only states or countries having a larger proportion than one to 1,000.1

Commenting on the educational situation in this country, the article first referred to declared that, "There is much in the state of education in this country, which is encouraging to the philanthropist and scholar. Its great object seems to be more and more distinctly apprehended. The harmonious cultivation of all the powers which belong to man, is regarded as of paramount importance." Here we see the abstract psychological view of education, which was closely bound up with the Pestalozzian movement, already coming to the front in this country.

The growing recognition of the Bible as a text-book in school instruction is referred to. This is significant as showing how far the schools had swung away from the practice of colonial times, when the Bible was a text-book in elementary schools almost as a matter of course. Of similar

import is the remark that within five years there had been a noticeable gain in the study of the classics. One other note is significant in a different way: "We have reason to believe that greater attention is paid to individual minds at our public institutions. The indiscriminate instruction of a class has long been a fatal error. The instructors have not studied the peculiar conformation -the excellencies and defects of particular minds. The sound advice of Mr. Jardine, the excellent Glasgow professor, has produced, we think, considerable effect in this country."2 In this we hear what has a familiar sound to our more modern ears. But a consideration of the academies, as they were in their actual working, must be reserved for the chapters next following this.

NOTE

The study of successive phases of influence of foreign countries upon our own is a fascinating one. It can hardly be doubted that much more will be brought to light than has yet been shown respecting French influence

1 Op. cit., pp. 21-24.

2 Op. cit., pp. 273-274.

in American education during the period next following the Revolutionary War. The studies of PROFESSOR HERBERT B. ADAMS and DR. SHERWOOD in this field are full of interest. Attention should be called to a very suggestive sketch by DR. HINSDALE, entitled Notes on the history of foreign influence upon education in the United States. In Rept. Comr. Ed., 1897–98, I., pp. 591-629.

After all is said and done in this field of inquiry, the impression remains that there was in this period a tremendous moving of the spirit of education in ways that may fairly be called American, as distinguished from any pattern set by European nations.

CHAPTER XI

THE CHARACTER OF THE ACADEMIES

THE academy was the institution for secondary education wrought out by the American people in the first half century of their independence, and it was the dominant institution of its class for at least another half century. It appeared under different names and in different forms, and its character changed as time went on. In its varied developments, it contributed largely to the making of American civilization. The nature of this contribution and of the institution which made it must now be considered a little more particularly.

To begin with, some differences between the academy and the grammar school, and the social conditions out of which they respectively arose, should be mentioned. The early grammar-school-and-college system, as was pointed out, belonged to a society in which there was a conscious cleavage between higher and lower classes. In the revolutionary period there was a strong tendency toward democracy. Yet the democracy with which the present generation has been familiar had not yet come into being. A most important turning-point was passed when the Republican party came into power, with Thomas Jefferson in the presidential chair. The rise of the west within the twenty years next following, made for a great advance in democratic spirit. And this was a time when academies were springing up everywhere.

The academy age was, in fact, the age of transition from the partially stratified colonial society to modern democracy. Perhaps the most marked feature of that transition was the growing importance of a strong middle class. The rise of the academies was closely connected with the rise of this

middle class. The academies were by no means exclusively middle-class schools at the start, and they became something very different from that at a later period. But it is one of their glories that they were in the earlier days so bound up with the higher interests of the common people.

There was in the academies a growing sense of the value of education for its own sake, or rather for its effect in the heightening of sheer human worth. To be sure the colonial colleges had not been professional schools in the modern sense; but they were valued chiefly because they gave such an education as a member of one of the learned professions required. In this way the professional spirit was strong in them, apparently stronger than the spirit of "culture," to use the word in a modern sense. But the idea of liberal culture took strong hold of the academies; and it would, perhaps, be fair to call it the dominant note of both academy and college education in the nineteenth century.

There were many reasons for this change of attitude. It may have been influenced in some measure by Rousseau. This influence, however, was indirect for the most part, though the Emile was read somewhat on this side of the water. Then, our revolutionary period was alive with the doctrine of the rights of man and with the assertion of human freedom. The minds of men were receptive not only to the ideas of revolutionary France, but also to those ancient conceptions of the rights and duties of freemen which the study of Latin and Greek had made familiar. So this ideal of liberal culture which made its way into the academies and was spread abroad by them, was a blending of many elements, all fused in a very religious enthusiasm. It gave us a noble view of the worth of education, a view which tended doubtless to abstraction, but which was very high and generous. It had consequences, too, of a thoroughly practical sort.

1 There had been preparation here for some of the ideas of Rousseau and his school. The Quaker doctrine of a continuous revelation was the religious counterpart and forerunner of the "return to nature."

The old grammar schools had, many of them, been erected to supply the educational need of single communities. An academy, on the other hand, was not commonly regarded as a merely local institution. It served a widely scattered constituency. The Phillips academies came, in fact, to be in a sense national, like the great public schools of England. We have seen that the close corporation was the characteristic type of academy organization, replacing those various forms of control which were found in the grammar schools. Where there was a deviation from this type, it was not in the direction of management by some public corporation, as in the grammar schools, but rather in the direction of ecclesiastical control. The members of the managing board of an academy were commonly drawn from several localities, and these sometimes remote from one another.

The earlier academies were not bound up with the college system in the same way as the grammar schools: they were not primarily fitting schools." They were, instead, institutions of an independent sort, taking pupils who had already acquired the elements of an English education, and carrying them forward to some, rather indefinite, roundingout of their studies.

The constitutions of the Philadelphia academy and of the two schools founded by the Phillips family, set forth the purposes of those several institutions, but make no such mention of preparation for college as is contained in the New England laws providing for grammar schools, or in official documents relating to the grammar schools of Maryland and Virginia. We even find the interests of the academies sometimes set over against those of the colleges, as in New York and Maryland, the two institutions being regarded as belonging to diverse educational systems. The colleges were for the higher, and particularly the professional, classes. The academies were the colleges of the people. So the matter stood in the controversies of the time.

On the other hand, it should be noted that, even in the