30

AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION

the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts.

The activities of this Society were by no means confined to New York but affected to some degree the educational life of all the colonies. In New England the strength of the Congregationalists left little room for Anglican missionary effort, and the completeness of the public school system discouraged the foundation of private charity schools; but in spite of these handicaps some Church of England schools were organized. In other parts of America the Society had better fortune, particularly in New York, where the rapidly increasing and cosmopolitan population and the lack of common schools offered a unique opportunity for educational effort.

But the establishment of schools was a secondary matter to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. Its chief aim was evangelical; its main purpose, to convert the heathen Indians, to confirm in the faith the adherents of the Church of England, and to make headway against heresy and dissent. But, like the Jesuits of old and the modern missionaries to India or China, the missionaries of the S. P. G., as it is familiarly known, soon discovered that the only way to evangelize was to teach. In their

charity schools they emphasized the catechism and a thorough knowledge of the Anglican ritual, but they also found it advisable to teach the children "to write a plain and legible hand in order to the fitting them for useful Employments; with as much Arithmetick as shall be necessary to the same Purpose." The Society supported between five and ten schools in the colony of New York up to the time of the American Revolution and gave aid to many others. In New York City the Trinity Church charity school received help from the local authorities as well as from the Society and at one time held session in the City Hall.

The officers of the Society exercised great care in selecting their missionaries. All had to be sound in the faith and well-affected toward the existing Government, and married schoolmasters usually were required to take their wives with them to America. Teachers were expected to send home two reports a year of the progress of their work, but this duty they frequently neglected, as adequate supervision was impossible when the central organization was separated from its agents by the width of the Atlantic. The Society kept its schools supplied with generous donations of text-books, for the most part of a purely religious character. In

the early years of the eighteenth century the Society devoted no small share of its efforts to the instruction of the Iroquois Indians and the negro slaves, but, as the colony became more populous and settled, it shifted the emphasis more and more from purely missionary activities to ordinary school work. After an insurrection of the slaves in 1712 had been unjustly ascribed to the educational work of the Society, the colonists looked with some disfavor on the teaching of negroes, but the Society did not entirely abandon its work.

The English made, on the whole, a creditable educational record in New York. As a result of private initiative and philanthropic effort, free elementary education was provided for many children, some good secondary schools were established, and a flourishing college was founded. But the cardinal mistake of the English in not establishing a public school system had baneful effects that outlasted the colonial period. Free education became synonymous with charity education, and the schooling which the New England lad expected as a right, the New Yorker received as a privilege to be bought in the market by well-to-do parents or given as alms to the poor. Such prominent educators as President Johnson of King's College early advocated the

public endowment of education, but it was not until the middle of the nineteenth century that the battle for the free school system was finally won.

Another obstacle which the friends of learning encountered in New York, and one which was only less formidable than the tradition that education was a private rather than a public concern, was the swamping of the commercial centers by incessant immigration in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Private educational agencies were quite unable to cope with the growing problem of illiteracy, especially when it was willful illiteracy. As early as 1713 Chaplain John Sharp of the royal army in New York complained that "the city is so conveniently Situated for Trade and the Genius of the people are so inclined to merchandise, that they generally seek no other Education for their children than writing and Arithmetick. So that letters must be in a manner forced upon them not only without their seeking but against their consent." It was just this necessary element of compulsion that was lacking in the school system of colonial New York, and the results of this defect proved to be far-reaching.

1 W. W. Kemp, The Support of Schools in Colonial New York by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (1912), p. 68.

CHAPTER III

SCHOOLS OF THE MIDDLE AND SOUTHERN

COLONIES

We press their memory too soon, and puzzle, strain and load them with words and rules; to know grammar and rhetoric, and a strange tongue or two, that it is ten to one may never be useful to them; leaving their natural genius to mechanical and physical or natural knowledge uncultivated and neglected; which would be of exceeding use and pleasure to them through the whole course of their life. To be sure languages are not to be despised or neglected. But things are still to be preferred. — William Penn.

No colony was ever founded in a nobler spirit than was the Quaker settlement planned by William Penn in the wilderness of Pennsylvania. Religious toleration, fair dealing with the Indians, and the instruction of all children in godliness, industry, and learning were parts of the enlightened plan projected by the founder and first proprietor. The intentions of William Penn were seconded by the settlers, who passed a law that all children should be taught “so that they may be able to read the Scriptures and to write by the time they attain to

34