CHAPTER XVI

LATER STATE SYSTEMS

HOWEVER important other educational systems and educational movements may have been, the general trend of the nineteenth century set strongly in the direction of an education under the control of public corporations. There has been another tendency, intimately connected with this. The demand for systems of schools under full public control has carried with it the demand for consecutiveness in our state systems of education, from the lowest grades to the highest. We have been moving toward an ideal somewhat like that of the Einheitsschule. We have found ourselves more or less consciously striving toward the standard set up by Huxley when he said, "No system of public education is worth the name of national unless it creates a great educational ladder, with one end in the gutter and the other in the university.' These aspirations have come to their most complete expression in states having state universities-but about twothirds of the states in the Union are of this class. They are aspirations which have grown up with a new ideal of social relations, a new democracy, which in its full development is peculiar to the nineteenth (and the twentieth) century.

We saw that in the old colony days the need of a middlegrade education, except for those intended for college and for one of the learned professions, was not generally recognized. Society was still largely organized on distinct levels. People still spoke of "the quality." That is, the difference between the professional and directive class on the one hand and the common people on the other was apparently accepted as qualitative, in a sense that we hardly realize. The col

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leges, with the grammar schools leading up to them, were for the higher class. The educational provision for the lower classes extended only to schools of elementary grade, and was very scanty and fragmentary at best. Between the two systems there was no organic connection.

The revolutionary period and the years next following saw a gradual breaking up of the earlier social strata, and the rise of a middle class to prominence and influence. The newly recognized educational needs of this class were now met by the academies, especially in such of their courses as did not aim at preparation for college.

With the advance of nineteenth and twentieth century democracy, the social levels of earlier days have been upset. No one speaks of social classes now, unless it be under his breath. Our present-day society knows no levels: we recognize no generic distinction between its several grades. Its extremes may be much farther apart than were those of an earlier age, but the lowest and the highest occupy their several places in one continuous gradation of social differences.

The lovers of diagrammatic representation, whose number is not at all declining, may find in the following scheme a passable symbol of the change which has taken place:

The old grammar schools were for those on the plane a b and for such as were making their way up to that eminence. The earlier academies were for those on this same plane, now represented by the line gh, but were in particularly intimate connection with the restless middle line ij, which has already lost its sense of the horizontal. The high schools belong out and out to this jostling middle line, which at an early day has imposed its own slanting disposition on the other members of the scheme. There is little need to add that the diagram at best can tell but a small part of the story; or to raise the insistent question of our time: After the line mn, what next?

This brief survey of social change may help us a little to understand some things which have a bearing on our subject. It suggests one cause of that extreme restlessness which characterizes our modern society. On this social inclined plane, whoever is not on his way to the top is perforce on his way to the bottom. Our systems of education have gradually adjusted themselves to such a state of things. There has appeared accordingly a widespread purpose to link our schools together from the lowest to the highest; to put every kindergarten and primary school on a line which leads, without by-way or break, straight up to the university.

This purpose has come only gradually to full consciousness; but in the course of a century the ideal proposed in the Indiana state constitution of 1816 has become the characteristic aim of American educational organization: "A general system of education, ascending in regular gradation from township [district] schools to a state university wherein. tuition shall be gratis and equally open to all." Such a purpose has found repeated expression, not only in the educational schemes of our statesmen and teachers, but in legislative enactments. A few citations will serve for illustration.

The legislature of Tennessee declared, in 1817, that, "Institutions of learning, both academies and colleges, should ever be under the fostering care of this legislature, and in

their connection with each other form a complete system of education." 1

Thomas Jefferson, replying to the charge that he was pushing university education to the neglect of the elementary schools, wrote to Mr. Cabell:

"Nobody can doubt my zeal for the general instruction of the people. Who first started that idea? I may surely say myself. Turn to the bill in the revised code which I drew more than forty years ago, and before which the idea of a plan for the education of the people generally had never been suggested in this State. There you will see developed the first rudiments of the whole system of general education we are now urging and acting on; and it is well known to those with whom I have acted on this subject that I have never proposed a sacrifice of the primary to the ultimate grade of instruction. Let us keep our eye steadily on the whole system.”

President Henry P. Tappan, of the University of Michigan, presented a statesmanlike report to the regents of that institution, in 1856, in which he discussed the "true position" of the university, "and its relation to our entire system of public education." He said:

"An entire system of public education comprises three grades. and can comprise but three grades: the primary, the intermediate, and the university. . . . The primary school comes first. . . . All human learning begins with the alphabet.

...

"The second grade occupies the period of youth - of adolescence or growth. This is the period when the foundations of knowledge and character can be most amply and securely laid. . . .

"But let it be remembered that the intermediate grade embraces only the apprenticeship of the scholar. . . . Hence the necessity of universities, as the highest form of educational institutions.

1 Quoted by BLACKMAR, Federal and state aid, p. 265.

2 The text of this report may be found in Superintendent Ira Mayhew's Reports of the Superintendent of Public Instruction of the State of Michigan for the years 1855-6-7 with accompanying documents. Lansing, 1858, pp. 155184.

President Tappan's definition of a university, which follows this paragraph, is significant. It marks a great change from the view of a college

"The highest institutions are necessary to supply the proper standard of education; to raise up instructors of the proper qualifications; to define the principles and methods of education.

"Nothing is more evident than that the three grades of education the primary, the intermediate, the university — are all alike necessary. The one cannot exist, in perfection, without the others; they imply one another. .

"It is to the honor of Michigan that she has conceived of a complete system of public education running through the three grades we have discussed above. Nor do these grades exist merely in name. She has established the primary grade of schools and made them well nigh free. She has laid the foundation of an institution which admits of being expanded to a true university. In former days she had her 'branches' belonging to the intermediate grade; and now we see rising up those invaluable institutions, the 'union schools,' belonging to the same grade. We say not that legislation has adequately reached the entire system, or made provision for its development; but the idea of the entire system is abroad among the people; it has not been absent from our legislation; it has appeared in the reports of superintendents and visitors, and in other documents; and the people, at this moment, unaided by any special appropriation, are organizing above the district school, the best schools of the intermediate grade, less than a college, which have yet existed among us; and are erecting large, tasteful, and convenient edifices for their accommodation. These ideas, spon

taneously working in the minds of the people, these spontaneous efforts to create schools of a higher grade must determine future legislation, and indicate the grand point to which our educational development is tending."

It is this large conception of education as one great public interest, from the lowest schools to the highest, which we need as a background for any consideration of the development of state systems of secondary education. We have already looked into the establishment of those state systems in which the educational unit was the presented by President Clap, of Yale College, in the eighteenth century. President Tappan says, "A university is a collection of finished scholars in every department of human knowledge, associated for the purpose of advanc. ing and communicating knowledge." — Op. cit., p. 161.