Separate school

“ There are no adequate provisions for the pupils who are supposed to be studying, because this one teacher in the one room must be hearing a class recite on some subject at practically every period in the day. The one-room building does not satisfy the progressive community. The device which has been adopted is that of consolidating a number of one-room schools and transporting the pupils through the necessary distances to make possible large schools with separate rooms for pupils of different ages. A consolidated school has facilities which are impossible in a one-room school. ”

“ Judge Parker went on in his own opinion to review decisions of the Supreme Court sustaining the separate-but-equal doctrine, and to distinguish between education at the graduate-school level and education at the elementary-school level. In dealing with the grammar schools, under systems of compulsory attendance, local lawmakers have problems of educational policy that must take into account not only questions of instruction “but also of the wishes of the parent as to the upbringing of the child and his associates in the formative period of childhood and adolescence.” ”

“ In many cases the law creating this system requires that separate schools shall be provided for the races. This plan works admirably. There is no friction in the administration of the schools, and no suspicion as to the ultimate tendency of the system. ”

“ Let the committee go over the lists and assign the scholars to classes according to age and acquirement. In some degree social relations should be considered, so that each class may be as far as practicable a social unit. In the Intermediate Department boys and girls should be in separate classes, and not more than six or eight pupils should be placed in one class. No announcement of the assignment of scholars to classes should be made until the day fixed for the reorganization of the school. ”

“ While there are many day schools that have a fine and strong school spirit, it reaches its height only in those schools and colleges where the students live a common corporate life, away from their homes and other influences which tend to separate them instead of unite them. Such communities foster the closeness and intimacy necessary to that complete solidarity essential for strong school spirit. ”

“ The efforts to establish and extend Separate Schools, although often energetic and made at great sacrifice, are a struggle against the instincts of Canadian society, against the necessities of a sparsely populated country, against the social and political interest of the parents and youth separated from their fellow-citizens. ”

“ These may be set up in any district upon the request of not less than five heads of families. The rates levied on their supporters are devoted exclusively to the separate schools, which also share pro rata in the government grant. Although many Roman Catholic children attend the public schools, the number of separate schools is, under the influence of the priesthood, steadily increasing. Under certain conditions, Protestants and coloured persons may also claim separate schools, but of these only four or five exist. Numerous kindergartens have been established in the cities. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But the moment you rise as high as a college, nature is violated. First, boys go off by themselves to their own destruction; secondly, home influences withdrawn; and, thirdly,—at Harvard, which the only college I ever visited,—the thorough comeliness which is found in the lower grades of schools does not appeal. The separation of boys and girls in school is a subject which has much talked about, but has not yet come to its adequate discussion. ”

“ Each child must be compelled to attend the public school, or a private school which fully meets the requirements of the public school, until he has completed the elementary-school education. Such school attendance should be rigidly enforced throughout the country, which would be possible if the local school authorities, in the enforcement of the law, were made more independent of the will of the parents in their districts. ”

“ In 1805 the opportunities offered in the private, church, and charity schools were seen by certain of the most prominent citizens to be totally inadequate for a city of seventy-five thousand inhabitants, and a Change of name. ‘Free School Society’ was founded to provide for the boys who were not eligible for these schools. ”

“ By sending better teachers into the public schools, you will effectually aid in the removal of this difficulty. The Normal School is, then, no substitute for the high school, academy, or college. Nor do we ask for any sympathy or aid which properly belongs to those institutions. ”

“ That they are not so firmly intrenched in the country schools is due usually to difficulties in the way of securing equipment and to the already crowded condition of the school program. The ideal remedy is the substitution of the consolidated school with its domestic science room and its specially trained teacher for the scattered one-room buildings. Wherever the consolidated school has come, it has been enthusiastically received and supported. ”

“ There is no other public institution in the country so varied in its organization, its strength, its methods and ways as the elementary public-school system. It ranges from a shanty-like to a palace-like building, from a teacher almost illiterate herself to a teacher with an education and training which fit her for a college chair, from a few hundred dollars of yearly appropriation to tens of thousands of dollars for upkeep of a single school, from one teacher to a staff of teachers in one school, from an almost voluntary attendance to a rigid compulsory attendance. ”

“ There can be but little stimulation in a school of only a few children. The pupils feel it and so does the teacher. Life, activity, mental aspiration are always found where large numbers of persons congregate. For these reasons the idea of consolidating the small schools into important centers, or units, is forcing itself upon the people of the country. Where the schools are small and the roads are good, everything favors the bringing of the children to a larger and more stimulating social and educational center. ”

“ No teacher can do justice to twenty-seven classes per day, and an average recitation period of thirteen minutes is so short as to be almost unworthy of mention.
Most consolidated schools, in addition to the ordinary rooms, have an assembly room in which lectures, festivals, socials, public meetings, and farmers’ institutes are held. Acting as a center for community life, the consolidated school takes a real place in the instruction of the community. ”

“ Here, again, the consolidated school, with its attractive building, its improved equipment, its larger body of pupils, and its better teaching, appears as a solution of the difficulty. For it does what the present type of district school can never do—it makes school life interesting and attractive to its pupils, and this brings to bear upon them one of the strongest incentives to continue in school and secure an education. ”

“ Of course, a neighborhood should be selected where there are good public schools, churches, and allied institutions for education and culture. It is always a loss to a child in this democratic country to be educated in a private school, and yet, especially in cities, careful parents are often compelled to resort to private instruction for their girls and boys because of the lack of refining influences in the public schools. ”

“ Since the advantages of the common school are not fully enjoyed, many, whose voices might be heard, do not see the necessity of a higher series of free schools—at least one in a county—which should do for all what the college now does for a part. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is not enough to gather from within a circle of half a dozen miles’ diameter fifty or sixty children for a single school. This brings all ages and all studies into the same room. A good system requires a separation of school children into four, or at least into three, classes, according to ages and attainments. ”

“ Oftentimes, at the first, private societies came forward as volunteers in the task of education, but the states early recognized their duty, and usually established schools as soon as they were deemed practicable, either taking over the existing private school or creating one of their own. After a time, as another stage in their development, the schools were made free by express provision, or have become so to all practical purpose. ”

“ In October, 1742, in order to protect the college and the ministry and to deal a blow at the "Shepherd's Tent," a kind of school or academy which the New Lights had set up in New London for qualifying young men as exhorters, teachers, and ministers, the General Assembly had decided that no persons should presume to set up any college, seminary of learning, or any public school whatever, without special leave of the legislature. ”

“ Modern opinion has so far transcended the modest proposal of Chalmers, that instead of a preparatory school in each university seat, the demand is now for adequate secondary schools scattered over all the land. ”

“ I fully believe that a high school should be to-day just what it was originally planned to be back there in the first half of the nineteenth century—a school higher than the elementary, controlled by the community, in co-operation with the educational leaders of the State, serving the needs of the community, fitting its boys and girls for service in the community and discriminating, if at all, in the favor of the group of boys and girls who are not going to college, since that group is much the larger. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There are then, it must be recollected, three different parties connected with every establishment for education; the parents of the scholars, the teacher, and the pupils themselves. Sometimes, as for example, in a common private school, the parents are not organized, and whatever influence they exert, they must exert in their individual capacity. At other times, as in a common district or town school, they are by law organized, and the school committee chosen for this purpose, are their legal representatives. ”

“ All that one can do is to provide the same textbooks, the same teaching aids, teachers with the same degree of education, and physical facilities generally comparable—but even then, identity of total educational opportunity could not possibly be achieved. ”

“ Action may be expected soon to be taken upon the Report of the Middle Class Schools Commission, which, while it will set some rich foundations free to compete on equal terms from their existing sites with the above-named schools, may be expected to give rise to a different class of schools, the comparative absence of which hitherto, in any satisfactory form, has tended to increase the numbers who have been glad to avail themselves of schools of the Public School type. ”

“ The State compels no one to attend the higher school or the university. The children of the lower classes of the population, whose relatives are not in a position to provide instruction for them in their own homes, are all sent to the public elementary school. ”

“ Valentine’s school has been hampered by lack of funds, and that some of the special things done are suited to one particular local population, the changes which have taken place in the neighborhood in the relation between the school and the parents, and in the spirit of the pupils in their school attitude, show what a public school may mean to its neighborhood when it ceases to be an isolated academic institution. ”

“ If four districts should be united in this way, they might erect a central house, C, for the larger and more advanced scholars, and four smaller ones, p p p p, for the younger children. The central school might be taught by a male teacher, with female assistants, if needed; but the primary schools, with this arrangement, could be more economically and successfully instructed by females. ”

“ The constitution requires the general assembly to maintain a system of free schools, and enforce the attendance of every child between 5 and 18 years of age for a term equivalent to three years, unless educated by other means. A free school must be kept in each school district for not less than three months during the year. The legislature is also required to establish and maintain a state university, with departments for instruction in teaching, agriculture, and natural sciences, as soon as the public school fund will permit. ”

“ Though the junior high school has so great a popularity, its work is eclipsed by the still more revolutionary program of those educators who advocate the complete abolition of any line between the elementary and the high school, and the establishment of a public school of twelve school years. This plan, coupled with promotion by subjects rather than by grades, replaces the machine method of promotion and the gap between elementary and high schools by an easy, natural progression adaptable to the needs of any student, from the end of the kindergarten to the beginning of the university. ”