Historic Towns of New England. Various

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СКАЧАТЬ Rhode Island did not have a system of popular education until just as the eighteenth century was closing. New Hampshire, Maine, and Vermont accepted the Massachusetts methods and ideals, with some minor variations.

      Devout as were the founders of New England, it followed inevitably that they should establish institutions where their children might obtain a distinctly religious training as well as a general education. Thus, for a long period of New England history, the Christian academy, under denominational control, flourished just as it does now in the West, and for much the same reason. As the public-school system has expanded, as town after town has added the high school to the primary and grammar school, as sectarian fences have toppled over or ceased to be restrictive, the academy of the old type has ceased to play the part it once did in New England life. But, in any survey of the history of education in New England, it should not be overlooked. Many excellent institutions of this type still survive to meet the demands of those persons who either distrust the public high school, or else are unable to send their children to one, owing to residence in towns where the school system has not developed to that extent. But, as a rule, the New England boy and girl, no matter what the social station or wealth of his or her parent, still “derives his or her preparation for college or life from the community in which he or she lives.” And, as Phillips Brooks said in his address at the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Boston Latin School:

      “That is the real heart of the whole matter. … It constitutes the greatest claim of the public-school system. It represents the fundamental idea of the town undertaking the education of her children. … It educates the thought of law and obedience, the sense of mingled love and fear, which is the true citizen’s true emotion to his city. It educates this in the very lessons of the school-room, and makes the person of the State the familiar master of the grateful subject from his boyhood. … It is in the dignity and breadth and seriousness which the sense that their town is training them gives to their training, that the advantage of the public-school boys over the boys of the best private schools always consists.”

      Emigrating westward, the pioneers from New England carried with them the public school, the academy, and the college. Connecticut’s settlers in the Western Reserve, Ohio, took with them conceptions of duty in this respect, which profoundly affected the future history of the commonwealth. Ohio has come to be, in this later day, what Virginia was in the early history of the country—“The Mother of Presidents”—and has more colleges within its borders than any State in the Union. It was a Massachusetts soldier, Gen. Rufus Putnam of Rutland, a Congregational clergyman, Rev. Manasseh Cutler of Hamilton, Massachusetts, and an Ipswich, Massachusetts, lawyer, Nathan Dane, who founded Marietta, Ohio, and induced Congress to put into the epoch-marking Ordinance of 1787 governing the Northwest Territory, this remarkable declaration and article:

      “Religion, and morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and means of education shall forever be encouraged.”

      As early as 1797, Muskingum Academy was founded in the territory conceded, and in due time came Marietta, Oberlin, Wabash, Illinois, Knox, Beloit, Olivet, and Ripon Colleges, all Christian institutions within the territory originally governed by the Ordinance of 1787.

      Precisely similar has been the record of New England emigrants beyond the Mississippi. Wherever they have settled and shaped the civic ideals, whether in the Dakotas, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, or in California, there they have laid the foundations of a free public-school system, and of academies and colleges controlled by Christian educators and trustees. Nor do they cease to believe in the academy and the college now that the competition of the State university in the States of the interior and the West is so intense, and the reliance of the treasuries of these Western Christian institutions upon the gifts of their friends in New England increases rather than abates.

      Impressed with the need, in all sections of the country, of a well-instructed and intelligent electorate, and convinced that the South was too poor to provide for itself the schools that its unfortunate illiterate whites and blacks needed, New Englanders early began to contribute to the support of academies and colleges in the South. Not always welcomed by the ruling class, the pioneers in this work persevered, and many of them have lived long enough to receive the thanks of those who at first despised and scorned them. Millions of dollars have gone from New England for the founding and support of such institutions as Berea College, Kentucky; Atlanta University, Georgia; Hampton Institute, Virginia; Fisk University, Tennessee; and Tuskeegee Institute, Alabama. Three New Englanders, George Peabody of Danvers, Mass., John F. Slater of Norwich, Conn., and Daniel Hand of Guilford, Conn., have given between them $5,100,000 in bequests or donations for the establishment or assistance of schools, colleges, and training schools for teachers in the South. The Peabody Education Fund, from 1868 to 1897, distributed in the South, from its income alone, a sum amounting to $2,478,527.

      Nor is New England’s influence, educationally speaking, limited to the United States. The educational system of Honolulu is based on New England models. Robert College, near Constantinople, has spread the principles of Christian democracy in Church and State, as they are held by New Englanders, throughout Bulgaria and the Balkan states, and given ideals to the Young Turkey party in the land where the Sultan is dominant. The Huguenot Seminary in South Africa was distinctly modelled after Mt. Holyoke Seminary, and its first teaching staff was made up of New England women educated at Mt. Holyoke. Wherever American Protestant missionaries have gone and established schools and colleges in Asia, Africa, or Europe, almost invariably the master spirits, the men and women who have given character to, and established the ideals of, the institutions, have been graduates of the New England colleges and academies, even if not New-England-born.

      Subtract from the history of education in the United States, during the latter half of the century just closing, the influence of four men, Horace Mann, Henry Barnard, Charles William Eliot, and William Torrey Harris, and you take from it the best that it stands for to-day. All of these men were born in New England. All were reformers. All showed great administrative ability. All lived to see their radical views find general acceptance. Horace Mann did his greatest work in remodelling the public-school system of Massachusetts. Barnard did a similar work in Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin, but his greatest service to the cause of education was his masterly editing of the American Journal of Education, from 1855 to 1881. Eliot has transformed the curriculum of Harvard, the oldest university of the North, has resolutely contended for the largest measure of election by the student in his selection of studies, his personal conduct, and his personal attitude toward God, and he has made “Veritas” in very truth the appropriate motto of the leading American institution of learning. Harris, as an interpreter of the philosophy of education, both in his many writings and more numerous addresses, has lifted the popular conception of the profession of teaching to a loftier and more rational plane, while his control of the United States Bureau of Education since 1889 has given it a standing abroad, and a measure of utility at home, which it is gratifying to contemplate.

      Few towns in New England possess more charm, whether of nature or society, than the towns in which her long-established institutions of learning have taken root, flourished, and dominated the life of the community. New Haven, Cambridge, and Providence are all cities now with a heterogeneous population and large manufacturing interests, and they each contain thousands of inhabitants to whom Harvard, Yale, and Brown are of as little practical benefit or concern as if they were situated in remote Hawaii or Porto Rico. Nevertheless, the chief glory of each of these large towns is its institution of learning, and to each there come added beauty of life and elevation of tone because of the presence within its borders of so many thirsty and hungry students and highly educated and apt instructors. It would be idle, however, to claim, for instance, that Cambridge to-day is quite as unique and charming in its simplicity and purity of life, or quite as classic in its atmosphere, as it was in the days when the town was a village, when the university was a college, and when thought and manners were as ideal as James Russell Lowell in his essay, Cambridge Thirty Years Ago, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson in his latest book, Cheerful Yesterdays, picture them.

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