Common school

“ The common school, so arranged, is perhaps the most important means to solve definitely the problem of morality, the woman question, the marriage question, the labour question, in less one-sided and more human ways. From this point of view the establishment of the common school is much more than a pedagogical question; it is the vital question of our social order.
Men and women, upper and lower classes, are walking on different sides of a wall. They can stretch their hands over it; the important thing to be done is to break the wall down. ”

“ Is it possible that any of the means of a common-school education are necessarily denied to a million and a quarter of industrious people, who already possess an aggregate capital of seven or eight hundred millions of dollars? But the character of a high school must always depend materially upon the previous training of the pupils, and the qualifications required for admission. When the high school is a public school, the studies of the primary and grammar or district schools are arranged with regard to the system as a system. ”

“ The struggle should be perpetual and in the right direction. First, elevate your common schools so that the education there may be a sufficient basis for a course of training here. If the Normal School and the public schools shall each and all do their duty, candidates for admission will be so well qualified in the branches required, that the art of teaching will be the only art taught here. ”

“ They must first have the common school to teach them to read, write, and cipher. The white teachers who flocked South went to establish such a common school system. They had no idea of founding colleges ”

“ The academy and college take young men from the district and high schools, and furnish them with additional aids for the business of life; but the Normal School is truly the helper of the common schools. It receives its pupils from them, fits these pupils for teachers, and sends them back to superintend where a few months before they were scholars. ”

“ Though there is much interest in all these higher institutions of learning, as well as in the normal schools and academies, many of which are prosperous and important, yet the common schools more particularly engage the attention of the people and of the successive legislatures, resulting in a complication of school laws scarcely balanced by the improvement in the school system. ”

“ The common school is a log hut, built by the wayside, and the "schoolmarm" is not a pretentious person. But, what the school cannot supply, a long line of intelligent, independent ancestors have supplied, robust, common sense and sagacity. ”

“ In these vital tasks of acquiring a broader view of human possibilities the common school must have a large part. I urge that teachers and other school officers increase materially the time and attention devoted to instruction bearing directly on the problems of community and national life.—Woodrow Wilson. ”

“ It seems, also, that the examinations are so managed, doubtless partly in deference to public sentiment, that men of higher education are not encouraged to enter. In 1891, 629⁄10 per cent of those who took the examinations on the basis of a common-school education passed, 773⁄10 per cent f those who had been through high school, and only 671⁄10 per cent of the college men. ”

“ Gradually the high school has been accepted as a part of the state common- school system by all the American States, and the funds and taxation originally provided for the common schools have been extended to cover the high school as well. ”

“ PUBLIC EDUCATION.—During the nineteenth century, systems of general education were established in different countries. In a part of the United States, an effective common-school system has always existed. In Germany also, especially in Prussia, there have long been thorough provisions for the instruction of all the young in elementary branches. In France, in consequence of the laws requiring primary schools in all the communes of any considerable size, the average of illiteracy has of late steadily diminished. ”

“ Exactly the same experience results from school and college organization of education work. The student in the common schools does not choose his course; it is prescribed for him by his family and by society. He does not go to school because he is mentally ambitious, but because the standards of universal education require it of him. Especially in the colleges which inherit a great name and attract young men and women for social advantage, the students are characterized by an involuntary subjection to the routine of modern pedagogy. ”

“ If provision were made for the liberal and punctual payment of common school teachers ... the teaching of common schools would soon become a regular and respectable calling, gentlemanly, well-educated persons would not be ashamed to take charge of youth, the schools would be no longer vacant, nor the scholars ignorant. ”

“ Love for the Common Schools.—He believed most fully in the common school, declaring that, "This institution is the greatest discovery ever made by man.... In two grand characteristic attributes, it is supereminent over all others: first in its universality, for it is capacious enough to receive and cherish in its parental bosom every child that comes into the world ”

“ Schools were declared to be essentially civil affairs; their purpose was asserted to be to promote the common welfare and advance the interests of the political State; ministers of education began to be appointed by the State to take over and exercise control; the citizen supplanted the ecclesiastic in the organization of education and the supervision of classroom teaching; the instruction in the school was changed in direction, and in time vastly broadened in scope; and the education of all now came to be conceived of as a birthright of the child of every citizen. ”

“ We should discriminate between the object of common schools and the object of colleges; between an institution intended to inform every one of what every one should know, and one designed to fit persons for particular spheres of life, [9] by a course of instruction which it is impracticable for all to pursue. ”

“ For a Public School has to equip a boy for life; and life is vast, indeterminate, a swiftly moving river that is never the same from one moment to another. The Preparatory School, on the other hand, has only to equip a boy for a Public School, and the Public School is a fixed quantity. As regards curriculum, the task is simple. The required standard of education is known. A certain percentage in the common entrance examination has to be obtained. The school has not to discover the career for which its individual members are best suited. ”

“ More remarkable than the achievements of the common schools has been the development of the colleges, both in the departments of the humanities and of science. If I were writing of education generally, I might have something to say of the measurable disappointment of the results of the common schools as at present conducted, both as to the diffusion of information and as to the discipline of the mind and the inculcation of ethical principles; which simply means that they need improvement. ”

“ In the public school the system rallied around a common center—its course of study. All the agencies employed were to render that course effective. Out of a supplemental lesson system will arise conditions that will crystallize into correlation of departments, methods of promotion, a Normal Department with its commencement day, and, best of all, by the help of the home and the church, an atmosphere of study for the scholar without which a school cannot be. ”

“ The best argument is simply an appeal to facts. All this inane declamation flies at once before it. In what States of our Union are common schools most flourishing? Precisely those, we answer, in which the best support is given to the higher institutions of learning. Who will venture to charge the Pilgrim Fathers with anti-popular tendencies? and yet, in laying the foundation of a system of national education, they began with the college. ”

“ New features of the common schools, such as efficient teachers for the rural districts, 326 county supervision, state normal training, and free higher education in state universities, have gradually rendered the state systems more consistent and complete. ”

“ The Legislature shall encourage the promotion of intellectual, moral, scientific and agricultural improvement, by establishing a uniform system of common schools, and schools of higher grade, embracing normal, preparatory, collegiate, and university departments. ”

“ But the desire for learning is increasing and the system of common schools which has been inaugurated is being developed. There are now about four thousand five hundred schools in the country, with over three hundred thousand pupils. ”

“ The great object, then, of the common schools in our country, is to teach the whole population to read, to write, and to calculate. In fact, so essential is it, that the accomplishment of these objects should be secured, that it is even a question whether common schools should not be confined to them. ”

“ The intermingling in the school of youth of different races, differing religions, and unlike customs creates for all a new and broader environment. Common subject matter accustoms all to a unity of outlook upon a broader horizon than is visible to the members of any group while it is isolated. The assimilative force of the American public school is eloquent testimony to the efficacy of the common and balanced appeal. ”

“ As the teacher cannot impart and teach what he does not possess and know, it is also plain that the teacher must have this superior spirit.
To accomplish the public education of the children of the people, we need the three classes of institutions just mentioned: free Common Schools, free High Schools and free Colleges. ”

“ It is time that we had uncommon schools, that we did not leave off our education when we begin to be men and women. ”

“ The primary school and the university are the alpha and omega of education. Whether institutions intermediate between these (so-called secondary schools) should exist, appears to me to be a question of practical convenience. If such schools are established, the important thing is that they should be true intermediaries between the primary school and the university, keeping on the wide track of general culture, and not sacrificing one branch of knowledge for another. ”

“ Because of the things that have been done, we can make college as universal in the 21st century as high school is today. And, my friends, that will change the face and future of America.
We have opened wide the doors of the world's best system of higher education. Now we must make our public elementary and secondary schools the world's best as well--by raising standards, raising expectations and raising accountability. ”

“ The situation, therefore, calls at once for examination reform, but it calls also for far more: we must harmonize under a sufficiently large ideal the various phases of developmental education. The elementary school, the secondary school, the college, have not yet been viewed and organized as essentially a single educational institution. Pending and in aid of their reorganization on this basis, I urge the colleges to emphasize the vital, not the mechanical, side of preparatory teaching; to establish fixedly no machinery that may impede the creation of a system subtly adapted to the individual. ”

“ There must always be a place for classical schools, scientific schools, professional schools, which, in their respective courses of study, either anticipate or follow, in the career of the student, his four years of college life. With these conditions and limitations stated, the point I seek to establish is that a public high school can do the work usually done in such institutions more faithfully, thoroughly, and economically, than it can be done anywhere else. ”

“ And, first, the high school must be a public school. A public school I understand to be a school established by the public,—supported chiefly or entirely by the public, controlled by the public, and accessible to the public upon terms of equality without special charge for tuition.
Private schools may be established and controlled by an individual, or by an association of individuals, who have no corporate rights under the government, but receive pupils upon terms agreed upon, subject to the ordinary laws of the land. ”

“ For childhood, or from six to twelve, was to be organized the ‘vernacular school,’ which should appear in every hamlet and village. From that time up to eighteen comes the ‘Latin school,’ to be maintained in every city; and, finally, for youth from eighteen to twenty-four, there should be a university in every kingdom or province. Such an organization would have made education universal, and would tend to bring about the custom of education according to ability, rather than social status, which was a suggestion some three centuries in advance of the times. ”

“ It will not necessarily happen that public schools will furnish to every child and youth the desired amount of education. Professional schools, classical schools, and academies of various grades, will be continued; but there is an amount of intellectual and moral training needed by every child which can be best given in the public school. This training in the public schools ought to be carried much further than it usually is. ”

“ The school system and its relations to local authorities, on the one hand, and to the general government, on the other, form a vast and difficult subject involving not merely pedagogical principles, but also such aims as the maintenance of higher learning, the dissemination of useful information, and the practice of indispensable arts. In university lectures a few words on such topics suffice, since young men who accept a school position assume, at the same time, obligations which for a long time to come prescribe for them the path they must follow. ”