USA > Massachusetts > Middlesex County > Somerville > Report of the city of Somerville 1843-1859 > Part 3
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11 80
Snow, Samuel
1 81
Emerson, Enoch
8 37
Titcomb, John H. Jr.
5 24
Fisk, Benjamin
5 62
West, Isaiah R.
30 61
Hawkins, Christopher
15 54
Tenney, Robert G., Jr.
5 24
Hazletine, Hazen
4 14
REPORT
OF
THE SCHOOL COMMITTEE,
SOMERVILLE,
FOR THE SCHOOL YEAR 1846 -- 47.
-
PUBLISHED BY ORDER OF THE TOWN.
SOMERVILLE PRINTED BY EDMUND TUFTS. 1847.
REPORT
1
OF
THE SCHOOL COMMITTEE,
SOMERVILLE,
FOR THE SCHOOL YEAR 1846 -- 47.
PUBLISHED BY ORDER OF THE TOWN.
-
SOMERVILLE PRINTED BY EDMUND TUFTS. 1847.
УЯАЯВЦА РЕВИЧ
REPORT
OF THE
SCHOOL COMMITTEE.
The School Committee respectfully submit the following REPORT.
In commencing their Annual Report, your Committee would explain the mortifying fact that the town has been, the present year, deprived of its share in the State School Fund, about forty-five dollars as they suppose, a sum paltry enough in amount in view of the ceremony necessary to obtain it, but of some little moment in view of the circumstances under which it has been taken from us. It is known to you, that every town in the state has an equal proportionate right in that fund,-not as a matter of legislative gift or charity, but of ab- solute ownership. One of the many and changing laws by which the subject of common schools is complicated, requires that certain facts, viz., the number of pupils in a town, and the amount of taxes raised for schools shall be sworn to, and re- turned, at a specified date to the Secretary of State. In our certificate of these points, a clerical error was made in not filling up the blank space for inserting the amount. The sum,
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however, was distinctly stated in another portion of the paper, and the truth of the whole document was sworn to, and returned. The fact, that the thing required by the statute was actually done, that every requisition of the law was substantially com- plied with, that the error, if such it will admit of being termed, was a mere miss of the pen, was proved beyond a doubt to the Legislative Committee on Education, and to their satisfaction, as they declined the offer of proof under oath, who forthwith reported that the petitioners should have leave to withdraw ! Being advised by those familiar with these matters, that such a claim can hardly be rejected by an appeal to the Committee on Claims, usually selected from practical men, we trust that we shall receive justice from the next Legislative assembly.
That a practitioner in a criminal court would have felt it a duty, if not an inclination, to urge a flaw like this, in an in- dictment for a petty larceny, is highly probable, but the at- tempt to evade a mere debt in a civil tribunal, on such a quib- bling pretence, your committee are informed would not be sus- tained a moment.
It is perhaps known to you, that quite a number of towns in every portion of the state, have ever since the enactment of this law lost their equitable share in the school fund, by an ac- tual omission of the facts required, or in the punctuality of the return. These form no precedent for our case in the mind of any one capable of discriminating between the captious nicety of a special plea or a bill of indictment, and a common sense view of what is honest and just. We did the things required by law ; there was an error only in the record of our doings.
Even were the cases referred to, exact precedents by which all cases resembling them, were to be decided, it might well be a question in your minds, in common with others who have suffered under such " sharp practice," whether it be not about time to seek a change in the law, or in the application of it. Snap-laws, as they are sometimes denominated, laws with dis- proportioned penalties, laws throwing the penalty in the wrong place, laws making accidents and clerical errors penal, do not
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suit the genius of an age " when the world is beginning to find that it is governed too much."
Our "great and general Court " has long had a somewhat un- enviable notoriety among sister states, for its hair-splitting pro- pensities, for skill in finding an i undotted, or a t uncrossed in some election return, for gravely sitting and ruminating for hours or days, some gnat-straining difficulty, like that lately argued and decided whether two commas are equal to ditto ! Some legis- tive bodies feel that they have enough of the sovereign power to take high, manly, equitable views on questions of simple right; to recognize what is just and equitable, and then adutit it, as a high minded individual would do. In dealing with bodies of un- paid public servants, like School Committees, the most disinter- ested and self-sacrificing of all office-holders, few of whom can be expected to have that scriviner's accuracy which filling up writs, leases, or other blank forms, half print, half manuscript, natur- ally gives, legislative bodies may well apply those sentiments which their distinguished senator so lately was urging Congress to regard legislative acts with. " Of all occasions," remarks Mr. Webster, " these are the last in which one should stick in the bark, or seek for loopholes or means of escape, or in the language of an eminent judge of former times, 'hitch and hang on pins and particles.' We must take the substance fairly and as it is, and not hesitate about forms and phrases."
The school committees in common with all engaged in edu- cating the young are charged in the constitution, to inculcate principles of justice, integrity and all the virtues. Can any one make candid and ingenuous youth, unskilled in the mysteries of special pleading and legal chicanery, understand the justice of the loss to which they have been subjected, or comprehend the propriety of their being vicariously punished for the errors, still less the mere accidents of their elders ?
Few persons whose duties have not led them to examine, are aware of the machinery requisite in our common school system. That the law makers and suggesters are not beyond the reach of imperfection and error themselves, may safely be
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presumed from the fact, that there has been a more than an an- nual tinkering of school laws since they were perfected in the Revised Statutes, and the work is still going on. If those, paid to do their duty, blunder and blunder again, they may well ex- tend their charity, instead of penalties, to School Committees, who surely have domestic anxieties enough to claim indulgence, and not severity from those, who ought to be fellow laborers with them in this glorious cause. A single clerk with a few blank circulars at his elbow, could notify every Committee who might have made any serious error in half a day. Whether this amount of time and labor might not be wisely transferred from some of the voluminous records of the School system, is especially submitted to the consideration of those who manage these things. Your Committee feel bound in justice to them- selves to declare, that they have labored diligently to keep the trail of all the laws, usages and statistics required of them. They with a small minority of towns, consented to invade the domestic sanctuaries of their fellow citizens to learn how many " additions" had been inade to your families within the year. They would not be understood to say, that they actually made the requisitions required by the act of 1844 in their own official capacity, but they hired an accurate gentleman to discharge this delicate duty, so that no demand of the Legislature should be unfulfilled ! After this, they knew they will not be deemed guilty of contumacious neglect of the statutes, however un- lucky they may have been in the lapsus penne, which has oc- casioned them much mortification, and you a small loss.
In reviewing a connection with your schools which some of them have maintained with never flagging zeal and interest for several years, we see much to which it will ever be gratifying to recur. Your ready, willing co-operation, your generous con- fidence in the intentions and the judgment of your Committee, your unequalled liberality, never having since our town was or- ganized declined any appropriation which has been asked, all render us too sensible of our own deficiences. Such ben- efactions demanded more skilled and less employed almoners,
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but we have done what we could. Amid duties often per- plexing from their minuteness and detail, in the judicious ex- penditure of considerable amounts of money for new purposes, in investigations sometimes as painful and important as those of the highest judicial body, in deliberations on the difficult points of moral and intellectual training of our children,-in all these, they can look back upon a general concordance of views and feelings, and a harmony of personal intercourse, which leaves nothing but the most kindly recollections behind. The fact that they have had about fifty regular meetings the current year will give some idea of their devotion to their duty.
The guiding principle they have 'ever kept in view in their attempts to fix the educational system of this town is briefly this ; that the object of primary and grammar school instruc- tion is not to arquire learning, but the means by which that object can in the future be secured ; that to do this, certain in- strumental objects are to be accurately and thoroughly main- tained, few in number, but essential to the great prospective end. These instrumental means are not unanalogous to the use of tools in acquiring a mechanical trade. The apprentice is first set to acquire such a degree of dexterity in the use of lis implements, as when perfectly attained, will enable him to apply it to any and every form, quality and extent of work, which may be required. The value of the article he pro- duces, is a secondary consideration altogether ; even if more so, than the interests of the master now makes it, it would probably be still more advantageous to his progress, So in education. " To get learning " as it is called, at a grammar school, to acquire valuable information of men or things, is one of the least important of the ends of education. Certain things are hardly susceptible of being acquired, except in the school period of life ; other parts of an education can only, or as well, be learned at a mature age. It fortunately happens, that these alternative acquirements are to be made just as a priori, it would be most eligible that they should be in a natural progress. The adult neglected at the proper stage can never be taught to
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speak with habitual elegance and accuracy his native tongue, while the youth seizes the niceties of pronunciation and gram- matical construction with amazing facility and correctness. The adult discriminates the characters of men and actions in history, the philosophy of natural or moral relations clearly, if not always soundly ; in childhood these things are merely committed to the treacherous tablet of the memory, almost un- comprehended. Studies, then, should have a direct reference to the age at which they are practicable, and the order in which they are to aid something yet beyond. To study nat- ural philosophy before a certain amount of mathematical know- ledge is attained, is as absurd as to teach Latin or Greek before the vernacular is acquired. The foundation is to be first so laid, that the superstructure may be afterwards carried up, as high as you will. What then are the auxiliary or instrumental studies which can be acquired, and must be acquired under any practicable aid of primary and grammar schools ? We will at- tempt to give our views and experience from watching the de- velopement of the youthful mind among us.
Mere memory of words is by nature so wonderfully devel- oped in children as to demand but little cultivation. This is fully illustrated in the experience of every primary school, when many of the pupils acquire the poetical lessons, so accu- rately, by hearing their elders read them, as to interfere with their instruction. They in fact are able to read them as well with the book closed as open. Memory is not, as in practice it is too often deemed the great instrumentality of education.
The studies regarded as indispensable as instruments for fu- ture operations, are
1. Reading, which is not less an accomplishment in itself, but the first step to general instruction. Your Committees' ex- perience in the mode of teaching this branch is briefly this. To teach it successfully it must be regarded as a close, critical exercise, like a lesson in arithmetic. The teachers and pupils must give it an attention of the most undivided and intense character. Every fault must be corrected, again and again,
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and the extent passed over must be wholly subordinate to the perfection. Every sound must be delivered clear, distinct, ar- ticulate. The miserably incorrect, disgusting mode of speak- ing in reading which foreigners, who perhaps are equally faulty, recognize aud ridicule in us, arose in a good degree from the cir- cumstance that the teacher of former time, presumed that he could hear a class read in plain composition, without tracing them on the book. While the pupil read, the teacher set his cop- ies or walked the floor intent on his own thoughts, or gained time by working on the puzzling arithmetical examples. When the pu- pil came to a dead set, he could lift him out, and set liim going again, but all correctness, propriety and even decency was ut- terly sacrificed. Errors in reading are almost ineradicable by future efforts at a maturer age. Quinctilian relates, two thou- sand years ago, that those who went to a certain illustrious teacher, of music were expected to pay double tuition, if they had ever been taught by any other teacher. It was easier to teach, than to eradicate old vices ; to learn than to unlearn.
Reading will be caught from some example, it is an imitative rather than didactic study. Every one has noticed in some schools how soon and how markedly the tone, pitch, and man- ner of some loud and glib reader infects the whole pupils. The master should be his own fugleman ; the school should im- itate him, and he should be equal to the task of serving as a model. He should go before them, with them, and after them in his examples. He should present himself so ever before them as their guide that his reading, whether good or bad, will be reading of his school, after a fair interval of training.
The next defect in teaching reading, (that inattention just named is a practical delinquency and not a mere error,) is be- lieved to be prematurely attempting to instruct pupils in rhetor- ical reading without a previous essential perfect mechanical skill in the art. A pupil may be made to read with correct- ness, that is, with just tone, correct pauses, distinct articula- tion and yet have little or no understanding of the matter. We have known a foreign child read well, without the understand-
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ing of one word. To read rhetorically, with emphasis, stress, inflection, unmarked pauses, stops denoted by no external sym- bol, can only be done by a clear definite, vivid understanding of the author. Now of most of the didactic or poetical matter, conveying no story or narrative, how few pieces of our books are comprehensible by youths of grammar school age.
When the pupil arrives at that age, when he can understand clearly his book, and feels an interest in the topic, if his me- chanical reading is free and unembarrassed, he can hardly fail to read well, for he will read as he feels, naturally. Our im- pression is, that to mix up fine reading with elementary instruc- tion in young pupils is useless and injurious ; the pupil does not comprehend the writer, in part because liis mind is engaged on the other difficulties of his task, and still more because it is too high for his understanding. To demand of him to read with just emphasis, stress and inflection is asking an impossibility, which discourages him. He feels that something not very plain must be done, and to compensate as far as possible, he goes through the motions without attaining the real object. He lays his emphasis hap-hazard and his fine reading becomes senseless affectation. We cannot but feel, that with the excep- tion of marked emphasis, the attempt to communicate the graces too early, is at the expense of the solid, accurate and enduring. The advanced classes may be carried as far as it is clear that they understand, but this essential should never be forgotten.
We submit this view with deference to the opinions of ex- perienced educators, but as one of the difficulties in common practice, which has struck our attention.
There is still another obstacle in our schools in reading, di- rectly connected with that just alluded to, the unfitness of many of the reading books in general use for grammar school pupils. The taste which has presided over the selection has been a tawdry and meretricious one. The lessons are too generally chosen from the most ornate, highflown and magniloquent por- tions of the most eminent authors. Their exceptions of occa- sional flights in the fiowery regions of letters being aggregated,
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become the prevailing literature of our school rooms. A false taste as to what constitutes good composition, is early impress- ed and retained, and our national predisposition to extravagant, bombastic and inflated declamation cultivated, instead of being repressed, at these first fountains.
So far as these reading books are intelligible to the young at all, many of them carry with them false and pernicious mean- ings. Most of them retain those miserable and fatal delusions as to what constitutes the true excellence of man, of the real character of war, of glory, of ambition and of the struggling for the artificial gewgaws and distinctions of life. These derived, almost unchanged by contact with a Christian age, from the heathenish volumes of the profane classics are handed down like heir-looms from one generation of us to the next. Like the ghost and goblin tales foolishly or thoughtlessly impressed upon infancy, these false ideas of what is great and good, re- tain their hold upon the imagination and the feelings, long after the calm cultivated reason and conscience of mature age has stripped them of their false gilding. If colleges and higher in- stitutions will not discard their heathen literature, but will insist upon our youth wading in imagination through all the falsehood and filth of the so called classics, unmindful of the bearing of these upon the formation of individual and national character, let our common schools receive an expurgated literature. " The child is father to the man." The child's first literature indelibly impresses the eternal character.
Spelling. The old method of teaching spelling in New England schools was for the pupil to study the solid columns of the pocket dictionary or defining vocabulary, with or without committing the meaning of the words. Whether called or not, to repeat the definitions, a certion portion of them would invol- untarily be impressed upon the learner's memory. This method has been widely supplanted by selecting words either by author or teacher from the reading lesson, for spelling or de- fining or both. From being a great item in common school exercises, it has fallen into a most insignificant importance.
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Your Committee do not believe that this change has been an advantageous one to the cause of elementary instruction, and that in this particular, schools are not generally as well taught as they were many years since. Spelling is one of those parts of the rudiments, which if not learned at a very early age, is never acquired, and men in the highest public stations and of the most exalted intellect could be pointed out, whose produc- tions, uncorrected by the printer's apprentice, would border on the ludicrous.
Spelling to the eye is more important than to the ear, and is quite a different thing in its acquisition. The blackboard is a no less valuable auxiliary in this, than as will hereafter be shown, it is in grammar, or as universally admitted to be as re- gards arithmetic. In former years, spelling to the ear was often fully acquired, while the pupil could not write with any tolerable accuracy. The black-board, slate or paper are pre- cious adjuvants in spelling, punctuation and grammatical con- struction. They are learned on these by practice, in the usu- al mode, by theory only, and every one recognizes the differ- ence of these two modes of learning any thing. Impressions made on the eye, are admitted by all writers on the percep- tive faculties, to be much more certain, definite, and abiding than those received through the ear. And, as large classes can be addressed, and their faculties put into operation at once, there is an immense saving of time in teaching these great and difficult branches on the black-board.
3. Numbers. That wonderful " new avenue to mathemat- ical science " to which the world is indebted to the fate War- ren Colburn of our country and spread in its application by a great many new arrangers and compilers of introductory trea- tises, will probably be never essentially improved. Like the geometry of Euclid, it will be immortal. It is a method purely inductive, uniting a just application to the ear and the eye, oral and written lessons advancing together, as the immature mind developes itself to receive them, the rules being entirely subsi- diary to the processes and examples.
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When we contrast the methods in use within our own recol- lection, the long unintelligible rules to be committed mechani- cally, because carrying no meaning to the memory, the strange mixture of pure principle and business applications, the riddle- like and vexatious puzzles all empirically solved by trying, again and again, until the printed answer was reached, when the whole was carefully recorded, as if the precious result was too valuable to be lost, we feel that Colburn was one of the greatest benefactors of the young who has ever lived, and that it is a duty, as new books are perpetually given to the world, based upon his great discoveries without one word of acknowl- edgement of the source from which all their merits are derived, to add our feeble tribute to the memory of this great man.
We need not say that we have been satisfied perfectly with the education of your youth in arithmetic. Under a careful and faithful application of the inductive method, we believe that we have youth not exceeding twelve years of age, who have made more attainments really in numbers, than most col- lege graduates of a few years since, however the fact may be now in collegiate instruction.
4. Geography. In each yearly addition to our already co- pious stock of elementary works on this subject, we see nearer approaches to an inductive method ; a more judicious dwelling upon the principles, on which the details can be added life long, as well as a separation of the temporary and changing features from the permanent points and of the jumbling of principles of strict geography from historical and political accidents. Wood- bridge's last book has been introduced into one of our grammar schools, and in our view, is the best text-book which has fall- en under our notice. With the frequent protraction of geo- graphical divisions on the black-board, the use of the artificial globe to convey permanent impressions to the eye, the studying the maps with especial reference to the scales on which differ- ent countries are delineated, with the constant introduction of questions calculated to make the pupils think, calculate and turn his mind inward, instead of laboring to recall tho exact
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answer to the question given at the bottom of the page, we think geography is one of those studies in which classes can be made to feel a lively and intelligent interest, and a lasting basis be made for all further acquisitions in the knowledge of the whereabouts of man and his acts, whether spread over the pages of the most erudite historians ancient or modern, or daily meet- ing him in the columns of a penny paper. If taught merely as a memory exercise, if the pupil is left to think he has done all he can, when he has given the precise book-answer to the book-question, the exercise is of no more utility than getting a last year's almanac by heart - that is, it cultivates the powers of application and of memory ; the last of which as before ob- served, claims but little necessity of being strengthened.
Our schools need some supplies of maps and other simple apparatus for geographical illustration, in order to carry out our views fully, as to having the text book fill a much less promi- nent place in the recitations and instruction than it now does.
5. Handwriting. We have been led, in our acquaintance with our own and other grammar schools of this region, to sup- pose that the whole art of chirography and its mode of teaching was in a state of more confusion and uncertainty, than any other branch of early education, except perhaps grammar. Our schools are filled with all kinds of strange aids in this art. We have copy books with pale copies, with duplicate outlines, with single tracings, with dotted guides, with rulings, longitu- dinal, vertical, sloping and recently rectangular. We have copy slips large enough for signs and small enough for the mi- croscope, angular, antiangular, copperplate and letter press. The teachers themselves, all of whom write beautiful hands, appear to be mystified under these multifarious arrangements, as if in a doubtful and unsettled state as to any true course of training, and let each pupil use such machinery of this kind, as he may happen to purchase. It may be that under any and all these ways, a certain command of the pen is attained, which finally settles into a fixed hand of the individual. Yet we have rather supposed, that the notoriously inferior common hand-writ-
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