows, and such as were not, put to trades" The Company's order of 1619, contemplated only the teaching of " a certain number of the children in the first elements of literature." Hon. H. 27

VOL. II.

I. The New England education began after a different fashion, humbler, and more elementary. It proceeded in the opposite direction. The Pilgrim fathers did not wait for great university projects, or for a collegiate school even. In February, 1623, when it was charged in London that their children were "not catechized nor taught to read," they made answer: "This is not true, in neither part thereof."* The early laws imply what was the case in all their first colonies, that parents gave elementary instruction at home to their children, when (as at Plymouth) "they had no common school for want of a fit person, nor means to maintain one." They were truer to the declared policy of the Synod of Dort, which had been adopted in that ancient city of Holland just before they left Holland, insisting that youth should be trained, "First, in the house by parents; Second, in the schools by schoolmasters," than were the emigrants of the Dutch West India Company to the same shores. "It was ever the custom, and it soon became the law in Puritan New England, to teach children and apprentices," says Bancroft; and the custom did not wait for the law, just as their custom of sustaining the social and public worship of God did not wait for what "soon became the law on that subject. But "owing in part to the commercial purposes entertained by the companies having charge of the colonization of New York, Virginia, and some other portions of the country," says Hon. Henry Barnard, "and to the educational and religious institutions of the colonists being not so much a matter of domestic as of foreign policy, these institutions never commanded the regular and constant attention of the local authorities or of the settlers themselves." Wherever in the early New England settlements the religious aims of the Congregational immigrants gave place in any measure to other ends, the primitive voluntary education "by their parents or others" of the children brought into, or born, in the wilderBarnard, in Stebbins's First Century of National Existence," 345, and Saunders', Our National Jubilee, 122. It was after negotiations had begun with an usher, that they authorized Rev. Patrick Copeland to procure an expert writer to go over with him that can withal teach the grounds of arithmetic."—Neill.

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* Palfrey's History of New England, 45, 6.—" Among the oldest entries" of "the earliest records," says Dr. Barnard, "the school is mentioned not as a new thing, but as one of the established interests of society."

ness, failed, but only there. Those immigrants made more than others did of the Christian minister, but they did not depend upon him any more than upon the maker or officer of the law to see to the educating of the young; they attended to it themselves. They did not create church schools, as other colonists did, as Nonconformists in the mother country have been obliged to do to this day; the "church in the house" was adequate to create a school in the house; the formal church organization was with them but the other side of the colonial, the Christian-political organization; and when it found it necessary and feasible to act in this latter capacity in respect to education, it cared for the whole community, as it did in religion. But the primitive Congregational zeal for the teaching of the young did not wait to prove itself in this way; it was already, and always proved by private or family schools. We are rediscovering the special tact of woman for primary school work. But the "dame schools" disclosed it as soon as there began to be deficiencies in family and village teaching. And from the first, these were taught by women of experience-not crude girls-and of Christian experience. All teachers were Congregational church members at first, of necessity; and when dissenters from the "standing order" began to discourage learning, the majority were still, though not obliged to be.

II. Meantime, academic or secondary education had developed itself from the root of voluntary and primary schools. There has been inaccurate assertion, not born of research, to the effect that the New England college is the parent of both pri mary school and academy in this country. If so, our fathers must have imported the first Harvard freshmen from England! But the first class was formed in 1638, just after John Harvard converted a feeble and ill-sustained grammar school into the first permanent college in America," three years after Boston had "entreated Philemon Pormont to become schoolmaster," and when there had been teaching several times three years by persons unusually competent in various settlements.* There

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* Mr. Bancroft's history has hitherto implied that there was already a college when Harvard made his bequest; (Old. Eds., i. 459) but in his revised 'Centennial'

Edition, he says that " a public school" was established in 1637, and that it became Harvard College the next year, when the first class was formed, in consequence of the bequest. "It is not certain that Pormont was the first school

is really no mystery about that first Harvard class, or about the source of subsequent ones, when one gives the voluntary and religious education of the day its historical place. If others, besides pupils of Pormont, entered at "Newtown" in 1638 and after, they were unquestionably prepared by other and more private teachers. Between that year and 1647, from other towns came some of the fifty or sixty who entered— Oakes and Bulkley from Concord, Thacher from Scituate, Hubbard from Ipswich, Mitchell from Stamford, Brock from Dedham, Hooker from Hartford, and Wigglesworth from New Haven, are examples.* From New Haven alone, before the foundation of Yale, came one in thirty-the town having "not more than five hundred inhabitants," and other towns, such as Hartford, Roxbury, and Dorchester, etc., had Latin schools. Ezekiel Cheever began at New Haven in 1641, nineteen years before the Hopkins Grammar School; John Higginson began at Hartford the same year, or the year before. So Roger Williams in 1654 (a hundred and ten years before President Manning's school at Warren, out of which the "College of Rhode Island" grew); wrote Gov. Winthrop, "I have begun with mine own three boys, who labor besides; others are coming to me." But after the voluntary, or private classical schools were established, and even after secondary schools preparing for college were authorized by law,† Congregational pastors continued to do in superior style the same work. New Amsterdam was in those days petitioning the West India Company to export to them a Latin schoolmaster, as they could not give their children Latin "without sending them to New England." The master in Boston." "It was not till twelve years after that the General Court recognized and gave the sanction of law to the schools." Rep. of Mass. B. of Ed., pp. 104, 118. There was no one method of sustaining any grade of schools. Some ministers became scholars without going to Harvard, like Green of Watertown, first minister of Reading, 1645. Cf. Dr. A. S. Packard, "Our Alma Mater." *Harvard Trien. Cat., Sprague's Annals, vol. i.

These schools were not exclusively classical. Even the Boston Public Latin School, the parent of them all, founded by endowment of "the richer inhabitants," had an usher voted it in 1645, "who should also teach to read, write, and cipher," at £30 per ann.

Judge Smith, Hist. N. York, mentions the lack of academies there "to the disgrace of our first planters." In Virginia, at the accession of Charles II., there were "not more than three or four educated clergymen" to ten times that num

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