USA > Rhode Island > Rhode Island : three centuries of democracy, Vol. I > Part 73
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The report of the survey commission was written by Francis Wayland and was worthy of that distinguished educator, whose view of public education was liberal and enlightened, and of college education was so much in advance of his era that he introduced the elective sys- tem of studies at Brown University nearly two generations before it was "discovered or invented" at Harvard. Wayland discussed first the principles of equity that should be observed in provision for a public school system, thus: "There should be furnished a number of schools sufficient to accommodate all who wish to avail themselves of their advantages. Everyone sees the injustice of taxing the whole community to support one or two schools, to which not more
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than one-tenth of the whole number of children can find admittance. The same injustice will evidently occur if the number of scholars imposed upon a teacher be so great as to render his instruction of so little value that a large portion of the community is obliged to resort to private schools. The same principle would dictate that there be established various grades of schools suited to the wants of the public. If there be but one description of schools, it must either be so elevated that many of the parents cannot prepare their children to enter it, or else so elementary that none would avail themselves of its advantages for any considerable length of time, or else everything of necessity would be so imperfectly taught that a very small portion of the community would receive the benefit of that provision, which all were taxed to support."
At a later stage in his report Wayland recommended the establishment of a public high school, thus: "It may here be properly suggested whether equity does not demand that the system of public education in this town should make provision for at least one school of high character, a school which should provide instruction in all that is necessary to a finished edu- cation. If it be said that such a school would be of advantage only to the rich, it may be answered, as the rich contribute in an equal proportion to education, why should not they be entitled to a portion of the benefit? But it is far from being the case that such a school would be only for the rich. It would be as much a public school, as open to all, and as much under the government of the public as any other. But it would evidently be of most peculiar advan- tage to the middling classes, and the poor. Such an education as we propose, the rich man can give, and will give to his son by sending him to private schools. But the man in moderate cir- cumstances cannot afford to incur the heavy expenses of a first-rate school, and if no such provision be made, the education of his children must be restricted to the ordinary acquisition of a little more than reading and writing. With such a school as we have contemplated, he would be enabled to give his child an education which would qualify him for distinction in any kind of business." The report proceeded from an argument that would support a public school system rising from infant school to university, to a discussion of defects in and reme- dies proposed for the schools of Providence: "And lastly, the principle of equity to which we have alluded would dictate that the public schools of every description should be well and skillfully taught. . . .. The schools now number on their books as many pupils as can receive advantage from the labors of the present instructors. Yet it will not, we presume, be denied that a very considerable portion of the children about our streets attend no school whatever. It would, therefore, seem proper that the school committee, joined with such persons as the town council may add, be empowered to increase the means of instruction from time to time as the wants of the population may require. But it has appeared to your committee that one part of this object may be accomplished immediately, and with very little additional expense, by establishing a sufficient number of primary schools in different parts of the town. The effect of these will be to provide a grade of instruction as much needed by the public as any other, to elevate the character of the grammar schools, and to enable the teachers of these schools to devote their attention to a larger portion of those who are prepared for instruction in the more advanced branches of education."
Returning to the high school, Wayland outlined a course of instruction for a public high school, intended to serve the purposes of a finishing school rather than an academy preparing youth for college, and emphasizing adjustment to the particular needs of a community, like Providence, in which trade and commerce furnished employment for the largest numbers: "If in addition to these two grades of schools a single school for the whole town should be estab- lished, of a more elevated character, to enter which it shall be necessary to have been proficient in all the studies of the grammar school, and in which should be taught a more perfect and scientific knowledge of geography, bookkeeping, arithmetic, algebra, geometry, navigation, moral and natural philosophy, natural history, the elements of political economy, and the Con-
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stitution of the United States, and the Latin and Greek languages, we think that our system of education would be such as to do honor to the public spirit of this commercial and manu- facturing metropolis, but not at all beyond what is demanded by the advanced intelligence of the age. Whether a high school, of somewhat the same character, for girls might not also be desirable and expedient would be a matter for future consideration."
The report concluded with a recommendation for non-professional supervision, thus :
In closing this report your committee feel obliged to assure their fellow citizens that it is utterly in vain to hope for a valuable course of public instruction without a thorough and active system of supervision on the part of the community. Unless the schools be visited frequently and examined thoroughly, and unless the school committee determine to give to this subject all the attention and reflection and labor necessary to carry the system of education to as great a degree of perfection as the case admits, everything will be fruitless. Without this every plan of education will fail, and with it almost any may be made to succeed. If a sufficient number of gentlemen can be found, who will devote to the interests of the rising generation a half-day every month, and who will so combine their labor as to produce the effect of a particular and general supervision, all that the most benevolent could wish can be accomplished. If such men cannot be found, nothing of value will ever be done.
The state school act of 1828 created for Providence, as for other towns, a school com- mittee independent of the town council; the new school committee included Asa Messer, who had been President of Brown and who was elected as chairman. The General Assembly, on request by Providence, exempted the town from the provision in the general law that limited town appropriations to twice the amount apportioned from the general treasury. A reorgani- zation of schools was effected, with provision for five "writing" schools taught by men, and six "reading" schools taught by women. The "reading" schools admitted children four years of age and older ; on reaching seven years and attaining ability to read fluently a child was eligible for promotion to the "writing" school. In the latter the branches taught were reading and spelling, the use of capital letters and punctuation, writing, arithmetic, elementary book- keeping, English grammar and letter writing, which was dignified by the title "epistolary com- position." The plan for the high school was not carried into effect. Consequent upon the improvement, the schools of Providence showed an immediate gain of twenty-five per cent. in enrollment. With the chartering of Providence as a city in 1832 the election of the school committee for a time passed from the freemen to the city council. The fuel tax on pupils was abolished in 1833 on the motion of Thomas W. Dorr, who was a member of the commit- tee. The position taken by the school committee was that the payment of the tax could be enforced only by exclusion from school, and that that course seemed inconsistent with "the spirit of the law or the great object of it," which was to promote public education rather than restrict it. Thus the schools of Providence became absolutely free public schools. Through the movement of 1828, Providence achieved an improvement in its public schools paralleling the general advance made for the state as a whole.
STATE REPORTS-The beginning of a system of state-town reports of school conditions was forecasted in a resolution adopted by the General Assembly in 1836, directing town clerks to report the number, age, sex and pecuniary condition of deaf and dumb persons and the extent of their education, and also the number of children who attend town public schools and the amount of school money received from the state. To the inquiry concerning attendance nineteen towns responded, reporting a total attendance of 12,350 children at town public schools. By act of 1838 school committees were required to report annually before the first Wednesday in May the amount of school money received from the state; the amount of school money raised by the town; the number of school districts in the town and the number of schools kept in each district, the amount of money spent in each school district; the amount of money spent in each school district for fuel, furniture, incidental expenses and instruction ;
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the number of children, male and female, attending school and the average attendance; the time and season of keeping schools; the number, names and salaries of teachers; the branches taught and textbooks used in schools. The Secretary of State was ordered to furnish blanks for the reports required, and towns failing to report forfeited the right to participate in the distribution of state school money. Under this act and the general school law of 1839, in which it was codified, statistics were collected from every town in the state from 1839 to 1845, when the Barnard school law made other provision for town school reports. While the report for 1836 was so incomplete as scarcely to warrant comparisons, the reports for 1839, of 13,748 children in public schools, did not indicate the improvement over the figures in Angell's report, even if the latter is taken as "corrected," that might reasonably be expected. The figures for 1840, 17,752, and for 1841, 20,253, were more consistent.
Wayland's report on the public schools of Providence as of 1828 showed substantial rea- sons for discontent with the schools, pointing out clearly that the free schools of Providence in 1828 were insufficient to accommodate all children of school age; that the instruction was inefficient because of the large number of pupils assigned to each teacher; that the schools could be of advantage to only a small portion of the community, because they must inevitably, under all circumstances, teach only a narrow content well, or an extended content poorly. Even with the improvements inaugurated in 1828 following Wayland's report the Providence Association of Mechanics and Manufacturers found reason to complain in 1837, in a petition to the city council requesting better schools: "Your memorialists have been struck by one fact, to which they would respectfully solicit particular attention. It has been argued by some (and perhaps the argument has attracted the consideration of your honorable body) that the instruction of youth in the public schools is a heavy tax upon the middling classes, without an adequate return, as they do not participate in the benefit of this public instruction. This argument, which is evidently weighty in the present condition of these schools, would be destroyed if they were raised to the condition desired by your memorialists. Why is it that the middling classes do not become participants in this instruction? There is evidently but one reason. They perceive that the crowded state of the schools alone would prevent proper atten- tion to the pupil; and they are aware that with the small sum which the instructors receive it is difficult to procure and retain the services of competent persons to fill the station. But let the schools be made so numerous that the scholars may receive as much attention as they do in the private schools, and let the salaries be so large as to induce men of equal ability to take charge of them, and that which is now considered a tax, would then be viewed as an alleviation of one of the heaviest burdens put upon the middling classes."
The essential errors in the school system in Providence in 1837, as disclosed by the peti- tion, were (I) insufficient accommodations; (2) too few teachers for the number of pupils; (3) inadequate salaries, and (4) poor teaching. If such complaints against the schools of Providence, taught as they were by persons following education as a regular profession on steady tenure, could be justified, what complaints might with greater justification be made of rural schools taught by persons who could be found to accept casual employment for tenure extending only a few months? Another factor contributing to unsatisfactory enrollment records was the competition with the schools of the rising textile industry, offering employ- ment at wages in competition with attendance on public instruction. Losses in ocean com- merce had impressed Rhode Islanders with the hazards of foreign trade; merchants turned to safer investments in factories and machinery. Compact villages grew up close to the new factories, and boys and girls of the factory villages worked in the mills instead of attending school. Not all the manufacturers of Rhode Island were indifferent to the dangers attending the neglect to educate the children of the rising generation; some erected schoolhouses near their factories. Yet hundreds certainly, perhaps thousands, of boys and girls worked in fac- tories all the year around. An attempt to remedy this condition was made in 1840, when a
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state law was passed, declaring that no child under twelve years of age should be employed in any manufacturing establishment unless the child attended, for three of the twelve months next preceding such employment, some public or private day school where instruction was given in spelling, reading, writing and arithmetic. This was the first child labor and compulsory attendance law passed by an American legislature, preceding by more than ten years the earli- est enactment elsewhere. It was left out of the revision of the statutes in 1844 with all other school laws, in anticipation of the enactment of a new school law to be drawn by Henry Bar- nard, and it was not codified in the revised school act which the General Assembly passed in 1845.
The years between 1828 and 1839 were critical years in the history of Rhode Island pub- lic schools. The school act of 1828 produced improvement immediately, but the appropria- tion of $10,000 annually, while significant for the inauguration of new schools, was too meagre to assure continued progress. Consequently the schools maintained under the act of 1828, even when towns supplemented the state appropriation, were not of such a character as to attract that increasing attendance which is the surest index of public appreciation and satis- faction. At the same time there was a growth of manufacturing which operated as an external factor in decreasing school attendance. That the schools themselves were at fault seems to be proved by the advance of nearly fifty per cent. in enrollment of pupils which followed imme- diately an increase of state appropriations under the new statutes of 1836 and 1839. More money then meant more schools, more scholars and better schools, as it has since. The com- pulsory attendance law also operated to effect improvement between 1840 and 1844.
MORE MONEY; BETTER SCHOOLS-The source of the increase in the state appropriation for public schools under the act of 1836 was federal. The tariff law of 1833, a compromise, produced a revenue far in excess of current expenditures by the federal government. The national debt was liquidated. In his warfare against the Bank of the United States, Presi- dent Andrew Jackson not only vetoed a bill granting the bank an extension of its charter, but withdrew from the bank and its branches deposits of federal money. The federal treasury had a surplus, which must be restored to circulation lest business suffer. Congress, in 1836, voted to deposit the treasury surplus in excess of $5,000,000 in the treasuries of the several states as loans, to be returned to the federal treasury upon demand. Rhode Island received $382,335.30. The "Providence Morning Courier," in an editorial on October 25, 1836, sug- gested that the income that might be earned by judicious investment of the deposit money be applied to the support of public schools. The editor estimated Rhode Island's share as $272,- 000, and the income as "at least $16,000 annually, which added to the school fund, would in a few years produce an income sufficient to maintain free schools in every town in the state during the whole year." He advocated the appointment of a commission to invest the fund, "who should be judicious business men," and continued: "These hints are thrown out in the hope that they may meet the eye of some of the members of the Assembly, that the subject may be thought of preparatory to its consideration next week. We do not mean to be under- stood as speaking in the language of dictation, but only to call to the reflection of the mem- bers a subject upon which they will be called to act." Two resolutions were presented in the General Assembly: One, by Thomas Wilson Dorr, proposed that the income of the deposit fund should be applied exclusively to the support of public schools ; another, by George Curtis, directed that the money be deposited in the incorporated hanks of Rhode Island at not less than five per cent. interest. An amendment, offered as a substitute for the Curtis and Dorr resolu- tions, that the money be divided amongst the several towns, was defeated, and the original resolutions were adopted. It will be noted that the Dorr resolution differed from the "Morn- ing Courier" suggestion in that it provided for distributing the income to the towns imme- diately for the support of public schools, whereas the newspaper advocated use of the income to increase the permanent fund, and a deferred application. The deposit fund earned $1,358.35
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up to April 30, 1837; $17,676.24 in 1837-1838; $18,991.14 in 1838-1839, all of which, with the $10,000 provided by the act of 1828, was apportioned to the towns.
The revised school law of 1839 fixed the annual school appropriation at $25,000. Although this amount was less than the $27,676.24 and the $28,991.14 made available for schools in the two years preceding, the legislation of 1839 was fortunate, because the deposit fund yielded a decreasing revenue after 1839. The business depression following the financial disturbance of 1837 made deposits at five per cent. not profitable for banks, and the banks turned the state money back into the treasury, where it earned no interest. To provide for reinvestment, loans to towns to be used exclusively for educational purposes or investment in the capital stock of banks were authorized in 1839. Loans to towns for any municipal purpose were authorized in 1841, on bonds yielding five per cent. interest; later return was made to the policy of 1839. The state inaugurated a somewhat different policy in 1840, although it still recognized its obligation to the federal government as a merely temporary custodian of the deposit fund. In January, 1840, the General Treasurer was authorized to borrow $35,000 from the deposit fund, to pay the state's debt to the Globe Bank, the act stipulating that the loan should be repaid by the state with interest at five per cent .; for this purpose $29,526.49 was withdrawn. In June, 1842, the withdrawal of $50,000 from the banks and payment into the treasury for use of the state, "to be refunded as soon as may be, with interest at five per cent.," was ordered. In October of the same year a further withdrawal of $32,000 was author- ized, but only $28,192.72 was actually taken, the balance of the $32,000 being made up by $3807.28 received from the federal government as the state's share in the proceeds of sales of public lands. In January, 1843, two acts authorized the further withdrawal of $25,000. The withdrawals in 1842 and 1843, amounting to $103,192.72, or $107,000 if the public land money be included, may be ascribed to the expenses incurred in the suppression of Thomas Wilson Dorr's movement for constitutional reform. In June, 1843, $10,000 was drawn from the fund, to be applied to the appropriation for public schools, and it was ordered that no further investments of the surplus money be made without direction by the General Assembly. A further payment of $468.75 as Rhode Island's share in the proceeds of sales of public lands was covered into the general treasury in June, 1844. Of $386,611.33 received from the fed- eral treasury as deposit money or public land money, Rhode Island had "borrowed," by con- version for state purposes, $142,719.21. A resolution announcing discovery in 1858 that the public land money had been paid directly into the treasury instead of into the account of the deposit fund, ordered $4276.03 added to the latter. Other "borrowings" from the deposit fund were: May, 1845, $10,000; January, 1849, $41,526.67, to pay a debt due the Bank of North America, and expenses and orders of the General Assembly ; 1858, $32,500. The state's "indebtedness" to the fund in 1859, including money returned to the treasury and not rein- vested, and also the public land money, was $231,070.06. The balance, $155,541.27, was, in 1859, ordered credited to the permanent school fund, until such time as the federal govern- ment shall recall it. As a matter of fact, all that was credited was the stocks and bonds held. Money returned by banks and not reinvested, and the money balance in the treasury not part of authorized loans, was retained in the general treasury. Perhaps the act of January, 1860, by which the general treasury balance, $11,191.80, was ordered transferred to the permanent school fund, was the result of an effort to rectify previous dereliction. The income of the deposit fund, after the school law of 1839 had fixed the annual school appropriation at $25,000, was $17.084.27 in 1839-1840; $19,295.99 in 1840-1841 ; $16,306.95 in 1841-1842; $12,213.52 in 1842-1843, and thereafter a decreasing amount annually as money was diverted from the fund for state purposes.
The school act of 1839 arrested decrease of state appropriation for public schools, by establishing a fixed sum, $25,000. The statistical evidence of improvement in public schools because of additional money appeared in increased enrollment of pupils, and steady gains in the
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amount expended for teachers' salaries, which rose from $32,383 in 1839 to $48,444 in 1845. In the same period the number of teachers employed increased from 427 to 495. The gain in Providence was almost as significant as that which followed the survey in 1828. The Asso- ciation of Mechanics and Manufacturers, anticipating the additional support for schools to be made available by the General Assembly, requested improvement, thus: "Your memorial- ists are convinced that the present is the time to commence this work of reform. The amount that will be received from the government and devoted to education will considerably alleviate the expense at the outset, and the inhabitants of the city are now so well convinced of the necessity of effort that any appropriation for this object would no doubt meet with their approbation." The association suggested the establishment of a grade of schools between the primary and writing schools "for reading, writing, and arithmetic only, the design of which is to give a thorough instruction in these branches to those children whose parents need their services at as early an age as twelve or thirteen years, and who under the present arrangement are compelled to leave school with a very superficial knowledge of these branches, which are so necessary for obtaining a livelihood in any business." "Intermediate" schools of the kind described in the petition were subsequently established in the city, but the immediate action of the city council was even more liberal than had been prayed for. The city council, on April 8, 1838, adopted an ordinance providing for a high school, six grammar schools and writing schools, and ten primary schools; and, most important from the viewpoint of administration and efficiency, the appointment of a superintendent of schools-the first officer of the kind in America.
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