the schools. The intention of the law was good, for its aim was to secure educational facilities for every part of each township, but it made the schools more than ever dependent upon small neighborhoods and resulted in mismanagement.

The law of 1789, which recognized in Massachusetts the district school system already established in fact by many of the towns, made other interesting changes in the school laws of the State. Towns of one hundred families were no longer compelled, as formerly, to maintain a grammar school. This requirement had, indeed, long been a dead letter, and the law recognized existing facts when it raised the limit to a hundred and fifty families for a part-time grammar school and required a full-time school only in towns of at least two hundred families. All teachers were required to have a college education or else present a certificate of learning and good character from a minister of the gospel "well skilled in the Greek and Latin language." Ministers and town officials were authorized to inspect schools every six months to see that they were properly conducted. Elementary schools were required to teach arithmetic, spelling, and "decent behavior," in addition to reading and writing English. This law marks the

definite triumph of experience over expectation: the common school system had firmly established itself and the grammar school, in which the founders of New England placed their greatest hope amid frontier conditions, had now all but perished.

CHAPTER II

SCHOOLS IN NEW NETHERLAND

You must urge upon the States-General that they should establish free schools, where children of quality, as well as of poor families, for a very small sum, could be well and Christianly educated and brought up. This would be the greatest and most useful work you could ever accomplish for God and Christianity, and for the Netherlands themselves. John of Nassau.

WHEN the Dutch planted their colony in the valley of the Hudson, they were not constrained as were the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay to devise a system of public instruction but found in the institutions of their fatherland a ready model. Indeed, it is hardly too much to say that the Dutch colonists themselves did not establish schools but merely accepted those provided by the authorities. So slight was the effective control of the British Government over the New England commonwealths that they were virtually so many independent republics allied to England by sentiment and tradition. The colonists of New Netherland, on the

other hand, were governed autocratically by officials of the Dutch West India Company, whose charter of 1629 required the patroons and colonists to support a minister, a schoolmaster, and a "comforter of the sick." To maintain religion and learning every householder and inhabitant was subject to tax, but the West India Company furnished the schoolmasters and sometimes contributed to their support.

It would, however, be unjust to infer that the Dutch colonists were at all indifferent to the schools established in New Netherland. On the contrary, the records of the colony show how eager the settlers were to have schools built and kept supplied with competent teachers. The Dutchmen, many of them educated in the public schools of the Netherlands, would have considered it criminal to allow their children to go without similar advantages in their new home. But since most of the colonists were tradesmen seeking new commercial opportunities for themselves and their fellowcountrymen, the type of education in which they were most interested was a thorough grounding in the bread and butter subjects. Unlike the settlers of Massachusetts and Virginia, the Dutch colonists never founded a college and even had

to wait for some twenty years after elementary schools had been started before they had a Latin grammar school.

The city then called New Amsterdam was the first Dutch settlement to enjoy a public school. Adam Roelantsen, the first schoolmaster, opened school probably in 1633. It must be confessed that Roelantsen was far from being in all respects a credit to his profession. Little is known about his skill as a teacher, but it is a fact that he was constantly involved in lawsuits and frequently accused of slander and disorderly conduct. After Roelantsen abandoned his position, the school was continued somewhat irregularly by a number of other schoolmasters. For want of an adequate building the teachers were often forced to keep school in private houses or in public buildings intended for other purposes. The pay which the teacher received was frequently insufficient to maintain him. Sometimes the New Amsterdam school could find no one who would consent to undertake its charge, and the children were without schooling for months at a time, though a few struggling private schools shared with the public school the work of instructing the children of the city.

New Amsterdam was not the only Dutch colonial