USA > Massachusetts > Hampden County > Our county and its people : A history of Hampden County, Massachusetts. Volume 1 > Part 20
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In the valley section of the county, social life has received a development under conditions more favorable than those in the more sparsely populated sections ; but the extension of steam and trolley lines, and the improvement of highways are so facilitating communication, that social and educational advantages are less and less limited by the boundaries of towns and the locality of one's home. Towns unable alone to employ skilled superintend- ents of schools are grouped in districts. The schools of each district are put in charge of a superintendent in part paid by the state. These superintendents, with the generous co-operation of school committees, are doing much to help schools in the smaller towns to keep pace with the schools of like grade in larger towns.
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If we study the beginnings of the common schools of our State and county we are led to notice causes operating before the settlement of Massachusetts.
The reformation under Luther transferred the authority of deciding religious questions in Protestant communities from the church and the priesthood to the individual, as taught by the Word of God, and enlightened by the Holy Spirit. Calvin em- phasized this view, and urged the necessity and the religious duty of the intellectual as well as the religious culture of all, that each might be able to interpret the Bible for himself. Calvinism found full expression in the earlier churches of Massachusetts. The maintenance of public schools, our Puritan ancestors con- sidered a religious duty. The church and the school were coun- terparts, each of the other.
The horn book and the New England primer were the text books of the primary or dame school, as it was called, in early colonial times. This primer is a remarkable medley of the alphabet, "easy syllables," rude rhymes setting forth Bible events illustrated by what now seem ludicrous wood cuts, Bible quotations, followed by verses full of solemn and direful admoni- tions respecting death and hell, and much religious counsel. The primer also contains that elaborate compend of theological wis- dom-The Assembly's shorter catechism-a title in contrast with the time spent in memorizing its statements. The boys at suitable age were transferred to the master's or grammar school, where those who wished could be made ready for Harvard col- lege, by reading, spelling, writing, working dictated problems on their slates, and much wearisome plodding in Latin grammar.
The girls, for the most part having completed their schooling when they left the dame school, entered upon their practical training in spinning, weaving, and other departments of house- wifery. The public schools were supervised by the ministers, who were quite as ready to test the theological and the biblical knowledge of the pupils as their secular knowledge. Boys had an added motive for attending to the long doctrinal sermon on Sunday, in the fact that the minister might visit the school on Monday and question them about it.
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The coming into the colonies of men of different religious be- liefs at length abated the religious zeal in the maintenance of public schools. The Indian and the French wars exhausted funds, which in part, at least, would in more peaceful times have been used to strengthen the schools. Poverty seemed to furnish some reasonable excuse for non-compliance with the statute of 1647, requiring the maintenance of elementary, and of grammar schools the embryo high schools of the time. Yet the school laws were not to be ruthlessly disregarded. Towns in our county, as well as in other counties, were summoned to court to answer for their delinquencies. In 1769, Wales was fined for not main- taining a grammar school. Three years earlier, Brimfield suf- fered a like penalty for a similar neglect.
The tendency to disregard the authority of the state led to the decentralization of the school system. By the laws of 1789 towns were allowed to divide their areas into school districts. While this district system seemed to be in the interest of local government and seemed to encourage local effort, it hastened the decline of the common school. It relieved the towns from re- sponsibility in the conduct of the schools, and too often lodged it in irresponsible hands. The work of administrative disintegra- tion went on. In 1800, the raising of money by tax for the support of schools was conferred upon the several districts; in 1817, the school districts were made corporations; and in 1827, the whole matter of selecting and hiring teachers and the man- agement of the schools was conferred upon the districts, save that the town committee was to examine candidates presented by the prudential committees of the districts and decide the fitness of these candidates for the position of teacher. This examination usually occurred just before the opening of the winter and spring terms of the schools, and as only those were examined who had been selected by the committees in the several districts, the town committee must approve the candidates, or practically close the schools for a time. The examination was usually short, and teachers of very inferior quality frequently found their way into the schools. The continued decline of the common schools was inevitable. The half century covering the period between
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1789 and 1839 has been termed the "Dark Age" of our common schools.
However depressed the condition of the common schools, ow- ing to the poverty and disorder incident to the revolutionary war, however culpable the neglect of the common schools, and however unworthy of the high aims of the original founders, the people of Massachusetts never lost sight of the true moral function of every school. When the war was over and the national govern- ment was established under our present constitution, the people of Massachusetts, through their legislature by the act of 1789, laid the educational cornerstone of the civil fabric in these words :
"It shall be the duty of the president, professors and tutors of the University of Cambridge and of the several colleges, of all preceptors and teachers of academies, and of all other instructors of youth, to exert their best endeavors to impress on the minds of children and youth committed to their care and instruction, the principles of piety and justice, and a sacred regard to truth ; love of their country, humanity, and universal benevolence ; sobriety, industry and frugality ; chastity, moderation and tem- perance; and those other virtues which are the ornament of human society and the basis upon which a republican constitu- tion is founded; and it shall be the duty of such instructors to endeavor to lead their pupils, as their ages and capacities will admit, into a clear understanding of the tendency of the above- mentioned virtues to preserve and perfect a republican consti- tution, and secure the blessings of liberty as well as to promote their future happiness, and also to point out to them the evil tendencies of the opposite vices."
As we have already noticed, the common schools of our county, as well as of other parts of the state, in the second century of our history, were unworthy of a people really prizing education and inadequate to the needs of children, both in the quantity and the quality of the instruction provided. Secondary schools,-the grammar schools yet remaining,-with a few worthy exceptions, were diminishing in number and declining in excellence. The statutes requiring their maintenance were gradually so relaxed
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that early in the nineteenth century only seven towns were re- quired to maintain them. As in the darkness of the Middle Ages in Europe, learning was still cherished by the clergy, so dur- ing the eighteenth century and later, the ministers of the churches in New England encouraged the youth in their parishes to strug- gle on toward college, and often became their private instructors in preparatory Latin and Greek. The work of a minister in our smaller towns was no sinecure. If he would supplement his narrow stipend so as to provide for his family, he must till the parish land ; if he would care for the people over whom he had been settled as a pastor for life, he must not only prepare his two weekly sermons, but must visit from house to house and acquaint himself with the religious condition and progress of his people individually ; and if he would be instrumental in raising up young men who would fill the pulpits and become intellectual and spiritual leaders, he must encourage and aid promising youth in their endeavors to equip themselves with the learning of the college. Country ministers were farmers, preachers, pastors and teachers. For maintaining the standards of religion according to their convictions, of truth as they apprehended it, and of sound learning as they knew and loved it, we owe the early min- isters of New England a debt of lasting gratitude.
Referring again to the low state of the common schools we may quote the words of Rev. Dr. Cooley, so long a forceful illustration of the value to a town of such a minister as we have attempted to describe. He says, speaking of the condition of the schools in 1777, when he began his school life, "The only school books were Dillworth's spelling book, the primer and the Bible. The fur- niture, as I recollect, was a chair for the master, a long hickory and a ferule. Reading, spelling, a few of the business rules of arithmetic, the catechism and writing legibly, was the amount of school education for sons ; and for daughters, still less. The lux- ury of a slate and pencil I never enjoyed till I entered college. Previous to 1796," he adds, "no academy existed in Western Massachusetts, except a well endowed institution at Williams- town." Alluding to his own teaching while a parish minister, he said : "Probably as many as eight hundred have been under
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my tuition, and as many as sixty or seventy have entered the ministry." Very few New England ministers had as long a pas- torate and labors as manifold as those of Dr. Cooley of Granville ; but in his life we have a type of the New England ministry.
We now notice an educational movement at first evidently adverse to the improvement of the common school, but ultimately an effective agency in revolutionizing it. Unable to secure for children suitable and sufficient instruction in the common school, parents and friends of education by private benefactions began to found other schools.
As early as 1761, William Dummer left by will his house and farm in Newbury, Mass., for the establishment of a free school. In 1782 the school was incorporated under the name of Dummer academy. This was the first school in the state that bore the name of academy. As soon as the revolutionary struggle, with its long years of devastation, discord and discouragement, was over, the people of Massachusetts, like the people of Prussia, after the downfall of Napoleon, began to legislate for the future. They were not ignorant of the wretched condition of most of the common schools, and by enactments provided for a broader range of studies and a somewhat better administration. But there was then too much poverty and too much rural conservatism to allow of any general improvement in the schools. The district system, with its petty politics, purblind narrowness, and penurious ap- propriations, was destined to work its evils for another genera- tion. Those who prized education could not then uplift the public schools. With no little personal sacrifice, they founded academies. In 1797, the policy of aiding towns and individuals in establishing academies was inaugurated. A common form of aid was a grant of state land in the District of Maine. The co- operation of the state accelerated the founding of academies. Several were founded not far from the time of the founding of Westfield academy, which was dedicated in 1800. Before 1840, one hundred and twelve acts of incorporation had been enacted by the legislature, providing for academies in eighty-eight towns. Six academies have been located in Hampden county. Of these, Westfield academy was the oldest, and for half a century the
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most noted. We shall speak more specifically of these academies hereafter.
These academies secured permanent teachers of fine scholar- ship and generous culture. They were, with very few exceptions, men and women of earnest Christian purpose who encouraged, and themselves engaged in distinctive religious efforts that might have been thought out of place in a public school. If these teachers did not introduce new and better methods of teaching, they taught with a thoroughness not to be expected in the district schools. While special attention was given to completing the studies of the common school, a goodly number of elective studies, now included in high school courses, was taught. These acad- emies furnished the connecting steps between the common school and the college; they re-enforced the colleges with young men better fitted for college work, and thus gave new life to the col- leges. The academies co-operated with the colleges in bringing forward men whose influence was of untold value in promoting public instruction ; they nourished a sentiment in favor of better common schools; and they led the people to form higher ideals of teachers, and of teaching. While it must be admitted that academies, for a time, so centered attention upon themselves that the common schools seemed more neglected than ever, we are indebted to these institutions for educating men and women whose influence and whose efforts at length secured a great advance in the administration of public schools, and in the methods of instruction. The first master of Dummer academy helped to educate fifteen members of congress, two chief justices of the Supreme court, a president of Harvard college, and sev- eral college professors. Monson and Westfield and Wesleyan academies, and others within the limits of Hampden county, had a like honorable record. Academies were the training schools for teachers of the common schools before the establishment of nor- mal schools. Many of these teachers must have tried to intro- duce into their schools the finer motives and the gentler methods which they had known in the academies, in place of the rude rigors then in vogue in district schools. Many of them lived to see a new era in the history of the common schools.
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We have seen that the immediate effect of the rise of acad- emies was to center the attention of those who most appreciated good schools upon the academies, and to withdraw from the com- mon schools that interest and that generous support which were essential to their welfare. Academies tended in times more dem- ocratic even than our own, to separate the children of those hav- ing a competency from the children of the poor. The former could enjoy the advantages of an academy; the latter were too generally obliged to content themselves with the meagre oppor- tunities of the common school. The passing away of the colonial grammar schools, and the decadence, or rather lack of progress, of the common schools, had made private schools and academies a necessity. Their success tended to leave the common schools uncared for. But there was a growing persuasion that the com- mon schools were failing to secure the ends for which they were established, and were unworthy of an intelligent people.
The eighth annual report of the board of education, written by William G. Bates, of Westfield, one of the earlier mem- bers of the board, contains a paragraph that well summarizes the disadvantages to the common schools, arising from the mainte- nance of private schools. We quote the paragraph :
"But whatever may have been the cause of the establishment of private schools, the effect of their establishment has been most disastrous upon the interests of common school education. By increasing the expense of education, without proportionately improving its quality ; by drawing off to the private schools the best of the teachers; by depriving the common schools of their best scholars, and thus robbing them of a bright example, the best incentive to diligence; by withdrawing from them the care and sympathy of the most intelligent part of the population ; by taking away from the patrons of these private institutions the motive to swell the amount of the appropriations for the support of common schools ; by degrading the common school from its just estimation in the minds of the community, to an institution where only those are sent whose parents are too poor or too neglectful to pay a proper regard to their condition ; by fostering that feeling of jealousy which will always spring up between
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persons of antagonistic interests; by instilling into the mind of the youthful student a feeling of inferiority ; by pointing him to a fellow student born under the laws of his country to the same destiny, yet in the enjoyment of superior intellectual advantages ; and by dissolving that community of feeling which should ever be consecrated to this great cause, they have done an injury to our common school system, which their discontinuance only can repair."
The first quarter of the nineteenth century had hardly closed ere the thick gloom that had long settled upon elementary schools, both in Europe and America, began to yield to the dawn of a brighter day. Pestalozzi, in Germany and in Switzerland, with his co-laborers and pupils, and Bell and Lancaster, in England, had begun a great movement in the educational world. To this the friends of popular education in Massachusetts were the first in America to respond. "To James Carter, of Lancaster, Mass.," it has been said, "belongs the honor of first attracting attention to the decadence of the public schools, the extent of it, the cause of it, and the remedy for it." The result of his writings, his addresses, his work in the legislature, seconded by Gov. Edward Everett, Josiah Quincy, and others, was the creation of a school fund in 1834, and of a board of education in 1837. At the first meeting of this board in June, Horace Mann was chosen secre- tary. On the evening of the day of his appointment he made this entry in his private journal, "Henceforth, so long as I hold this office, I dedicate myself to the supremest welfare of man upon earth." His work of the next twelve years proved the genuineness of this self-dedication. Supervisor Martin has well said of him in his valuable book, "Evolution of the Massachusetts Public School System": "He fought the battle of educational reform in Massachusetts through to the end, and conquered. A pathetic indifference, hide-bound conservatism, niggardly parsi- mony, sectarian bigotry, and political animosity surged around him as the enemies of France surged around the white plume of Henry of Navarre; but he left the field so clear, that since his day none of these reactionary forces, singly or combined, has made any successful opposition to the on-going movements of the cause of popular education."
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Ten years before the appointment of the board of education, Mr. Carter, in the Massachusetts legislature, came within one vote of securing an appropriation for a school for the training of teachers. The plan was not realized until Edmund Dwight, belonging to a worthily honored family of Springfield, but then a resident of Boston, employed his money and his influence to establish normal schools. We are also indebted to Mr. Dwight, with others, for the development of the cotton mills of Chicopee and Holyoke. Well informed respecting educational affairs in his own state and in Europe, Mr. Dwight was wisely chosen one of the original members of the board of education. He was keenly aware of the need of trained teachers for the public schools, and offered to give $10,000 for the training of teachers in normal schools, provided the legislature would appropriate an equal sum. By the resolves of April 19, 1838, the legislature appropriated the additional $10,000.
The first normal schools in America were opened in 1839,- one in Lexington and one in Barre. The latter, in 1844, found a permanent home in Westfield. It is a lasting honor to our coun- ty that within its limits was the early home of the man whose influence and whose munificence resulted in founding the first state normal schools on this continent. Later, Mr. Dwight, by the gift of $1,000, made it possible for Mr. Mann, under the direction of the board of education, to inaugurate a system of teachers' institutes.
The value of the Westfield and other State Normal schools- the value of the institutes, which have been termed the "flying artillery of the normal school,"-in improving the schools of the county and of the state can hardly be over-estimated. The Westfield school in a few years won a national reputation. Nor- mal schools have developed new and better methods of teaching, nourished professional enthusiasm, led to a higher appreciation of teaching, helped teachers to form higher ideals and through their influence on the schools have proved that they are essential to any well ordered system of public instruction.
So far as the public schools improved, so far there was less need of academies. The development of manufacturing industries,
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bringing people together in villages and cities, led to the erection of larger and more suitable school buildings, the grading of pupils, and the permanent employment of excellent teachers.
As towns increased in population, they became able to maintain high schools, and they were especially disposed to do this in local- ities where academies failed to furnish the needed opportunities for secondary instruction. As early as 1821, the city of Boston established a free English High school. In 1826, the legisla- ture, which in previous sessions had seemed to care little for secondary schools, enacted a law requiring that high schools should be maintained in towns having five hundred families ; but the opposition to this measure, of those interested in the pros- perity of academies, and of several towns in which a high school could not be located so as to easily accommodate pupils from all parts of the town, soon secured the repeal of the effective clauses of the law. After experiencing various vicissitudes, being re- enacted in 1836, practically set aside in 1840, and again re-enact- ed and improved in 1848, the high schools law, mainly as it now is, became the permanent expression of the will of the people of the commonwealth.
In 1838 there were very few high schools in the State. From this time to 1860, fifty more were added. From 1860 to 1875, ninety more were established. In 1900, the whole number of high schools in the state was two hundred and sixty-one. In twenty-three towns, academies, most of them on an early founda- tion, serve as high schools. High schools include nearly nine per cent. of the school enrollment. Where academies have yielded their place to free high schools, the academy funds have generally been utilized to increase the efficiency of the high school. The high schools in Hampden county are a just source of pride to the several towns in which they are maintained.
Monson academy, in charge of a succession of principals eminent for scholarship and rare personal qualities, and strength- ened from time to time by the benefactions of liberal donors living in Monson, has maintained its hold upon the community. It still continues the noble work for which it was founded June 21, 1804. It now adds to its original functions those of a high school for the town of Monson.
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The Wesleyan academy at Wilbraham, strengthened by the generous efforts of the members of the Methodist Episcopal church, also survived the revolution in favor of public high schools ; broadening its work, adding to its equipment and in- creasing its influence, until it has become one of the leading acad- emies of the state.
The Hitchcock Free academy, founded at Brimfield by the act of incorporation April 26, 1855, in the excellence of its work has taken rank with the Monson and Wesleyan academies, fur- nishing admirable high school facilities to communities beyond the limits of Brimfield as well as to the people of that town.
The district system, Horace Mann and his immediate succes- sors found one of the greatest hindrances to the improvement of public schools. By this system the inhabitants of towns were for many years divided into petty corporations, each having well nigh independent management of its own school. The large centers of population were the first to free themselves from the evils of the system; but in the rural sections of the state, in- trenched in what was deemed the right of local government, and defended by custom, it long seemed almost invincible. In spite of several legislative attempts to rid the state of the system, it was not fully abolished until 1882, though persuasion and legis- lation had previously led all but forty-five towns to adopt the town system, by which all the schools of a town are in charge of a town committee. This system frees from the petty feuds, the damaging jealousies, the narrow parsimony and the selection of teachers on the grounds of relationships and favoritisms, that often made the district system a disgrace. Political considera- tions may gain possession of the members of a town committee. The committees in our county have generally been wholly free from such debasement. The good results of the town system are evident on every hand. Among the most obvious are the more healthful, tasteful and suitable school buildings that have been erected in recent years. This improvement is most marked in agricultural communities where, under the district system, neighborhood strifes and local jealousies too often made it easy for penurious men to prevent the erection of needed buildings.
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