Settling along the coast in little groups or congregations, they at once set up a combined civil and religious form of government, modeled in a way after Calvin's City-State at Geneva, and which became known as a New England town. [4] In time the southern portion of the coast of New England was dotted with little self-governing settlements of those who had come to America to obtain for themselves that religious freedom which had been denied them at home. These settlements were loosely bound together in a colony federation, in which each town was represented in a General Court, or legislature. The extent of these settlements by 1660 is shown on the map on the opposite page.

BEGINNINGS OF SCHOOLS IN NEW ENGLAND. Having come to America to secure religious freedom, it was but natural that the perpetuation of their particular faith by means of education should have been one of the first matters to engage their attention, after the building of their homes and the setting up of the civil government (R. 185). Being deeply imbued with Calvinistic ideas as to government and religion, they desired to found here a religious commonwealth, somewhat after the model of Geneva (p. 298), or Scotland (p. 335), or the Dutch provinces (p. 334), the corner- stones of which should be religion and education.



At first, English precedents were followed. Home instruction, which was quite common in England among the Puritans, was naturally much employed to teach the children to read the Bible and to train them to participate in both the family and the congregational worship. After 1647, town elementary schools under a master, and later the English "dame schools" (chapter XVIII), were established to provide this rudimentary instruction. The English apprentice system was also established (R. 201), and the masters of apprentices gave similar instruction to boys entrusted to their care. The town religious governments, under which all the little congregations organized themselves, much as the little religious parishes had been organized in old England, also began the voluntary establishment of town grammar schools, as a few towns in England had done (R. 143) before the Puritans migrated. The "Latin School" at Boston dates from 1635, and has had a continuous existence since that time. The grammar school at Charlestown dates from 1636, that at Ipswich from the same year, and the school at Salem from 1637. In 1639 Dorchester voted:

that there shall be a rent of 20 lb a year for ever imposed upon Tomsons Island ... toward the mayntenance of a schoole in Dorchester. This rent of 20 lb yearly to bee payd to such a schoole-master as shall vndertake to teach english, latine, and other tongues, and also writing. The said schoole-master to bee chosen from tyme to tyme p'r the freemen.

Newbury, in 1639, voted "foure akers of upland" and "sixe akers of salt marsh" to Anthony Somerby "for his encouragement to keepe schoole for one yeare," and later levied a town rate of L24 for a "schoole to be kepte at the meeting house." Cambridge also early established a Latin grammar school "for the training up of Young Schollars, and fitting them [5] for Academicall Learning" (R. 185).

The support for the town schools thus founded was derived from various sources, such as the levying of tuition fees, the income from town lands or fisheries set aside for the purpose, [6] voluntary contributions from the people of the town, [7] a town tax, or a combination of two or more of these methods. The founding of the "free (grammar) school" at Roxburie, in 1645, is representative (R. 188) of the early methods. There was no uniform plan as yet, in either old or New England.

FOUNDING OF HARVARD COLLEGE. In addition to establishing Latin grammar schools, a college was founded, in 1636, by the General Court (legislature) of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, to perpetuate learning and insure an educated ministry (R. 185) to the churches after "our present ministers shall lie in the dust." This new college, located at Newtowne, was modeled after Emmanuel College at Cambridge, an English Puritan college in which many of the early New England colonists had studied, [8] and in loving memory of which they rechristened Newtowne as Cambridge. In 1639 the college was christened Harvard College, after a graduate of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, by the name of John Harvard, who died in Charlestown, a year after his arrival in the colony, and who left the college his library of two hundred and sixty volumes and half his property, about L850.

The instruction in the new college was a combination of the arts and theological instruction given in a mediaeval university, though at Harvard the President, Master Dunster (R. 185), did all the teaching. For the first fifty years at Harvard this continued to be true, the attendance during that time seldom exceeding twenty. The entrance requirements for the college (R. 186 a) call for the completion of a typical English Latin grammar-school education; the rules and precepts for the government of the college (R. 186 b) reveal the deep religious motive; and the schedule of studies (R. 186 c) and the requirements for degrees (R. 186 d) both show that the instruction was true to the European type. In the charter for the college, granted by the colonial legislature in 1650 (R. 187 a), we find exemptions and conditions which remind one strongly of the older European foundations. A century later Brown College, in Rhode Island, was granted even more extensive exemptions (R. 187 b).

THE FIRST COLONIAL LEGISLATION: THE LAW OF 1642. We thus see manifested early in New England the deep Puritan-Calvinistic zeal for learning as a bulwark of Church and State. We also see the establishment in the wilderness of New England of a typical English educational system—that is, private instruction in reading and religion by the parents in the home and by the masters of apprentices, and later by a town schoolmaster; the Latin grammar school in the larger towns, to prepare boys for the college of the colony; and an English-type college to prepare them for the ministry. As in England, too, all was clearly subordinate to the Church. Still further, as in England also, the system was voluntary, the deep religious interest which had brought the congregations to America being depended upon to insure for all the necessary education and religious training.

It early became evident, though, that these voluntary efforts on the part of the people and the towns would not be sufficient to insure that general education which was required by the Puritan religious theory. Under the hard pioneer conditions, and the suffering which ensued, many parents and masters of apprentices evidently proved neglectful of their educational duties. Accordingly the Church appealed to its servant, the State, as represented in the colonial legislature (General Court) to assist it in compelling parents and masters to observe their religious obligations. The result was the famous Massachusetts Law of 1642 (R. 190), which directed "the chosen men" (Selectmen; Councilmen) of each town to ascertain, from time to time, if the parents and masters were attending to their educational duties; if the children were being trained "in learning and labor and other employments ... profitable to the Commonwealth"; and if children were being taught "to read and understand the principles of religion and the capital laws of the country," and empowered them to impose fines on "those who refuse to render such accounts to them when required." In 1645 the General Court further ordered that all youth between ten and sixteen years of age should also receive instruction "in ye exercise of arms, as small guns, halfe pikes, bowes & arrows, &c."



The Law of 1642 is remarkable in that, for the first time in the English- speaking world, a legislative body representing the State ordered that all children should be taught to read. The law shows clearly not only the influence of the Reformation theory as to personal salvation and the Calvinistic conception of the connection between learning and religion, but also the influence of the English Poor-Law legislation which had developed rapidly during the half-century immediately preceding the coming of the Puritans to America (R. 173). On the foundations of the English Poor Law of 1601 (R. 174) our New England settlers moulded the first American law relating to education, adding to the principles there established (p. 326) a distinct Calvinistic contribution to our new-world life that, the authorities of the civil town should see that all children were taught "to read and understand the principles of religion and the capital laws of the country." This law the Selectmen, or the courts if they failed to do so, were ordered to enforce, and the courts usually looked after their duties in the matter (R. 192).

The Law of 1647. The Law of 1642, while ordering "the chosen men" of each town to see that the education and training of children was not neglected, and providing for fines on parents and masters who failed to render accounts when required, did not, however, establish schools, or direct the employment of schoolmasters. The provision of education, after the English fashion, was still left with the homes. After a trial of five years, the results of which were not satisfactory, the General Court enacted another law by means of which it has been asserted that "the Puritan government of Massachusetts rendered probably its greatest service to the future."

After recounting in a preamble (R. 191) that it had in the past been "one cheife proiect of y't ould deluder, Satan, to keepe men from the knowledge of y'e Scriptures, ... by keeping y'm in an unknowne tongue," so now "by pswading from y'e use of tongues," and "obscuring y'e true sence & meaning of y'e originall" by "false glosses of saint-seeming deceivers," learning was in danger of being "buried in y'e grave of o'r fath'rs in y'e church and comonwealth"; the Court ordered:

1. That every town having fifty householders should at once appoint a teacher of reading and writing, and provide for his wages in such manner as the town might determine; and

2. That every town having one hundred householders must provide a grammar school to fit youths for the university, under a penalty of L5 (afterwards increased to L20) for failure to do so.

This law represents a distinct step in advance over the Law of 1642, and for this there are no English precedents. It was not until the latter part of the nineteenth century that England took such a step. The precedents for the compulsory establishment of schools lie rather in the practices of the different German States (p. 318), the actions of the Dutch synods (R. 176) and provinces (p. 335), the Acts of the Scottish parliament of 1633 and 1646 (p. 334; R. 179), and the general Calvinistic principle that education was an important function of a religious State.

PRINCIPLES ESTABLISHED. The State here, acting again as the servant of the Church, enacted a law and fixed a tradition which prevailed and grew in strength and effectiveness after State and Church had parted company. Not only was a school system ordered established—elementary for all towns and children, and secondary for youths in the larger towns—but, for the first time among English-speaking people, there was an assertion of the right of the State to require communities to establish and maintain schools, under penalty if they refused to do so. It can be safely asserted, in the light of later developments, that the two laws of 1642 and 1647 represent the foundations upon which our American state public-school systems have been built. Mr. Martin, the historian of the Massachusetts public-school system, states the fundamental principles which underlay this legislation, as follows: [9]

1. The universal education of youth is essential to the well-being of the State.

2. The obligation to furnish this education rests primarily upon the parent.

3. The State has a right to enforce this obligation.

4. The State may fix a standard which shall determine the kind of education, and the minimum amount.

5. Public money, raised by general tax, may be used to provide such education as the State requires. The tax may be general, though the school attendance is not.

6. Education higher than the rudiments may be supplied by the State. Opportunity must be provided, at public expense, for youths who wish to be fitted for the university.

"It is important to note here," adds Mr. Martin, "that the idea underlying all this legislation is neither paternalistic nor socialistic. The child is to be educated, not to advance his personal interests, but because the State will suffer if he is not educated. The State does not provide schools to relieve the parent, nor because it can educate better than the parent can, but because it can thereby better enforce the obligation which it imposes." To prevent a return to the former state of religious ignorance it was important that education be provided. To assure this the colonial legislature enacted a law requiring the maintenance and support of schools by the towns. This law became the corner-stone of our American state school systems.

Influence on other New England colonies. Connecticut Colony, in its Law of 1650 establishing a school system, combined the spirit of the Massachusetts Law of 1642, though stated in different words (R. 193), and the Law of 1647, stated word for word. New Haven Colony, in 1655, ordered that children and apprentices should be taught to read, as had been done in Massachusetts, in 1642, but on the union of New Haven and Connecticut Colonies, in 1665, the Connecticut Code became the law for the united colonies. In 1702 a college was founded (Yale) and finally located at New Haven, to offer preparation for the ministry in the Connecticut colony, as had been done earlier in Massachusetts, and Latin grammar schools were founded in the Connecticut towns to prepare for the new college, as also had been done earlier in Massachusetts. The rules and regulations for the grammar school at New Haven (R. 189) reveal the purpose and describe the instruction provided in one of the earliest and best of these.



Plymouth Colony, in 1658 and again in 1663, proposed to the towns that they "sett vp" a schoolmaster "to traine vp children to reading and writing" (R. 194 a). In 1672 the towns were asked to aid Harvard College by gifts (R. 194 b). In 1673-74 the income from the Cape Cod fisheries was set aside for the support of a (grammar) school (R. 194 c). Finally, in 1677, all towns having over fifty families and maintaining a grammar school were ordered aided from the fishery proceeds (R. 194 d).

The Massachusetts laws also applied to Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont, as these were then a part of Massachusetts Colony. After New Hampshire separated, in 1680, the Massachusetts Law of 1647 was virtually readopted in 1719-21. In Maine and Vermont there were so few settlers, until near the beginning of our national life, that the influence of the Massachusetts legislation on these States was negligible until a later period.

Only in Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, of all the New England colonies, did the Massachusetts legislation fail to exert a deep influence. Settled as these two had been by refugees from New England, and organized on a basis of hospitality to all who suffered from religious oppression elsewhere, the religious stimulus to the founding of schools naturally was lacking. As the religious basis for education was as yet the only basis, the first development of schools in Rhode Island awaited the humanitarian and economic influences which did not become operative until early in the nineteenth century.

Outside of the New England colonies, the appeal to the State as the servant of the Church was seldom made during the early colonial period, the churches handling the educational problem in their own way. As a result the beginnings of State oversight and control were left to New England. In the central colonies a series of parochial-school systems came to prevail, while in Episcopalian Virginia and the other colonies to the south the no-business-of-the-State attitude assumed toward education by the mother country was copied.

THE CHURCH SCHOOLS OF NEW YORK. New Netherland, as New York Colony was called before the English occupation, was settled by the Dutch West India Company, and some dozen villages about New York and up the Hudson had been founded by the time it passed to the control of the English, in 1664. In these the Dutch established typical home-land public parochial schools, under the control of the Reformed Dutch Church. The schoolmaster was usually the reader and precentor in the church as well (R. 195), and often acted, as in Holland, as sexton besides. Girls attended on equal terms with boys, but sat apart and recited in separate classes. The instruction consisted of reading and writing Dutch, sometimes a little arithmetic, the Dutch Catechism, the reading of a few religious books, and certain prayers. The rules (1661) for a schoolmaster in New Amsterdam (R. 196), and the contract with a Dutch schoolmaster in Flatbush (R. 195), dating from 1682, reveal the type of schools and school conditions provided. All except the children of the poor paid fees to the schoolmaster. [10] He was licensed by the Dutch church authorities. As the Dutch had not come to America because of persecution, and were in no way out of sympathy with religious conditions in the home-land, the schools they developed here were typical of the Dutch European parochial schools of the time (R. 178). A trivial (Latin) school was also established in New York, in 1652.

After the English occupation the English principle of private and church control of education, with schooling on a tuition or a charitable basis, came to prevail, and this continued up to the beginning of our national period. [11] Of the English colonial schools of New York Draper has written: [12]

All the English schools in the province from 1700 down to the time of the Declaration of Independence were maintained by a great religious society organized under the auspices of the Church of England—and, of course, with the favor of the government—called "The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts." The law governing this Society provided that no teacher should be employed until he had proved "his affection for the present government" and his "conformity to the doctrine and discipline of the Church of England." Schools maintained under such auspices were in no sense free schools. Indeed, humiliating as it is, no student of history can fail to discern the fact that the government of Great Britain, during its supremacy in this territory, did nothing to facilitate the extension or promote the efficiency of free elementary schools among the people.

THE PAROCHIAL SCHOOLS OF PENNSYLVANIA. Pennsylvania was settled by Quakers, Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, German Lutherans, Moravians, Mennonites, and members of the German Reformed Church, all of whom came to America to secure greater religious liberty and had been attracted to this colony by the freedom of religious worship which Penn had provided for there. All these were Protestant sects, all believed in the necessity of learning to read the Bible as a means to personal salvation, and all made efforts looking toward the establishment of schools as a part of their church organization. Unlike New England, though, no sect was in a majority; church control for each denomination was considered as most satisfactory; and no appeal was made to the State to have it assist the churches in the enforcement of their religious purposes. The clergymen were usually the teachers in the parochial schools established, [13] while private pay schools were opened in the villages and towns. These were taught in English, German, or the Moravian tongue (Czech), according to the original language of the different immigrants. The Quakers seem to have taken particular interest in schools (R. 199), a Quaker school in Philadelphia (R. 198) having been established the year the city was founded. Girls were educated as well as boys, and the emphasis was placed on reading, writing, counting, and religion, rather than upon any higher form of training.



The result was the development in this colony of a policy of depending on church and private effort, and the provision of education, aside from certain rudimentary and religious instruction, was left largely for those who could afford to pay for the privilege. Charitable education was extended to but a few, for a short time, while, under the freedom allowed, many communities made but indifferent provisions or suffered their schools to lapse. Under the primitive conditions of the time the interest even in religious education often declined almost to the vanishing point. So lax in the matter of providing schooling had many communities become that the second Provincial Assembly, sitting in Philadelphia, in 1683, passed an ordinance requiring (R. 197) that all persons having children must cause them to be taught to read and write, so that they might be able to read the Scriptures by the time they were twelve years old, and also that all children be taught some useful trade. A fine of L5 was to be assessed for failure to comply with the law. So much in advance of English ideas as to what was fitting and proper was this compulsory law that it was vetoed by William and Mary, when submitted to their majesties for approval. Ten years later it was reenacted by the Governor and Assembly of the colony, but proved so difficult of enforcement that it was soon dropped, and the chance of starting education in Pennsylvania somewhat after the New England model was lost. The colony now settled down to a policy of non state action, and this in time became so firmly established that the do- as-you-please idea persisted in this State up to the establishment of the first free state school system, in 1834.

MIXED CONDITIONS IN NEW JERSEY. In New Jersey, situated as it was near the center of the different colonies, the early development of education there was the product of a number of different influences. The Dutch crossed from New Amsterdam, the English came from Connecticut and later from New York, Scotch and Scotch-Irish Presbyterians came from the mother country, Swedish Lutherans settled along the Delaware, and Quakers and German Lutherans came over from Pennsylvania. The educational practice of the colony or land from which each group of settlers came was reproduced in the colony. After the English succeeded the Dutch in New Amsterdam (1664), English methods and practice in education gradually came into control throughout most of New Jersey, and as a result here, as in New York, but little was accomplished in providing schools for other than a select few until well after the beginning of the nineteenth century. Neither New Jersey, New York, nor Pennsylvania may be said to have developed any colonial educational policy aside from that of allowing private and parochial effort to provide such schools as seemed desirable.

VIRGINIA AND THE SOUTHERN TYPE. Almost all the conditions attending the settlement of Virginia were in contrast to those of the New England colonies. The early settlers were from the same class of English yeomen and country squires, but with the important difference that whereas the New England settlers were Dissenters from the Church of England and had come to America to obtain freedom in religious worship, the settlers in Virginia were adherents of the National Church and had come to America for gain. The marked differences in climate and possible crops led to the large plantation type of settlement, instead of the compact little New England town; the introduction of large numbers of "indentured white servants," and later negro slaves, led to the development of classes in society instead of to the New England type of democracy; and the lack of a strong religious motive for education naturally led to the adoption of the customary English practices instead of to the development of colonial schools. The tutor in the home, education in small private pay schools, or education in the mother country were the prevailing methods adopted among the well-to-do planters, while the poorer classes were left with only such advantages as apprenticeship training or charity schools might provide. Throughout the entire colonial period Virginia remained most like the mother country in spirit and practice, and stands among the colonies as the clearest example of the English attitude toward school support and control. As in the mother country, education was considered to be no business of the State. Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and the Carolinas followed the English attitude, much after the fashion of Virginia.

Practically all the Virginia colonial legislation relating to education refers either to William and Mary College (founded in 1693), or to the education of orphans and the children of the poor. Both these interests, as we have previously seen, were typically English. All the seventeenth- century legislation relating to education is based on the English Poor-Law legislation, [14] previously described (p. 325), and included the compulsory apprenticeship of the children of the poor, training in a trade, the requirement that the public authorities must provide opportunities for this type of education, and the use of both local and colony funds for the purpose (R. 200 a), all, as the Statutes state, "according to the aforesaid laudable custom in the Kingdom of England." It was not until 1705 that Virginia reached the point, reached by Massachusetts in 1642, of requiring that "the master of the [apprenticed] orphan shall be obliged to teach him to read and write." In all the Anglican colonies the apprenticing of the children of the poor (see R. 200 b for some interesting North Carolina records) was a characteristic feature. During the entire colonial period the indifference of the mother country to general education was steadily reflected in Virginia and in the colonies which were essentially Anglican in religion, and followed the English example.

TYPE PLANS REPRESENTED BY 1750. The seventeenth century thus witnessed the transplanting of European ideas as to government, religion, and education to the new American colonies, and by the eighteenth century we find three clearly marked types of educational practice or conception as to educational responsibility established on American soil.

The first was the strong Calvinistic conception of a religious State, supporting a system of common vernacular schools, higher Latin schools, and a college, for both religious and civic ends. This type dominated New England, and is best represented by Massachusetts. From New England this attitude was carried westward by the migrations of New England people, and deeply influenced the educational development of all States to which the New Englander went in any large numbers. This was the educational contribution of Calvinism to America. [15] Out of it our state school systems of to-day, by the separation of Church and State, have been evolved.

The second was the parochial-school conception of the Dutch, Moravians, Mennonites, German Lutherans, German Reformed Church, Quakers, Presbyterians, Baptists, and Catholics. This type is best represented by Protestant Pennsylvania and Catholic Maryland. It stood for church control of all educational efforts, resented state interference, was dominated only by church purposes, and in time came to be a serious obstacle in the way of rational state school organization and control.

The third type, into which the second type tended to fuse, conceived of public education, aside from collegiate education, as intended chiefly for orphans and the children of the poor, and as a charity which the State was under little or no obligation to assist in supporting. All children of the upper and middle classes in society attended private or church schools, or were taught by tutors in their homes, and for such instruction paid a proper tuition fee. Paupers and orphans, in limited numbers and for a limited time, might be provided with some form of useful education at the expense of either Church or State. This type is best represented by Anglican Virginia, which typified well the laissez-faire policy which dominated England from the time of the Protestant Reformation until the latter half of the nineteenth century.

These three types of attitude toward the provision of education became fixed American types, and each deeply influenced subsequent American educational development, as we shall point out in a later chapter.

DOMINANCE OF THE RELIGIOUS MOTIVE. The seventeenth century was essentially a period of the transplanting, almost unchanged in form, of the characteristic European institutions, manners, religious attitudes, and forms of government to American shores. Each sect or nationality on arriving set up in the new land the characteristic forms of church and school and social observances known in the old home-land. Dutch, Germans, English, Scotch, Calvinists, Lutherans, Anglicans, Presbyterians— reproduced in the American colonies the main type of schools existing at the time of their migration in the mother land from which they came. They were also dominated by the same deep religious purpose.

The dominance of this religious purpose in all instruction is well illustrated by the great beginning-school book of the time, The New England Primer. A digest of the contents of this, with a few pages reproduced, is given in R. 202. This book, from which all children learned to read, was used by Dissenters and Lutherans alike in the American colonies. This book Ford well characterizes in the following words:

As one glances over what may truly be called "The Little Bible of New England," and reads its stern lessons, the Puritan mood is caught with absolute faithfulness. Here was no easy road to knowledge and salvation; but with prose as bare of beauty as the whitewash of their churches, with poetry as rough and stern as their storm-torn coast, with pictures as crude and unfinished as their own glacial-smoothed boulders, between stiff oak covers which symbolized the contents, the children were tutored, until, from being unregenerate, and as Jonathan Edwards said, "young vipers, and infinitely more hateful than vipers" to God, they attained that happy state when, as expressed by Judge Sewell's child, they were afraid that they "should goe to hell," and were "stirred up dreadfully to seek God." God was made sterner and more cruel than any living judge, that all might be brought to realize how slight a chance even the least erring had of escaping eternal damnation.

One learned to read chiefly that one might be able to read the Catechism and the Bible, and to know the will of the Heavenly Father. There was scarcely any other purpose in the maintenance of elementary schools. In the grammar schools and the colleges students were "instructed to consider well the main end of life and studies." These institutions existed mainly to insure a supply of learned ministers for service in Church and State. Such studies as history, geography, science, music, drawing, secular literature, and organized play were unknown. Children were constantly surrounded, week days and Sundays, by the somber Calvinistic religious atmosphere in New England, [16] and by the careful religious oversight of the pastors and elders in the colonies where the parochial-school system was the ruling plan for education. Schoolmasters were required to "catechise their scholars in the principles of the Christian religion," and it was made "a chief part of the schoolmaster's religious care to commend his scholars and his labors amongst them unto God by prayer morning and evening, taking care that his scholars do reverently attend during the same." Religious matter constituted the only reading matter, outside the instruction in Latin in the grammar schools. The Catechism was taught, and the Bible was read and expounded. Church attendance was required, and grammar-school pupils were obliged to report each week on the Sunday sermon. This insistence on the religious element was more prominent in Calvinistic New England than in the colonies to the south, but everywhere the religious purpose was dominant. The church parochial and charity schools were essentially schools for instilling the church practices and beliefs of the church maintaining them. This state of affairs continued until well toward the beginning of the nineteenth century.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

1. Compare the conservative and radical groups in the English purification movement with the conservative and radical groups, as typified by Erasmus and Luther, at the time of the Reformation.

2. Show how, for each group, the schools established were merely homeland foreign-type religious schools, with nothing distinctively American about them.

3. Show why such copying of home-land types, even to the Latin grammar school, was perfectly natural.

4. The provision of the Law of 1642 requiring instruction in "the capital laws of the country" was new. How do you explain this addition to mother- land practices?

5. Show why the Law of 1642 was Calvinistic rather than Anglican in its origin.

6. Explain the meaning of the preamble to the Law of 1647.

7. Show how the Law of 1647 must go back for precedents to German, Dutch, and Scotch sources.

8. Apply the six principles stated by Mr. Martin, as embodied in the legislation of 1647, to modern state school practice, and show how we have adopted each in our laws.

9. Show also that the Law of 1647, as well as modern state school laws, is neither paternalistic nor socialistic in essential purpose.

10. Show that, though the mixture of religious sects in Pennsylvania made colonial legislation difficult, still it would have been possible to have enforced the Massachusetts Law of 1642, or the Pennsylvania laws of 1683 or 1693, in the colony. How do you explain the opposition and failure to do so?

11. Show how the charity schools for the poor, and church missionary- society schools, were the natural outcome of the English attitude toward elementary education.

12. Which of the three type plans in the American colonies by 1750 most influenced educational development in your State?

13. State the important contribution of Calvinism to our new-world life.

14. Explain the indifference of the Anglican Church to general education during the whole of our colonial period.

15. Explain what is meant by "The Puritan Church applied to its servant, the State," etc.

SELECTED READINGS

In the accompanying Book of Readings the following selections are reproduced:

183. Nichols: The Puritan Attitude. 184. Gov. Bradford: The Puritans leave England. 185. First Fruits: The Founding of Harvard College. 186. First Fruits: The First Rules for Harvard College. (a) Entrance Requirements. (b) Rules and Precepts. (c) Time and Order of Studies. (d) Requirements for Degrees. 187. College Charters: Extracts from, showing Privileges. (a) Harvard College, 1650. (b) Brown College, 1764. 188. Dillaway: Founding of the Free School at Roxburie. 189. Baird: Rules and Regulations for Hopkins Grammar School. 190. Statutes: The Massachusetts Law of 1642. 191. Statutes: The Massachusetts Law of 1647. 192. Court Records: Presentment of Topsfield for Violating the Law of 1642. 193. Statutes: The Connecticut Law of 1650. 194. Statutes: Plymouth Colony Legislation. 195. Flatbush: Contract with a Dutch Schoolmaster. 196. New Amsterdam: Rules for a Schoolmaster in. 197. Statutes: The Pennsylvania. Law of 1683. 198. Minutes of Council: The First School in Philadelphia. 199. Murray: Early Quaker Injunctions regarding Schools. 200. Statutes: Apprenticeship Laws in the Southern Colonies. (a) Virginia Statutes. (b) North Carolina Court Records. 201. Stiles: A New England Indenture of Apprenticeship. 202. The New England Primer: Description and Digest.

QUESTIONS ON THE READINGS

1. What does the selection on The Puritan Attitude (183) reveal as to the extent and depth of the Reformation in England?

2. Characterize the feelings and emotions and desires of the Puritans, as expressed in the extract (184) from Governor Bradford's narrative.

3. Characterize the spirit behind the founding of Harvard College, as expressed in the extract from New England's First Fruits (185).

4. What was the nature and purpose of the Harvard College instruction as shown by the selection 186 a-d?

5. Point out the similarity between the exemptions granted to Harvard College by the Legislature of the colony (187 a) and those granted to mediaeval universities (103-105). Compare the privileges granted Brown (187 b) and those contained in 104.

6. Compare the founding of the Free School at Roxbury (188) with the founding of an English Grammar School (141-43).

7. What does the distribution of scholars at Roxbury (188) show as to the character of the school?

8. State the essentials of the Massachusetts Law of 1642 (190).

9. Compare the Massachusetts Law of 1642 and the English Poor-Law of 1601 (190 with 174) as to fundamental principles involved in each.

10. What does the court citation of Topsfield (192) show?

11. What new principle is added (191) by the Law of 1647, and what does this new law indicate as to needs in the colony for classical learning?

12. Show how the Connecticut Law of 1650 (193) was based on the Massachusetts Law (190) of 1642.

13. What does the Plymouth Colony appeal for Harvard College (194 b) indicate as to community of ideas in early New England?

14. What type of school was it intended to endow from the Cape Cod fisheries (194 c)?

15. What is the difference between the Plymouth requirement as to grammar schools (194 d) and the Massachusetts requirement (191)?

16. Compare the rules for the New Haven Grammar School (189) with those for Colet's London School (138 a-c).

17. Characterize the early Dutch schools as shown by the rules for the schoolmaster (196) and the Flatbush contract (195).

18. Just what type of education did the Quakers mean to provide for, as shown in the extract from their Rules of Discipline (199)?

19. What kind of a school was the first one established in Philadelphia (198)?

20. Compare the proposed Pennsylvania Law of 1683 (197) and the Massachusetts Law of 1642 (190).

21. What conception of education is revealed by the Virginia apprenticeship laws (200 a, 1-3) and the North Carolina court records (200 b, 1-3)?

22. Characterize the New England Indenture of Apprenticeship given in 201.

SUPPLEMENTARY REFERENCES

Boone, R. G. Education in the United States. Brown, S. W. The Secularization of American Education. Cheyney, Edw. P. European Background of American Education. Dexter, E.G. A History of Education in the United States. * Eggleston, Edw. The Transit of Civilization. Fisk, C. R. "The English Parish and Education at the Beginning of American Civilization"; in School Review, vol. 23, pp. 433-49. (September, 1915.) * Ford, P. L. The New England Primer. * Heatwole, C. J. A History of Education in Virginia. Jackson, G. L. The Development of School Support in Colonial Massachusetts. * Kilpatrick, Wm. H. The Dutch Schools of New Netherlands and Colonial New York. * Knight, E. W. Public School Education in North Carolina. * Martin, Geo. H. Evolution of the Massachusetts Public School System. Seybolt, R. F. Apprenticeship and Apprentice Education in Colonial New York and New England. * Small, W. H. "The New England Grammar School"; in School Review, vol. 10, pp. 513-31. (September, 1902.) Small, W. H. Early New England Schools.



CHAPTER XVI

THE RISE OF SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY

NEW ATTITUDES AFTER THE ELEVENTH CENTURY. From the beginning of the twelfth century onward, as we have already noted, there had been a slow but gradual change in the character of human thinking, and a slow but certain disintegration of the Mediaeval System, with its repressive attitude toward all independent thinking. Many different influences and movements had contributed to this change—the Moslem learning and civilization in Spain, the recovery of the old legal and medical knowledge, the revival of city life, the beginnings anew of commerce and industry, the evolution of the universities, the rise of a small scholarly class, the new consciousness of nationality, the evolution of the modern languages, the beginnings of a small but important vernacular literature, and the beginnings of travel and exploration following the Crusades—all of which had tended to transform the mediaeval man and change his ways of thinking. New objects of interest slowly came to the front, and new standards of judgment gradually were applied. In consequence the mediaeval man, with his feeling of personal insignificance and lack of self- confidence, came to be replaced by a small but increasing number of men who were conscious of their powers, possessed a new self-confidence, and realized new possibilities of intellectual accomplishment.

The Revival of Learning, first in Italy and then elsewhere in western Europe, was the natural consequence of this awakening of the modern spirit, and in the careful work done by the humanistic scholars of the Italian Renaissance in collecting, comparing, questioning, inferring, criticizing, and editing the texts, and in reconstructing the ancient life and history, we see the beginnings of the modern scientific spirit. It was this same critical, questioning spirit which, when applied later to geographical knowledge, led to the discovery of America and the circumnavigation of the globe; which, when applied to matters of Christian faith, brought on the Protestant Revolts; which, when applied to the problems of the universe, revealed the many wonderful fields of modern science; and which, when applied to government, led to a questioning of the divine right of kings and the rise of constitutional government. The awakening of scientific inquiry and the scientific spirit, and the attempt of a few thinkers to apply the new method to education, to which we now turn, may be regarded as only another phase of the awakening of the modern inquisitive spirit which found expression earlier in the rise of the universities, the recovery and reconstruction of the ancient learning, the awakening of geographical discovery and exploration, and the questioning of the doctrines and practices of the Mediaeval Church.

INSUFFICIENCY OF ANCIENT SCIENCE. From the point of view of scientific inquiry, all ancient learning possessed certain marked fundamental defects. The Greeks had—their time and age in world-civilization considered—made many notable scientific observations and speculations, and had prepared the way for future advances. Thales (636?-546? B.C.), Xenophanes (628?-520? B.C.), Anaximenes (557-504 B.C.), Pythagoras (570- 500 B.C.), Heraclitus (c. 500 B.C.), Empedocles (460?-361? B.C.), and Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) had all made interesting speculations as to the nature of matter, [1] Aristotle finally settling the question by naming the world-elements as earth, water, air, fire, and ether. Hippocrates (460-367? B.C.), as we have seen (p. 197), had observed the sick and had recorded and organized his observations in such a manner [2] as to form the foundations upon which the science of medicine could be established. The Greek physician, Galen (130-200 A.D.) added to these observations, and their combined work formed the basis upon which modern medical science has slowly been built up.

On the other hand, some of what each wrote was mere speculation and error, [3] and modern physicians were compelled to begin all over and along new lines before any real progress in medicine could be made. Aristotle had done a notable work in organizing and codifying Greek scientific knowledge, as the list of his many scientific treatises in use in Europe by 1300 (R. 87) will show, but his writings were the result of a mixture of keen observation and brilliant speculation, contained many inaccuracies, and in time, due to the reverence accorded him as an authority by the mediaeval scholars and the church authorities, proved serious obstacles to real scientific progress.

At Alexandria the most notable Greek scientific work had been done. Euclid (323-283 B.C.) in geometry; Aristarchus (third century B.C.), who explained the motion of the earth; Eratosthenes (270-196 B.C.), who measured the size of the earth; Archimedes (270?-212 B.C.), a pupil of Euclid's, who applied science in many ways and laid the foundations of dynamics; Hipparchus (160-125 B.C.), the father of astronomy, who studied the heavens and catalogued the stars, were among the more famous Greeks who studied and taught there in the days when Alexandria had succeeded Athens as the intellectual capital of the Greek world. Some remarkable advances also were made in the study of human anatomy and medicine by two Greeks, Herophilus (335-280 B.C.) and Erasistratus (d. 280 B.C.), who apparently did much dissecting.

But even at Alexandria the promise of Greek science was unfulfilled. Despite many notable speculations and scientific advances, the hopeful beginnings did not come to any large fruitage, and the great contribution made by the Greeks to world civilization was less along scientific lines than along the lines of literature and philosophy. Their great strength lay in the direction of philosophic speculation, and this tendency to speculate, rather than to observe and test and measure and record, was the fundamental weakness of all Greek science. The Greeks never advanced in scientific work to the invention and perfection of instruments for the standardization of their observations. As a result they passed on to the mediaeval world an extensive "book science" and not a little keen observation, of which the works of Aristotle and the Alexandrian mathematicians and astronomers form the most conspicuous examples, but little scientific knowledge of which the modern world has been able to make much use. The "book science" of the Greeks, and especially that of Aristotle, was highly prized for centuries, but in time, due to the many inaccuracies, had to be discarded and done anew by modern scholars.

The Romans, as we have seen (chapter III), were essentially a practical people, good at getting the work of the world done, but not much given to theoretical discussion or scientific speculation. They were organizers, governors, engineers, executives, and literary workers rather than scientists. They executed many important undertakings of a practical character, such as the building of roads, bridges, aqueducts, and public buildings; organized government and commerce on a large scale; and have left us a literature and a legal system of importance, but they contributed little to the realm of pure science. The three great names in science in all their history are Strabo the geographer (63 B.C.-24 A.D.); Pliny the Elder (23-79 A.D.), who did notable work as an observer in natural history; and Galen (a Roman-Greek), in medicine. They, like the Greeks, were pervaded by the same fear that their science might prove useful, whereas they cultivated it largely as a mental exercise (R. 203).

THE CHRISTIAN REACTION AGAINST INQUIRY. The Christian attitude toward inquiry was from the first inhospitable, and in time became exceedingly intolerant. The tendency of the Western Church, it will be remembered (p. 94), was from the first to reject all Hellenic learning, and to depend upon emotional faith and the enforcement of a moral life. By the close of the third century the hostility to pagan schools and Hellenic learning had become so pronounced that the Apostolic Constitutions (R. 41) ordered Christians to abstain from all heathen books, which could contain nothing of value and only served "to subvert the faith of the unstable." In 401 A.D. the Council of Carthage forbade the clergy to read any heathen author, and Greek learning now rapidly died out in the West. For a time it was almost entirely lost. In consequence Greek science, then best represented by Alexandrian learning, and which contained much that was of great importance, was rejected along with other pagan learning. The, very meager scientific knowledge that persisted into the Middle Ages in the great mediaeval textbooks (p. 162), as we have seen in the study of the Seven Liberal Arts (chapter VII), came to be regarded as useful only in explaining passages of Scripture or in illustrating the ways of God toward man. The one and only science worthy of study was Theology, to which all other learning tended (see Figure 44, p. 154).

The history of Christianity throughout all the Dark Ages is a history of the distrust of inquiry and reason, and the emphasis of blind emotional faith. Mysticism, good and evil spirits, and the interpretation of natural phenomena as manifestations of the Divine will from the first received large emphasis. The worship of saints and relics, and the great development of the sensuous and symbolic, changed the earlier religion into a crude polytheism. During the long period of the Middle Ages the miraculous flourished. The most extreme superstition pervaded all ranks of society. Magic and prayers were employed to heal the sick, restore the crippled, foretell the future, and punish the wicked. Sacred pools, the royal touch, wonder-working images, and miracles through prayer stood in the way of the development of medicine (R. 204). Disease was attributed to satanic influence, and a regular schedule of prayers for cures was in use. Sanitation was unknown. Plagues and pestilences were manifestations of Divine wrath, and hysteria and insanity were possession by the devil to be cast out by whipping and torture. One's future was determined by the position of the heavenly bodies at the time of birth. Eclipses, meteors, and comets were fearful portents of Divine displeasure:

Eight things there be a Comet brings, When it on high doth horrid rage; Wind, Famine, Plague, and Death to Kings, War, Earthquakes, Floods, and Direful Change. [4]

The literature on magic was extensive. The most miraculous happenings were recorded and believed. Trial by ordeal, following careful religious formulae, was common before 1200, though prohibited shortly afterward by papal decrees (1215, 1222). The insistence of the Church on "the willful, devilish character of heresy," and the extension of heresy to cover almost any form of honest doubt or independent inquiry, caused an intellectual stagnation along lines of scientific investigation which was not relieved for more than a thousand years. The many notable advances in physics, chemistry, astronomy, and medicine made by Moslem scholars (chapter VIII) were lost on Christian Europe, and had to be worked out again centuries later by the scholars of the western world. Out of the astronomy of the Arabs the Christians got only astrology; out of their chemistry they got only alchemy. Both in time stood seriously in the way of real scientific thinking and discovery.

GROWING TOLERANCE CHANGED BY THE PROTESTANT REVOLTS. After the rise of the universities, the expansion of the minds of men which followed the Crusades and the revival of trade and industry, the awakening which came with the revival of the old learning and the rise of geographical discovery, the church authorities assumed a broader and a more tolerant attitude toward inquiry and reason than had been the case for hundreds of years. It would have been surprising, with the large number of university- trained men entering the service of the Church, had this not been the case. By the middle of the fifteenth century it looked as though the Renaissance spirit might extend into many new directions, and by 1500 the world seemed on the eve of important progress in almost every line of endeavor. As was pointed out earlier (p. 259), the Church was more tolerant than it had been for centuries, and about the year 1500 was the most stimulating time in the history of our civilization since the days of Alexandria and ancient Rome.

In 1517 Luther nailed his theses to the church door in Wittenberg. The Church took alarm and attempted to crush him, and soon the greatest contest since the conflict between paganism and Christianity was on. Within half a century all northern lands had been lost to the ancient Church (see map, p. 296); the first successful challenge of its authority during its long history.

The effect of these religious revolts on the attitude of the Church toward intellectual liberty was natural and marked. The tolerance of inquiry recently extended was withdrawn, and an era of steadily increasing intolerance set in which was not broken for more than a century. In an effort to stop the further spread of the heresy, the Church Council of Trent (1545-63) adopted stringent regulations against heretical teachings (p. 303), while the sword and torch and imprisonment were resorted to to stamp out opposition and win back the revolting lands. A century of merciless warfare ensued, and the hatreds engendered by the long and bitter struggle over religious differences put both Catholic and Protestant Europe in no tolerant frame of mind toward inquiry or new ideas. The Inquisition, a sort of universal mediaeval grand jury for the detection and punishment of heretics, was revived, and the Jesuits, founded in 1534-40, were vigorous in defense of the Church and bitter in their opposition to all forms of independent inquiry and Protestant heresy.

It was into this post-Reformation atmosphere of suspicion and distrust and hatred that the new critical, inquiring, questioning spirit of science, as applied to the forces of the universe, was born. A century earlier the first scientists might have obtained a respectful hearing, and might have been permitted to press their claims; after the Protestant Revolts had torn Christian Europe asunder this could hardly be. As a result the early scientists found themselves in no enviable position. Their theories were bitterly assailed as savoring of heresy; their methods and purposes were alike suspected; and any challenge of an old long-accepted idea was likely to bring a punishment that was swift and sure. From the middle of the sixteenth to the middle of the seventeenth century was not a time when new ideas were at a premium anywhere in western Europe. It was essentially a period of reaction, and periods of reaction are not favorable to intellectual progress. It was into this century of reaction that modern scientific inquiry and reasoning, itself another form of expression of the intellectual attitudes awakened by the work of the humanistic scholars of the Italian Renaissance, made its first claim for a hearing.

THE BEGINNINGS OF MODERN SCIENTIFIC METHOD. One of the great problems which has always deeply interested thinking men in all lands is the nature and constitution of the material universe, and to this problem people in all stages of civilization have worked out for themselves some kind of an answer. It was one of the great speculations of the Greeks, and it was at Alexandria, in the period of its decadence, that the Egyptian geographer Ptolemy (138 A.D.) had offered an explanation which was accepted by Christian Europe and which dominated all thinking on the subject during the Middle Ages. He had concluded that the earth was located at the center of the visible universe, immovable, and that the heavenly bodies moved around the earth, in circular motion, fixed in crystalline spheres. [5] This explanation accorded perfectly with Christian ideas as to creation, as well as with Christian conceptions as to the position and place of man and his relation to the heavens above and to a hell beneath. This theory was obviously simple and satisfactory, and became sanctified with time. As we see it now the wonder is that such an explanation could have been accepted for so long. Only among an uninquisitive people could so imperfect a theory have endured for over fourteen centuries.



In 1543 a Bohemian church canon and physician by the name of Nicholas Copernicus published his De Revolutionibus Orbium Celestium, in which he set forth the explanation of the universe which we now know. He piously dedicated the work to Pope Paul III, and wisely refrained from publishing it until the year of his death. [6] Anything so completely upsetting the Christian conception as to the place and position of man in the universe could hardly be expected to be accepted, particularly at the time of its publication, without long and bitter opposition.

In the dedicatory letter (R. 205), Copernicus explains how, after feeling that the Ptolemaic explanation was wrong, he came to arrive at the conclusions he did. The steps he set forth form an excellent example of a method of thinking now common, but then almost unknown. They were:

1. Dissatisfaction with the old Ptolemaic explanation.

2. A study of all known literature, to see if any better explanation had been offered.

3. Careful thought on the subject, until his thinking took form in a definite theory.

4. Long observation and testing out, to see if the observed facts would support his theory.

5. The theory held to be correct, because it reduced all known facts to a systematic order and harmony.

This is as clear a case of inductive reasoning as was L. Valla's exposure of the forgery of the so-called "Donation of Constantine," an example of deductive reasoning. Both used a new method—the method of modern scholarship. In both cases the results were revolutionary. As Petrarch stands forth in history as the first modern classical scholar, so Copernicus stands forth as the first modern scientific thinker. The beginnings of all modern scientific investigation date from 1543. Of his work a recent writer (E. C. J. Morton) has said:

Copernicus cannot be said to have flooded with light the dark places of nature—in the way that one stupendous mind subsequently did— but still, as we look back through the long vista of the history of science, the dim Titanic figure of the old monk seems to rear itself out of the dull flats around it, pierces with its head the mists that overshadow them, and catches the first gleam of the rising sun,...

Like some iron peak, by the Creator Fired with the red glow of the rushing morn.



THE NEW METHOD OF INQUIRY APPLIED BY OTHERS. At first Copernicus' work attracted but little attention. An Italian Dominican by the name of Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), deeply impressed by the new theory, set forth in Latin and Italian the far-reaching and majestic implications of such a theory of creation, and was burned at the stake at Rome for his pains. A Dane, Tycho Brahe, after twenty-one years of careful observation of the heavens, during which time he collected "a magnificent series of observations, far transcending in accuracy [7] and extent anything that had been accomplished by his predecessors," showed Aristotle to be wrong in many particulars. His observations of the comet of 1577 led him to conclude that the theory of crystalline spheres was impossible, and that the common view of the time as to their nature [8] was absurd. In 1609 a German by the name of Johann Kepler (1571-1630), using the records of observations which Tycho Brahe had accumulated and applying them to the planet Mars, proved the truth of the Copernican theory and framed his famous three laws for planetary motion.



Finally an Italian, Galileo Galilei, a professor at the University of Pisa, developing a telescope that would magnify to eight diameters, discovered Jupiter's satellites and Saturn's rings. The story of his discovery of the satellites of Jupiter is another interesting illustration of the careful scientific reasoning of these early workers (R. 206). Galileo also made a number of discoveries in physics, through the use of new scientific methods, which completely upset the teachings of the Aristotelians, and made the most notable advances in mechanics since the days of Archimedes. For his pronounced advocacy of the Copernican theory he was called to Rome (1615) by the Cardinals of the Inquisition, the Copernican theory was condemned as "absurd in philosophy" and as "expressly contrary to Holy Scripture," and Galileo was compelled to recant (1616) his error. [9] For daring later (1632) to assume that he might, under a new Pope, defend the Copernican theory, even in an indirect manner, he was again called before the inquisitorial body, compelled to recant and abjure his errors (R. 207) to escape the stake, and was then virtually made a prisoner of the Inquisition for the remainder of his life. So strongly had the forces of medievalism reasserted themselves after the Protestant Revolts!



Finally the English scholar Newton (1642-1728), in his Principia (1687), settled permanently all discussions as to the Copernican theory by his wonderful mathematical studies. He demonstrated mathematically the motions of the planets and comets, proved Kepler's laws to be true, explained gravitation and the tides, made clear the nature of light, and reduced dynamics to a science. Of his work a recent writer, Karl Pearson, has said:

The Newtonian laws of motion form the starting point of most modern treatises on dynamics, and it seems to me that physical science, thus started, resembles the mighty genius of an Arabian tale emerging amid metaphysical exhalations from the bottle in which for long centuries it had been corked down.

So far-reaching in its importance was the scientific work of Newton that Pope's couplet seems exceedingly applicable:

Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night; God said, "Let Newton be," and all was light.

THE NEW METHOD APPLIED IN OTHER FIELDS. The new method of study was soon applied to other fields by scholars of the new type, here and there, and always with fruitful results. The Englishman, William Gilbert (1540-1603) published, in 1600, his De Arte Magnetica, and laid the foundations of the modern study of electricity and magnetism. A German-Swiss by the name of Hohenheim, but who Latinized his name to Paracelsus (1493-1541), and who became a professor in the medical faculty at the University of Basle, in 1526 broke with mediaeval traditions by being one of the first university scholars to refuse to lecture in Latin. He ridiculed the medical theories of Hippocrates (p. 197) and Galen (p. 198), and, regarding the human body as a chemical compound, began to treat diseases by the administration of chemicals. A Saxon by the name of Landmann, who also Latinized his name to Agricola (1494-1555), applied chemistry to mining and metallurgy, and a French potter named Bernard Palissy (c. 1500- 88) applied chemistry to pottery and the arts. To Paracelsus, Agricola, and Palissy we are indebted for having laid, in the sixteenth century, the foundations of the study of modern chemistry.



A Belgian by the name of Vesalius (1514-64) was the first modern to dissect the human body, and for so doing was sentenced by the Inquisition to perform a penitential journey to Jerusalem. One of his disciples discovered the valves in the veins and was the teacher of the Englishman, William Harvey, who discovered the circulation of the blood and later (1628) dared to publish the fact to the world. These men established the modern studies of anatomy and physiology. Another early worker was a Swiss by the name of Conrad Gessner (1516-65), who observed and wrote extensively on plants and animals, and who stands as the first naturalist of modern times.

The sixteenth century thus marks the rise of modern scientific inquiry, and the beginnings of the study of modern science. The number of scholars engaged in the study was still painfully small, and the religious prejudice against which they worked was strong and powerful, but in the work of these few men we have not only the beginnings of the study of modern astronomy, physics, chemistry, metallurgy, medicine, anatomy, physiology, and natural history, but also the beginnings of a group of men, destined in time to increase greatly in number, who could see straight, and who sought facts regardless of where they might lead and what preconceived ideas they might upset. How deeply the future of civilization is indebted to such men, men who braved social ostracism and often the wrath of the Church as well, for the, to them, precious privilege of seeing things as they are, we are not likely to over- estimate. In time their work was destined to reach the schools, and to materially modify the character of all education.



HUMAN REASON IN THE INVESTIGATION OF NATURE. To the English statesman and philosopher, Francis Bacon, more than to any one else, are we indebted for the proper formulation and statement of this new scientific method. Though not a scientist himself, he has often been termed "the father of modern science." Seeing clearly the importance of the new knowledge, he broke entirely with the old scholastic deductive logic as expressed in the Organon, of Aristotle, and formulated and expressed the methods of inductive reasoning in his Novum Organum, published in 1620. In this he showed the insufficiency of the method of argumentation; analyzed and formulated the inductive method of reasoning, of which his study as to the nature of heat [10] is a good example; and pointed out that knowledge is a process, and not an end in itself; and indicated the immense and fruitful field of science to which the method might be applied. By showing how to learn from nature herself he turned the Renaissance energy into a new direction, and made a revolutionary break with the disputations and deductive logic of the Aristotelian scholastics which had for so long dominated university instruction.

In formulating the new method he first pointed out the defects of the learning of his time, which he classified under the head of "distempers," three in number, and as follows:

1. Fantastic learning: Alchemy, magic, miracles, old-wives, tales, credulities, superstitions, pseudo-science, and impostures of all sorts inherited from an ignorant past, and now conserved as treasures of knowledge.

2. Contentious learning: The endless disputations of the Scholastics about questions which had lost their significance, deductive in character, not based on any observation, not aimed primarily to arrive at truth, "fruitful of controversy, and barren of effect."

3. Delicate learning: The new learning of the humanistic Renaissance, verbal and not real, stylish and polished but not socially important, and leading to nothing except a mastery of itself.

As an escape from these three types of distempers, which well characterized the three great stages in human progress from the sixth to the fifteenth centuries, Bacon offered the inductive method, by means of which men would be able to distinguish true from false, learn to see straight, create useful knowledge, and fill in the great gaps in the learning of the time by actually working out new knowledge from the unknown. The collecting, organizing, comparing, questioning, and inferring spirit of the humanistic revival he now turned in a new direction by organizing and formulating for the work a new Organum to take the place of the old Organon of Aristotle. In Book 1 he sets forth some of the difficulties (R. 208) with which those who try new experiments or work out new methods of study have to contend from partisans of old ideas.

The Novum Organum showed the means of escape from the errors of two thousand years by means of a new method of thinking and work. Bacon did not invent the new method—it had been used since man first began to reason about phenomena, and was the method by means of which Wycliffe, Luther, Magellan, Copernicus, Brahe, and Gilbert had worked—but he was the first to formulate it clearly and to point out the vast field of new and useful knowledge that might be opened up by applying human reason, along inductive lines, to the investigation of the phenomena of nature. His true service to science lay in the completeness of his analysis of the inductive process, and his declaration that those who wish to arrive at useful discoveries must travel by that road. As Macaulay well says, in his essay on Bacon:

He was not the maker of that road; he was not the discoverer of that road; he was not the person who first surveyed and mapped that road. But he was the person who first called the public attention to an inexhaustible mine of wealth which had been utterly neglected, and which was accessible by that road alone.

To stimulate men to the discovery of useful truth, to turn the energies of mankind—even slowly—from assumption and disputation to patient experimentation, [11.] and to give an impress to human thinking which it has retained for centuries, is, as Macaulay well says, "the rare prerogative of a few imperial spirits." Macaulay's excellent summary of the importance of Bacon's work (R. 209) is well worth reading at this point.

THE NEW METHOD IN THE HANDS OF SUBSEQUENT WORKERS. By the middle of the seventeenth century many important advances had been made in many different lines of scientific work. In the two centuries between 1450 and 1650, the foundations of modern mathematics and mechanics had been laid. At the beginning of the period Arabic notation and the early books of Euclid were about all that were taught; at its end the western world had worked out decimals, symbolic algebra, much of plane and spherical trigonometry, mechanics, logarithms (1614) and conic sections (1637), and was soon to add the calculus (1667-87). Mercator had published the map of the world (1569) which has ever since born his name, and the Gregorian calendar had been introduced (1572). The barometer, thermometer, air-pump, pendulum clock, and the telescope had come into use in the period. Alchemy had passed over into modern chemistry; and the astrologer was finding less and less to do as the astronomer took his place. The English Hippocrates, Thomas Sydenham (1624-89), during this period laid the foundations of modern medical study, and the microscope was applied to the study of organic forms. Modern ideas as to light and optics and gases, and the theory of gravitation, were about to be set forth. All these advances had been made during the century following the epoch-making labors of Copernicus, the first modern scientific man to make an impression on the thinking of mankind.



Accompanying this new scientific work there arose, among a few men in each of the western European countries, an interest in scientific studies such as the world had not witnessed since the days of the Alexandrian Greek. This interest found expression in the organization of scientific societies, wholly outside the universities of the time, for the reporting of methods and results, and for the mingling together in sympathetic companionship of these seekers after new truth. The most important dates connected with the rise of these societies are:

1603. The Lyncean Society at Rome. 1619. Jungius founded the Natural Science Association at Rostock. 1645. The Royal Society of London began to meet; constituted in 1660; chartered in 1662. 1657. The Academia del Cimento at Florence. 1662. The Imperial Academy of Germany. 1666. The Academy of Sciences in France. 1675. The National Observatory at Greenwich established.

After 1650 the advance of science was rapid. The spirit of modern inquiry, which in the sixteenth century had animated but a few minds, by the middle of the seventeenth had extended to all the principal countries of Europe. The striking results obtained during the seventeenth century revealed the vast field waiting to be explored, and filled many independent modern-type scholars with an enthusiasm for research in the new domain of science. By the close of the eighteenth century the main outlines of most of the modern sciences had been established.

LEADING THINKERS OUTSIDE THE UNIVERSITIES. During the seventeenth century, and largely during the eighteenth as well, the extreme conservatism of the universities, their continued control by their theological faculties, and their continued devotion to theological controversy and the teachings of state orthodoxy rather than the advancement of knowledge, served to make of them such inhospitable places for the new scientific method that practically all the leading workers with it were found outside the universities. This was less true of England than other lands, but was in part true of English universities as well. As civil servants, court attaches, pensioners of royalty, or as private citizens of means they found, as independent scholars reporting to the recently formed scientific societies, a freedom for investigation and a tolerance of ideas then scarcely possible anywhere in the university world.



Tycho Brahe and Kepler were pensioners of the Emperor at Prague. Lord Bacon was a lawyer and political leader, and became a peer of England. Descartes, the mathematician and founder of modern philosophy, to whom we are indebted for conic sections; Napier, inventor of logarithms; and Ray and Willoughby, who did the first important work in botany and zoology in England, were all independent scholars. The air-pump was invented by the Burgomaster of Madgeburg. Huygens, the astronomer and inventor of the clock was a pensioner of the King of France. Cassini, who explained the motion of Jupiter's satellites, was Astronomer Royal at Paris. Halley, who demonstrated the motions of the moon and who first predicted the return of a comet, held a similar position at Greenwich. Van Helmont and Boyle, who together laid the foundations of our chemical knowledge, were both men of noble lineage who preferred the study of the new sciences to a life of ease at court. Harvey was a physician and demonstrator of anatomy in London. Sydenham, the English Hippocrates, was a pensioner of Cromwell and a physician in Westminster. The German mathematical scholar, Leibnitz, who jointly with Newton discovered the calculus, scorned a university professorship and remained an attache of a German court. Newton, though for a time a professor at Cambridge, during most of his mature life held the royal office of Warden of the Mint. These are a few notable illustrations of scientific scholars of the first rank who remained outside the universities to obtain advantages and freedom not then to be found within their walls. Much these same conditions continued throughout most of the eighteenth century, during which many remarkable advances in all lines of pure science were made. By the close of this century the universities had been sufficiently modernized that scientific workers began to find in them an atmosphere conducive to scientific teaching and research; during the nineteenth century they became the homes of scientific progress and instruction; to-day they are deeply interested in the promotion of scientific research.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

1. Show that the rise of scientific inquiry was but another manifestation of the same inquiring spirit which had led to the recovery of the ancient literatures and history.

2. What do you understand to be meant by the failure of the Greeks to standardize their observations by instruments?

3. Show that it would be possible largely to determine the character of a civilization, if one knew only the prevailing ideas and conceptions as to scientific and religious matters.

4. Show the two different types of reasoning involved in the deduction of L. Valla (p. 246) and the induction of Copernicus.

5. Of which type was the reasoning of Galileo as to Jupiter's satellites?

6. Show that the three "distempers" described by Bacon characterize the three great stages in human progress from the sixth to the fifteenth centuries.

7. How do you explain the long rejection of the new sciences by the universities?

SELECTED READINGS

In the accompanying Book of Readings the following selections are reproduced:

203. Macaulay: Attitude of the Ancients toward Scientific Inquiry. 204. Franck: The Credulity of Mediaeval People. 205. Copernicus: How he arrived at the theory he set forth. 206. Brewster: Galileo's Discovery of the Satellites of Jupiter. 207. Inquisition: The Abjuration of Galileo. 208. Bacon: On Scientific Progress. 209. Macaulay: The Importance of Bacon's Work.

QUESTIONS ON THE READINGS

1. How do you explain the attitude of the ancients toward scientific inquiry?

2. State the ancient purpose in pursuing scientific studies.

3. Contrast Bacon and Plato as to aims.

4. Show that the thinking of Copernicus as to the motions of the heavenly bodies was an excellent example of deductive thinking.

5. Show that the discovery and reasoning of Galileo was an example of the common method of reasoning of to-day.

6. Were the difficulties that surrounded scientific inquiry and progress, as described by Bacon, easily removed?

7. Explain the readiness with which the clergy have so commonly opposed scientific inquiry for fear that the results might upset preconceived theological ideas.

SUPPLEMENTARY REFERENCES

Ball, W. R. R. History of Mathematics at Cambridge. * Libby, Walter. An Introduction to the History of Science. Ornstein, Martha. Role of the Scientific Societies in the Seventeenth Century. * Routledge, Robert. A Popular History of Science. * Sedgwick, W. T. and Tyler, H. W. A Short History of Science. * White, A. D. History of the Warfare of Science with Theology, 2 vols. Wordsworth Christopher. Scholae Academicae; Studies at the English Universities in the Eighteenth Century.



CHAPTER XVII

THE NEW SCIENTIFIC METHOD AND THE SCHOOLS

THE RISE OF REALISM IN EDUCATION. As will be remembered from our study of the educational results of the Revival of Learning (chapter XI), the new schools established in the reaction against medievalism, to teach pure Latin and Greek, in time became formal and lifeless (p. 283), and their aim came to be almost entirely that of imparting a mastery of the Ciceronian style, both in writing and in speech. This idea, first clearly inaugurated by Sturm at Strassburg (R. 137), had now become fixed, and in its extreme is illustrated by the teachings of the Jesuit Campion at Prague (R. 146). As a reaction against this extreme position of the humanistic scholars there arose, during the sixteenth century, and as a further expression of the new critical spirit awakened by the Revival of Learning, a demand for a type of education which would make truth rather than beauty, and the realities of the life of the time rather than the beauties of a life of Roman days, the aim and purpose of education. This new spirit became known as Realism, was contemporaneous with the rise of scientific inquiry, and was an expression of a similar dissatisfaction with the learning of the time. As applied to education this new spirit may be said to have manifested itself in three different stages, as follows:

1. Humanistic realism. 2. Social realism. 3. Sense realism.

We will explain each of these, briefly, in order.

1. HUMANISTIC REALISM

A NEW AIM IN INSTRUCTION. Humanistic realism represents the beginning of the reaction against form and style and in favor of ideas and content. The humanistic realists were in agreement with the classical humanists that the old classical literatures and the Bible contained all that was important in the education of youth. The ancient literatures, they held, presented "not only the widest product of human intelligence, but practically all that was worthy of man's attention." The two groups differed, however, in that the classical humanists conceived the aim of education to be the mastery of the vocabulary and style of Cicero, and the production of a new race of Roman youths for a revived Latin scholarly world, while the new humanistic realists wanted to use the old literatures as a means to a new end—that of teaching knowledge that would be useful in the world in which they lived. Monroe has so well expressed the humanistic-realist attitude that a passage from his History is worth quoting here. He says:

Not only did ancient philosophy contain the true philosophy of this life, but languages were the key to the real understanding of the Christian religion. Not only did mastery of these languages give power of speech, and hence influence over one's fellows; but, if military science was to be studied, it could in no place be better searched for than in Caesar and in Xenophon; was agriculture to be practiced, no better guide was to be found than Virgil or Columella; was architecture to be mastered, no better way existed than through Vitruvius; was geography to be considered, it must be through Mela or Solinus; was medicine to be understood, no better means than Celsus existed; was natural history to be appreciated, there was no more adequate source of information than Pliny and Seneca. Aristotle furnished the basis of all the sciences, Plato of all philosophy, Cicero of all institutional life, and the Church Fathers and the Scriptures of all religion.

EXPONENTS OF HUMANISTIC REALISM. The Dutch international scholar Erasmus (1467?-1536) (p. 274), the Frenchman Rabelais (1483-1553), and the English poet Milton (1608-74) stand as the clearest representatives of this new humanistic realism.

Erasmus had clearly distinguished between the education of words and the education of things, had pointed out the ease with which real truth is learned and retained, and had urged the study of the content rather than the form of the ancient authors. In his System of Studies he said:

From these very authors (Latin and Greek), whom we read for the sake of improving our language, incidentally, in no small degree is a knowledge of things gathered.

In his Ciceronian he had ridiculed those who mistook the form for the spirit of the ancients.

The French non-conforming monk, cure, physician, and university scholar, Francois Rabelais, in his satirical Life of Gargantua (1535) and The Heroic Deeds of Pantagruel (1533) had set forth, even more clearly, the idea of obtaining from a study of the ancient authors (R. 210) knowledge that would be useful. Writing largely in the character of a clown and a fool, because such was a safer method, he protested against the formal, shallow, and insincere life of his age. He made as vigorous a protest against medievalism and formalism as he dared, for he lived in a time when new ideas were dangerous commodities for one to carry about or to try to express. He ridiculed the old scholastic learning, set forth the idea of using the old classics for realistic as well as humanistic ends, and also advocated physical, moral, social, and religious education in the spirit of the best writers and teachers of the Italian Renaissance. His book was extensively read and had some influence in shaping thinking, though Rabelais's importance in the history of education lies rather in his influence on later educational thinkers than on the life of his time.



Perhaps the clearest example of humanistic realism is found in the writings of the English poet and humanitarian, John Milton. His Tractate on Education (1644) was extensively read, and was influential in shaping educational practice in the non-conformist secondary academies which arose a little later in England. Still later his ideas indirectly somewhat influenced American development.

Milton first gives us an excellent statement of the new religious-civic aim of post-Reformation education (R. 211), and then points out the defects of the existing education, whereby boys "spend seven or eight years merely in scraping together so much miserable Latine and Greek, as might be learnt otherwise easily and delightfully in one year." He then presents his plan for "a compleat and generous Education" for "noble and gentle youths," and tells "how all this may be done between twelve and one and twenty, less time than is now bestowed in pure trifling at Grammar and Sophistry." The course of study he outlines (R. 212) is enormous. The first year, that is beginning at twelve, the boy is to learn Latin grammar, arithmetic, and geometry, and to read simple Latin and Greek. During the next three or four years the pupil is to master Greek, and to study agriculture, geography, natural philosophy, physiology, mathematics, fortification, engineering, architecture, and natural history, all by reading the chief writings of the ancients, in prose and poetry, on these subjects. During the remaining years to twenty-one the pupil, similarly, is to obtain ethical instruction from the Greeks and the Bible; learn Hebrew, Greek, Roman, and Saxon law; learn Italian and Hebrew; and study economics, politics, history, logic, rhetoric, and poetry by reading selected ancient authors. What Rabelais suggested in jest for his giant, Milton adopted as a program for the school. In addition, in thoroughly characteristic modern English fashion, he makes careful provision for daily exercise and play. Aside, though, from its impossibility of accomplishment except by a superior few, Milton's plan is thoroughly representative of the new humanistic-realistic point of view-that is, that education should impart useful information, though the information as Milton conceived it was to be drawn almost entirely from the books of the ancients.



EDUCATIONAL RESULTS OF HUMANISTIC REALISM. The importance of humanistic realism in the history of education lies largely in that it was the first of a series of reactions that led later to sense-realism—that is, to the study of science and the application of scientific method in the schools.

In England it possesses still larger importance. Milton had called his institution an "Academy." [1] After the restoration of the Stuarts (Charles II, 1660), some two thousand non-conforming clergymen were "dispossessed" by the Act of Conformity (1662; R. 166), and soon after this the children of Non-Conformists were excluded from the grammar schools and universities. Many of these clergymen now turned to teaching as a means of earning a livelihood and serving their people, and the ideas of the non-conformist Milton were influential in turning the schools thus established even further toward the study of useful subjects. Many of the new schools offered instruction in the modern languages, logic, rhetoric, ethics, geography, astronomy, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, surveying, navigation, history, oratory, economics, and natural and moral philosophy, as well as the old classical subjects. All teaching, too, was done in English, and the study of English language and literature was emphasized. This made these non-conformist academies in many respects superior to the older Latin grammar schools. After the enactment of the Toleration Act, in 1689, these schools were allowed to incorporate and were gradually absorbed into the existing Latin grammar-school system of England, but unfortunately without producing much change in the character of these older institutions.

The idea of offering instruction in these new studies was in time carried to America, where better results were obtained. At first a few of the subjects, such as the mathematical studies, surveying, navigation, and English, were introduced into the existing Latin grammar or other schools of secondary grade. Especially was this true in the colonies south of New England. After 1751, and especially after about 1780, distinct Academies arose in the United States (chapter XVIII), whose purpose was to offer instruction in all these new subjects of study. From these our modern high schools have been derived.

II. SOCIAL REALISM



MONTAIGNE AND LOCKE. Social realism represents a still further reaction away from the humanistic schools. It was the natural reaction of practical men of the new world against a type of education that tended to perpetuate the pedantry of an earlier age, by devoting its energies to the production of the scholar and professional man to the neglect of the man of affairs. The social realists were small in number, but powerful because of their important social connections and wealth, and they were very determined to have an education suited to their needs, even if they had to create it themselves (R. 213). The French nobleman, scholar, author, and civic officer, M. de Montaigne (1533-92), and the English philosopher, John Locke (1632-1704), were the clearest exponents of this new point of view, though it found expression in the writings of many others. Each declared for a practical, useful type of education for the young boy who was to live the life of a gentleman in the world of affairs.

Neither had any sympathy with the colleges and grammar schools of the time (R. 214), and both rejected the school for the private tutor. This tutor must be selected with great care, and first of all must be a well-bred gentleman—a man, as Montaigne says, "who has rather a well-made than a well-filled head" (R. 215). Locke cautions that "one fit to educate and form the Mind of a young Gentleman is not every where to be found," and of the common type of teacher he asks, "When such an one has empty'd out into his Pupil all the Latin and Logick he has brought from the University, will that Furniture make him a fine Gentleman?" (R. 216).

Both condemn the school training of their time, and both urge that the tutor train the judgment and the understanding rather than the memory. To impart good manners rather than mere information, and to train for life in the world rather than for the life of a scholar, seem to both of fundamental importance in the education of a boy. "The great world," says Montaigne, "is the mirror wherein we are to behold ourselves. In short, I would have this to be the book my young gentleman should study with the most attention." "Latin and Learning," says Locke, "make all the Noise; and the main Stress is laid upon Proficiency in Things a great Part whereof belong not to a Gentleman's Calling; which is to have the Knowledge of a Man of Business, a Carriage suitable to his Rank, and to be eminent and useful to his Country, according to his Station" (R. 216). Both emphasized the importance of travel abroad as an important factor in the education of a gentleman.