[p. 9] first is
James G. Carter, whose work will be later spoken of. In a paper,
1 published in 1824, he described the teachers of the primary summer schools as ‘possessed of very moderate attainments, for they were often very young, constantly changing their employment, and consequently with but little experience.’
He asks ‘if there is any
other service in which young and often ignorant persons are employed, without some previous instruction in their appropriate duties.’
You wonder how such teachers were appointed, and
Carter explains.
He says, ‘No standard of attainments is fixed at which these female teachers must arrive before they assume the business of instruction, so that any one Keeps
school (which is a very different thing from teaching
school), who wishes to do it and can persuade, by herself or her friends, a small district to employ her.’
Professor Francis Bowen2 of
Harvard, writing fifty years ago of the common school system of
New England, said that at this time—the early thirties—‘it had degenerated into routine, it was starved by parsimony.
Any hovel would answer for a schoolhouse, any primer would do for a text-book, any farmer's apprentice was competent to keep school.’
George H. Martin, the present secretary of the Board of Education, and therefore a successor of
Horace Mann, in his book which has become a standard, ‘The Evolution of the
Massachusetts Public School System,’ says,
3 ‘The majority of
Massachusetts citizens were torpid, so far as school interests were concerned, or if aroused at all, awakened only to a spasmodic and momentary excitement over the building of a new chimney to a district schoolhouse, or the adding of a half-dollar a month to the wages of a school-mistress.’
And the fourth is
Brooks himself.
In his address before the American Institute of Instruction, at
Worcester,