CHAPTER XI.

SCHOOLS OF OUR FOREFATHERS.

REPRESENTATIVE SCHOOLMASTERS.

EARLY VIEWS OF EDUCATION. FRANK

LIN'S. DR. RUSH'S. CHRISTOPHER SOWER'S.

HE reader must now make the acquaintance of the old schoolHe reade Of schoolmistresses there are few to be introduced. In the early days, in Pennsylvania, women were employed in teaching school to a very limited extent. It was a rare thing to find a female teacher in a German settlement. Such teachers were most numerous among the Friends and among the settlers from New England, but even in communities of these classes of people, they seldom held a more responsible position than that of the head of a small private school, or were intrusted with the instruction of any but the youngest children. The fact that so many women are naturally qualified for the work of teaching is a discovery made at a much later date.

Of the schoolmasters, a certain proportion were selected from the neighborhood of the school to be supplied. In many neighborhoods, teaching school as a distinct employment was unknown, and in many others the services of professed schoolmasters were hard to procure. Few people had then come to see that teaching a child as he ought to be taught is a task of extreme difficulty, requiring, if any work in the world does, the most careful special preparation. The opinion was then common that keeping school was a business so simple that almost any one was equal to it. All the master of a school was expected in most cases to do, was to keep order and to follow the usual routine method of giving instruction in the merest elements of Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic. Under these circumstances, it is not to be wondered at that the heads of families supporting a school should sometimes look around among themselves or their neighbors in search of a young man possessing the physical strength and courage and the limited literary attainments. required of a schoolmaster; nor is it to be wondered at that it happened even more frequently, that some such young man, desiring to

employ to the best advantage a few spare months, or to make a little extra money, should offer of his own accord to take charge of a school. Hundreds of these inexperienced young men were employed as schoolmasters. As a class, they were at first extremely. unskillful and awkward in the performance of their duties, possessing very limited knowledge of the branches of learning they undertook to teach, and having no conception whatever of the great art of teaching school. Their first essays were necessarily a series of blunders, but it is to their credit that after years of experimental work, some among them became fair scholars and good teachers. Young men became schoolmasters then as now for the purpose of obtaining the money to pay for a course of higher instruction, or used the teachers' desk as a stepping-stone to a place in some other profession. Belonging to this class were some preparing with one hand to enter a classical school or a College, and teaching with the other; some half through their College course teaching in a halfhearted way and longing for the day to come when their half-earned pay would enable them to escape from the uncongenial work of the schoolroom, and others, students of theology, of medicine or of law, with time and strength preempted, like parasites living on the school but yielding it nothing in return. This class of schoolmasters was not large in the early days; it is perhaps proportionally as large to-day as it was a hundred or a hundred and fifty years ago, but unfortunately it has been at all times too large. When teaching comes to assume its proper rank among the learned professions, and to be able to maintain its own dignity as a calling requiring the most elaborate special preparation, this one-handed, half-hearted, make-shift way of keeping school will be considered an insufferable degradation; but it is only just to admit that on the whole, with all their shortcomings, the schools thus kept were about the best our grandfathers knew. Many of this class of masters were fair scholars, some of them, even if disliking the work of the schoolroom, had so much self-respect and so much regard for their reputation that they made an honest effort to succeed, and a few really distinguished themselves as teachers as they afterwards distinguished themselves in the profession of their choice. Among the names of the men of Pennsylvania most honored, there may be found a large number who began their career as schoolmasters. As examples, there may be named Robert Proud, the Historian; James Wilson, Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States; Gen. Jacob

Brown, who for a time was chief commander of the American army in the war of 1812; Joseph R. Chandler, the Journalist; Alexander Wilson, the distinguished Naturalist; Robert C. Grier, Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States; Asher Miner, editor and writer; George Wolf, the free-school Governor; Francis R. Shunk, the third Superintendent of Common Schools and the second Governor of the State under the Constitution of 1838; Thaddeus Stevens, the great lawyer and Congressional leader, and John W. Geary, Major General and Governor.

But the representative schoolmaster of by-gone times belonged to neither of the classes above' designated. He constitutes a class by himself, the itinerant schoolmaster. The itinerant schoolmasters. were mostly foreigners. A few of them came from New England, still fewer from Virginia, a small number were native Germans; but the great majority were Irish, Scotch or Scotch-Irish, with a sprinkling of straggling Englishmen. Most of them were without families and had no fixed residence; keeping school first in one place and then in another, wandering homeless up and down the country, some of them came to be well known throughout whole counties. They were not all, by any means, like the one publicly advertised for in the Maryland Gazette, in 1771: "Ran away-a servant man, who followed the occupation of schoolmaster, much given to drinking and gambling"; but as a class their knowledge was limited to the merest elements, they were odd in dress, eccentric in manners, and oftentimes intemperate. In the schoolroom, they were generally precise, formal, exacting and severe. Those who were good scholars, and there were College and University graduates among them, had either failed in some previous undertaking, met disappointment that had soured them against society and driven them to seek a livelihood in comparative isolation, or belonged to a class of queer characters and purposeless adventurers, "cranks," that find their way in large numbers to every new community and float about rudderless on the surface of its affairs. It must not be thought that none among them could teach a good school: this would be unjust. A few names have come down to us through the generations, revered for the noble, self-sacrificing work done long ago in some plain country schoolhouse, and, doubtless, many others, equally deserving, have been, in the lapse of time, forgotten. An unmarked grave and a blank in history and in the memory of men, is apt to be the fate of the faithful teacher at all times, though he may have done

more to shape the destinies of nations than the rulers in their councils or the leaders of their armies.

If there were few competent teachers of any class in the early schools of Pennsylvania, good reason can be found in the general condition of educational affairs. There was little about the schools to attract young men of ability and energy. The schoolhouses were uninviting-an old shop, an abandoned dwelling, a log cabin, or, at best, a small house built, in the plainest manner, of stone or wood. The furniture was about as rough as it could be made. The schools were generally open only two or three months in the year, the master's salary was often uncertain and always poor, seldom amounting to more than ten or twelve dollars a month, and frequently barely reaching one-half of these sums. It was customary, in most sections of the State, for the master to board around among the patrons of his school, remaining with each a stipulated time; and, in numerous instances, he was compelled to receive, in payment for his services, contributions in wood, wheat, corn, potatoes, pork or butter. In addition to all this, the schoolmaster, except in the best organized church schools, had no assured social position. He was a man unrecognized among the positive forces of society outside of his own narrow sphere, and unwelcomed by men of affairs in business or practical circles. The wonder is that under these circumstances, among the schoolmasters of the past, any one could be found with a single talent or a spark of ambition. The fact that there were at all times some men of ability engaged in the work of teaching, actuated as they must have been by the spirit of missionaries, is a green spot in the educational history of the early days. The names of many of these men will appear in the different chapters of this book, but to compile anything like a full and fair list of them is impracticable. The reader must be content with brief sketches of the characteristics and opinions of a few old schoolmasters considered representative.

Rowland Jones was most likely either Welsh or English. He represents the eccentric and somewhat unbalanced class of foreigners engaged in keeping school in the early part of the eighteenth century. He taught the schools connected with the Episcopal churches at Chester and Radnor, about 1730. The churchwardens at Chester recommended him "as a man who attends church and partakes of communion." In a letter to Rev. Dr. David Humphreys, he gave the following account of his method of teaching:

Sir, you requined an account of my method of instruction in school. I endeavor, for beginners, to get Primers with syllables, viz., from one to 2, 3, 4. 5, 6, 7 or 8. I take them several times over them till they are perfect, by way of repeating according as I find occasion, and then to some place forward according to their capacity and commonly every two or three leaves. I make them repeat perhaps two or three times over, and when they get the Primer pretty well I serve them so in the Psalter, and we have some Psalters with the proverbs at the latter end. I give them that to learn, the which I take to be very agreeable, and still follow repetitions till I find they are masters of such places. Then I move them into such places as I judge they are fit for, either in the New or Old Testament, and as I find they advance I move them not regarding the beginning nor ending of the Bible, but moving them where I think they may have benefit by. So making of them perfect in the vowels, consonants and diphthongs, and when they go on in their reading clean without any noising, singing or stumbling, with deliberate way, then I set them to begin the Bible in order to go throughout. And when I begin writing I follow them in the letters till they come to cut pretty clean letters and then one syllable and so to 2, 3, 4, and to the longest words, and when they join handsomely I give them some sweet pleasing verses, some perhaps on their business, some on behaviour, and some on their duty to parents, etc., of such I seldom want them at command, and when they come to manage double copies readily I give them some delightful sentences or Proverbs or some places in the Psalms or any part of the Bible as they are of forwardness and also to other fancies that may be for their benefit. And when I set them cyphering I keep them to my old fancy of repeating and shall go over every rule till they are in a case to move forward and so on. And I find no way that goes beyond that of repeating both in spelling, reading, writing and cyphering, and several gentlemen, viz., Ministers and others have commended it and some schoolmasters take to it, and though I speak it I have met with no children of the standing or time of mine, could come up with them on all accounts or hardly upon any; I also give them tasks, when able, to learn out of books according to their ability, but one girl exceeded all. She had a great many parts in the Bible by heart and had the whole book of St. John and hardly would miss a word. I put them to spell twice a week and likewise to Catechism, and likewise I catechise every Saturday and often on Thursdays. Sometimes I set them to sing Psalms.

David James Dove came to this country in 1758-9. He taught languages in the Academy at Philadelphia, was the first English master in the Germantown Academy, and at one time had charge of a school of his own in Germantown. He wrote poetry, dabbled in politics, but was best known as a caricaturist. Judge Peters, who had been one of his pupils, characterizes him as "a sarcastical and illtempered doggereliser, and was called Dove ironically-for his temper was that of a hawk, and his pen was the beak of a falcon pouncing on innocent prey." Graydon, in his Memoirs, thus describes his methods of discipline: "His birch was rarely used in the customary method. He generally stuck it into the back part of the