Hello. The early republic was the first period of U.S. nation building from the 1780s to the 1810s. >> The types of schools in the colonial period, primary schools, grammar schools, hang-out-a-shingle private venture schools, academies, missionary and charity schools, these continued in the early republic. Our focus is the evolution of the primary school,with an eye to the central role this institution would play in a social movement to create state systems of publicly funded, free, common schools, a topic we will fully explore when we discuss the national period. In the early decades of the republic, the northern states took some actions to stimulate the growth of public schools, although bona fide state schooling systems were much slower to develop. >> Mm. >> In 1789, Massachusetts, for example, updated its Education Act of 1647, this time omitting any reference to the old deluder, Satan. In government matters, religious orthodoxy was now deader than a doornail. The state legislature specified the size of towns that would require primary schools, now called district schools, and those that require grammar schools as well. This was not a true state system of public schools. Until the 1840s, schooling in Massachusetts would be marked by lax enforcement of the school law, and gross inconsistencies and inequities across districts. In the absence of a central authority, educational improvements in one town were unlikely to be known in the next. >> Mm. New York created a state system of public schools in 1812, charging towns in rural districts to maintain primary schools, as well as hire and supervise teachers. This was paid for in part by the interest generated from a state-managed permanent school fund in Albany, the state capital, and supplemented by local resources for schools. New York City used its annual allotment from the Permanent School Fund to support schools established by charitable private groups, notably the Free School Society, which later became the Public School Society. Clearly in this case, the distinction between what was public and what was private was blurred. The federal government had given its own endorsement to public support for schools in the expanding territories of the old Northwest, today's Midwest. Federal Land Ordinances passed in 1785 and 1787 designated the 16th section of each new township for sale or use in maintaining schools. Over the next 50 years, these territories would enter the Union as states whose schools were maintained at least partially from public sources. Yet the development of fully functioning state school systems in the United States would be slow, arduous and haphazard. Any direct federal support for schooling would await the 20th century. Hm. Remember in eight, in 1790, 95% of the American population of nearly 4 million inhabited farm communities or towns of less than 2,500. 95%. This was decidedly a rural nation. Rural communities preferred to tax little for their schools and to build cheaply. >> What were the characteristics of these schools? The district school houses of the early republic were typically one room log or wood frame structures. They were usually ramshackle buildings with dirt floors and drafty interiors. The wind blew right through them. They were sited on plots of land that were deemed unusable by the township for other purposes, often standing adjacent to roads, fallow lands, or swamps. And they were typically not the red buildings of Little Red Schoolhouse lore. Their funding derived from a combination of property taxes, contributions of fuel, tuition fees, and allotments from state education funds. >> Hm. The one room district schoolhouse accommodated boys and girls of all ages simultaneously. Its curriculum was ungraded. The school lacked any formal course of study and was dependent on books the children brought from home. Children read and recited their texts, the, that the parents had selected. These were supplemented by whatever catechetical material the teacher could lay his or her hands on. And children's progress was measured by their completion of these texts and their recitations. Men and women teachers in the district schoolhouses were variably qualified. Some of the men had secondary training in better academies, but many perhaps most teachers, had acquired little more than the primary education that they strove to impart to a diversity of learners, ages four to fifteen, about whose developmental needs they often knew virtually nothing. >> In the decades around the turn of the 19th century, district schools in the north were typically in session four to six months during the year. Teachers confronted overcrowded classrooms, sometimes 60 or 70 pupils in rooms built for 30. The typical district schoolhouse was arrayed with benches, with the older pupils located in the back of the room, the younger children seated in front or in the center close to the wood stove where they often roasted on cold days. Discipline was a perennial problem for men and women teachers alike. Small children struggle to sit still on the hard, wooden benches. The bigger boys in these school tended to be prankish, rambunctious and unruly, if not openly belligerent. Corporal punishment administered in the form of the bitch rod or hickory stick was standard practice. >> Mm. As the 19th century progressed, as benches gave way to desks in America's one-room schools, as school sessions were lengthened, as pedagogical enhancements such as blackboards and globes were introduced, as textbooks and spellers became nationally available, and for all these improvements, corporal punishment and other ways of publicly humiliating children would remain enduring features of one-room schools. Yet for all their flaws, these institutions succeeded in teaching the nation's children, at least its white children, to read, write and calculate. We do well to remember that Abraham Lincoln attended a one-room's log school in Hodgenville, Kentucky. And Lincoln's experience in a backwoods district schoolhouse was not atypical of his generation of national leaders from the North in the mid-19th century. >> What about the South? >> Hm. >> The south's main economic foundation and mainstay of white culture was the institution of black chattel slavery. Which entailed, over the course of 200 years, the enforced transport and enslavement of millions of Africans and their descendants to work the tobacco farms, and rice, sugar and indigo plantations of the South. And after 1815, the cotton plantations of Alabama, Mississippi, and the upcountry of Georgia and South Carolina. The South, unlike the North and West, would make scant progress toward establishing functioning state systems of publicly funded schools before the Civil War. Indeed, only one of the 11 slave-holding states of the future Confederate States of America would have anything resembling a state school system in the Antebellum era. And that was North Carolina in the 1850s and that system was wiped out by the South's defeat in the Civil War. Hm. A glimmer of hope and, and inspiration for the education of free blacks in the North was seen in Philadelphia. Two schools for black children, founded by white elites, antedated the revolution and continued thereafter. Also, in the 1780s and 1790s, Philadelphia's free black population increased dramatically, and African American leaders established their own schools. Richard Allen, for example, noted primarily as the founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, established a day school for 60 black children in 1795. A few years later, Allen's colleague, Absalom Jones, founded a preschool for young children with donations from the Pennsylvania Abolition Society. Yet across the American republic, South and North, African Americans continued to be treated as outcasts, with conditions direst for blacks in the South. >> Before leaving the early republic, we want to introduce you to the University of Pennsylvania's founder, Benjamin Franklin, whose illustrious career spanned much of the 18th century and left an enduring mark on American education. We'll join Ben in the next episode. [MUSIC]
