CHAPTER XXII.

HENRY BARNARD.

I. Henry Barnard's services to education in Connecticut.

II. Henry Barnard as first United States Commissioner of Education.

III. Establishment of the office of the Commissioner of Education of the United States, and Henry Barnard's relation to it.

I.-HENRY BARNARD'S SERVICES TO EDUCATION IN CONNECTICUT.

REMARKS AT THE CELEBRATION OF HENRY BARNARD'S BIRTHDAY IN HARTFORD, MONDAY, JANUARY 25, 1897.

BY W. T. HARRIS.

It is deemed a piece of good fortune that we are able to recognize and acknowledge the services of a public benefactor while he is yet living in our midst. Most recognition comes too tardy for the purposes of comfort and consolation of the hero himself. We build high the monument and place the portrait statue in our public square, not only to commemorate the patriotic citizen who has benefited us by his life, but also to confess our churlish neglect of his services while he lived. It is therefore doubly a cause of rejoicing with us to-day that we are assembled here to celebrate the birthday of a public benefactor who still lives to receive our tribute of respect and mingle his joy with our own. For it is even a greater pleasure to him than to us to see the cause that he advocated with sacrifices of labor and money under circumstances of apathy and neglect, or even of active opposition and some opprobrium, now become everywhere a triumphant cause throughout the entire nation.

The State which furnished the smallest amount of schooling to its people in 1895 gave an average quite equal to that offered by Connecticut in 1839. It may be doubted whether Connecticut or Massachusetts gave an average of more than two full years of two hundred days each to every inhabitant in 1830. Now Connecticut is giving nearly seven years as the average quota that every child receives before manhood and womanhood. In fact, the average schooling of the nation at large is four and one-half years, or double the amount received in Connecticut and Massachusetts at the beginning of the great revival in public education, sixty years ago, in New England.

It was only last year that the centennial anniversary of the birth of Horace Mann was commemorated throughout the nation. We are all fresh from the reading which we undertook anew for the purpose of understanding that remarkable epoch, and to-day we recall again the same historical data, because Henry Barnard was for us, the people of Connecticut and Rhode Island, the initiator of an educational revival corresponding to that of Horace Mann in Massachusetts. By common consent public opinion has placed Henry Barnard side by side with Horace Mann as his great coadjutor, for he has supplemented the work and universalized it by collecting in one great body the written records, not only of this movement, but of all similar

movements in the history of mankind. He has made accessible the wisest and best things that have come from the experience of the race in the matter of founding and conducting schools.

To see the significance of both phases of this movement it is necessary to consider the original status of these colonies and the necessary steps of their progress into membership within a great nation. All the colonies of New England owe their beginning to migration for religious purposes. Their first institutions were church societies, in which a very radical form of democracy was united with an intensely exclusive form of ecclesiasticism. The earliest proceedings of their governing bodies are forever memorable for the adoption of measures to secure the school instruction of all the inhabitants. But the civil community had not yet separated and become independent of the ecclesiastical. A struggle began soon after the restoration of the Stuarts to the throne of England-as early as 1665-to widen the civil functions and extend civil rights beyond the limits of the church organizations. This movement made great progress after the revolution of 1689 and on through the following century. The school was the chief agency through which the separation of the church and state was accomplished.

In Connecticut at first the town was one with the church society; but in time new branch societies were formed in the same town, and the civil interests began to have a wider scope of application than the ecclesiastical. But the school affairs were administered by the church societies until 1798, when the moneys came in from the sale of the Western reserve lands in Ohio. The State refused to give to the churches a share of this fund, but devoted it all to schools. Then new corporations (named in the law school societies) were formed to receive and distribute the school funds to the several districts and exercise supervisory functions so far as to examine teachers and occasionally inspect their schools, the district committeemen employing the teachers and fixing their terms of service. These school societies were coterminous with the religious societies, which they superseded in the control of schools.

The great fund derived from the sales of its Western land amounted by 1810 to $1,200,000, and by 1825 to one and three-quarter millions, its annual interest being nearly $150,000 for the support of schools. For a century previous there had been a compulsory tax of one-fifth of a cent on each dollar of property set apart for the support of schools, being in 1810, 45,000; 1825, 72,000; 1840, 103,000. Possibly this may have yielded as much as $20,000 by the year 1800, when the total valuation of the State may have been about $10,000,000.

A general State tax is not felt by the school committeeman ever so miserly inclined. He can not relieve his district financially by administering his schools on a basis of rigid economy so far as concerns the expenditure of what he receives from the State as a whole.

But he may limit the school expenditures of his district or his town to the smallest possible outlay beyond these revenues, as this surplus will fall as a special burden on himself and the other people of his district. There must have been a considerable contribution to the school fund on the part of towns and districts before the year 1800, perhaps the bulk of it being in the form of rate bills or tuition fees paid by the parents of the children in actual attendance on the schools. But such contribution must have nearly ceased after the distribution of the annual income from the school fund began. The revenue per child of school age was increased threefold. The results were so stimulating to the schools that Connecticut became famous for its public education, and doubtless it received large accessions of immigants for this cause alone from the neighboring border populations of Rhode Island and Massachusetts.

The fund being a fixed quantity and the increase of school children a progressive one, the annual quota per child constantly grew less, and the schools ceased to improve. The people had become unused to tax themselves for school purposes;

they disliked rate bills and preferred to shorten the school session or employ cheaper teachers, so that the schools might involve no burden of local expense. The prestige of Connecticut schools began to wane, and the fact that the church lost some of its interest in the schools after the direct responsibility was transferred from the ecclesiastical society to the secular corporation called the school society added very much to the decadence of the standard excellence of the instruction.

The trumpets of alarm were first sounded in and about Boston, where the urban growth had made possible a better type of schools, and a large body of highly enlightened men began to feel sensibly the need for higher ideals in the education of the people. It can not be supposed that Connecticut was at so low a status as Massachusetts in its public schools, even as late as 1835, but three or four years of Horace Mann's administration easily left the boasted prestige of this State behind. The epoch from 1820 to 1850 is remarkable in the history of the Northeastern States for the introduction of two great instruments of modern civilization-first, machinery in the manufactures, such as the power loom, spinning machines, and the like; next, the railroad locomotive and the stationary engine for the use of the mill. A new era of productive industry was ushered in. Perhaps the total product of all the industries of the United States in 1800 did not exceed 10 cents per day for each inhabitant. That of Russia at present does not exceed 15 cents per capita. But by 1850 the quota had risen to 25 cents, and in 1890 it was nearly or quite 50 cents as the average for the entire nation, while Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, thoroughly equipped with machinery, the railroad, and the common school, produced nearly $1 per day for each inhabitant.

The common school, by teaching reading, writing, arithmetic, and geography to the child takes him forever out of the fixed and immovable status of soul that belongs to lower civilizations, and by placing each individual into relation with his fellowmen by the agency of the printed page, sets him on the road of continued education, for he enters the spiritual process which goes on in the formation of public opinion. Each individual gives and takes-molding this opinion and being molded by it, but always in a state of continual education, never any longer to be classed with the people in a state of arrested development.

This urban epoch, ushered in by the power loom, the railway car, and the daily newspaper, must have as its concomitants the graded school, the professional teacher, and the expert supervisor of schools, for the village grows into a city and the district school of 1 teacher and 20 pupils of all ages and grades of advancement yields place to the union school, with its clustered group of primary rooms and grammar rooms all arranged in an ascending hierarchy, with small intervals between the classes and each class containing pupils of the same degree of advancement. The old process of recitation, in which the teacher heard the pupil say the words of the book with little or no explanation of the ideas in his own language and with no probing questions on his (the teacher's) part--for there were only five or six minutes available of the teacher's time for the whole recitation-has given place to class recitations of twenty to thirty minutes each, and the contents of the lesson are probed to the bottom, so that each pupil goes to the work of preparation of his new lesson with some new glimpses of the true method of study. He has learned through the well-conducted recitation of some defects of his habits of study, some lack of alertness which allowed critical points to escape him before, but he will not fail again to-day in those particulars. The graded city school, besides this training of the pupil in methods of study, also gives him a will training in the moral habits of regularity, punctuality, silence, and self-restraint, giving him a sense of his responsibility to so act that his deeds may not hinder others, but help them to help themselves.

With the great revival of education led in by Horace Mann, Henry Barnard, and their coadjutors, the school session was lengthened from three or four months to ten or eleven months, and the makeshift teacher, who worked on the farm in the sum

mer and "kept" (not taught) school in the winter, gave place to the professionally trained teacher, who made a business of school-teaching.

The era of normal schools began with that at Lexington in 1839, and was followed by those at Barre and Bridgewater and the New York school at Albany, and next by the honored institution at New Britain, in this State. In 1896 there had come to be 161 public normal schools and 165 private ones, 326 in the aggregate for the United States.

The graded schools improved rapidly in the new epoch, and in 1847 the justly celebrated Quincy School in Boston was opened under John D. Philbrick (well known to our Connecticut State normal school alumni), and each teacher was assigned 40 pupils for exclusive supervision and the conduct of studies. A new epoch began in discipline from this date with the adoption in cities of the Quincy-School plan, and a better school discipline was secured with a minimum of corporal punishment.

The experience of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut with supervision under Horace Mann and Henry Barnard led to the adoption of school superintendents in one State after another, until all the States have secured supervision by experts.

We have seen that the era beginning with the independence of the colonies from Great Britain in the year 1790 is an era of transition from ecclesiastical authority to civil authority, and that during this period the schools suffered from the change of basis. The ecclesiastical leaders were supplanted by secular leaders, but not for some time by leaders equally competent. Moreover, the great school fund which stimulated the school system in the highest degree up to the year 1820 afterwards furnished a continually decreasing amount for each child of school age, and the deficiencies were not met by local taxation. The school system declined in efficiency, and the rising consciousness of the defects of that system produced the reformers of the epoch from 1820 to 1840. The reform movement meant the better provision for schools on the part of the States and especially a provision for the better education of teachers in the theory and practice of their art. Certainly one of the two greatest movements in this reform was the measure inaugurated by our Connecticut hero, Henry Barnard, to provide for an educational literature, giving the history of all educational movements, and, besides this, containing translations or the original English of the great writings of pedagogy since the beginning. This movement is justly called one of the two greatest, because its usefulness can not be limited by State boundaries. The American Journal of Education, with its 31 volumes, is just as useful reading in California, Texas, North Dakota, Canada, Australia, England, and Scotland as it is in Connecticut, and Dr. Barnard has won the thankful recognition of professional teachers in all these places for his great work.

We celebrate here to-day, therefore, the person who in his early manhood consecrated his life to education. Here are his words uttered at the beginning of his career, words which ought to be printed in gold letters in a conspicuous place in the capitol of this flourishing Commonwealth:

So far back as I have any recollection the cause of true education, of the complete education of every human being without regard to the incidents of birth or fortune, seemed most worthy of the consecration of all my powers and, if need be, of any sacrifice of time, money, and labor which I might be called upon to make in its behalf.

This declaration sounds like a prophecy, for our honored citizen has devoted all his time and all of a considerable inherited fortune in making accessible in the form of books what is recorded of the wisdom of the race as relates to the instruction of children.

The nation rejoices with Connecticut to-day in paying this tribute of respect to the great educational counselor of the past fifty years, for Dr. Barnard has been always retained as a counselor on all difficult educational questions by State legislatures,

municipal governments, and the founders of new institutions of learning. The nation assists you to-day in this celebration of the man who has expended his time and fortune to print and circulate an educational course of reading of 24,000 pages and 12,000,000 words. It assists you in bearing testimony to Henry Barnard as the n.issionary of improved educational methods for the schools of the people, the schools which stand before all other philanthropic devices because they alone never demoralize by giving help-they always help the individual to help himself.

II.-HENRY BARNARD AS FIRST U. S. COMMISSIONER OF EDUCATION. BY REV. A. D. MAYO, A. M., LL. D.

In a biographical sketch of Dr. Henry Barnard by the writer (chapter 16 of the Report of the U. S. Commissioner of Education for 1896-97) is found the following estimate of this man, rightly named by one of his German admirers, Dr. Wimmer, "The veritable reformer of popular education," and by another foreign writer, "The world's educational orator:"

The time [1830-1850, the period of the first great revival of the common school] was ripe in our country for the appearance of a great national representative of the literary side of popular education. There was an imperative need of a man of large native capacity, broad culture, and catholic temperament, competent to gather into his capacious mind the entire condition of educational affairs in all civilized lands; a man by birth, education, and social connections commended to the educated class of the whole country, yet of a patriotism so intelligent and intense that he should be found ready to cast in his lot as a day laborer, and, if need be, a martyr, in the supreme cause of the uplifting of the masses of this Republic. He should be one who could set before every class of earnest and active teachers and educational workers the best results of educational thought and activity through Christendom in a form that would strongly commend itself to the foremost minds at home and abroad. Such a man was Henry Barnard, of Connecticut, the great colaborer and complement of Horace Mann.

Henry Barnard was born in Hartford, Conn., in 1811, and died in 1900, in the ninetieth year of his age, in the room in the house where he was born. He entered Yale College when only 15 years old, and graduated in 1830, at the age of 19. In 1835, at 24, he was admitted to the bar as a lawyer. His training in the common schools, a celebrated private academy, and Yale College was supplemented by two years of travel in the United States and Europe as a further preparation for the profession which he regarded the occupation of his life. In these journeys he formed the acquaintance of many of the most distinguished men in America and other countries. In 1837 he returned to Hartford, and at the age of 26 was elected a member of the general assembly of Connecticut.

From the year 1837, to the day of his death in 1900, the most remarkable sixtythree years in American educational history, he was always recognized as among the foremost educators of his own country, and especially conspicuous as for many years the medium by which the history and condition of education in Europe was transmitted to the United States.

During the twenty-five years from his first appearance as an educational reformer in Connecticut in 1837 to the outbreak of the civil war in 1861-62 he was engaged at different times in the State superintendency of common schools in Connecticut and Rhode Island and as chancellor of the University of Wisconsin. In the administration of the affairs of every local position he kept in view the larger interests of national education. All his reports, even the first concerning the public schools of Connecticut, praised by Chancellor Kent of New York as a classic in popular education, were uniformly in view of a national audience.