taries of the same with regard to the establishment of contract schools in Arctic visit the headquarters of the various missionary societies and confer with the secreAlaska, with the result that the Woman's Executive Committee of Home Missions of the Presbyterian Church, agreed to establish a school at Point Barrow, the northernmost point of land on the main continent of North America. The American Missionary Association of the Congregationalists agreed to establish a school at Cape Prince of Wales on Bering Straits, and the Episcopal Board of Missions at Point Hope, lying about midway between the other two. These comprised the three principal villages on that part of the coast. School buildings were erected at Cape Prince of Wales and Point Hope, and a room in the Government refuge station was secured for the school at Point Barrow. courtesy of Capt. L. G. Shepard, chief of the Revenue-Cutter Service, and Capt. In the spring of 1890, by permission of the Secretary of the Treasury and the M.A. Healy, commanding the revenue-cutter Bear, I was able to visit the entire Alaska coast of Bering Sea and the Arctic Ocean; also about 100 miles of the coast of Siberia, both south and north of the Arctic Circle. As the captain of the ship had been requested to take a census of the coast villages of that region, I had me to attend in person to the locating of the teachers at Cape Prince of Wales, unusual facilities for reaching the larger portion of the people. My trip also enabled Point Hope, and Point Barrow, the erection of the buildings, and the providing of sufficient food supply in the country. The ancestors of the present population had the necessary supplies. In visiting the various localities I found a great lack of an abundant food supply in the whale and walrus of the sea, and the fur-bearing animals of the land, but the destruction of the whale by the American whalers, and of fur-bearing animals by improved breech-loading firearms, had so diminished the food supply that the present inhabitants were slowly decreasing in number for want similar to the Eskimo of Alaska with an abundant food supply because they had of food. While coasting along the shore of Siberia I found a barbarous people large herds of domestic reindeer. As it was impossible to restock the ocean with whale as a stream could be restocked with fish, the suggestion was very natural to introduce the domestic reindeer of Siberia into Alaska, teach the Alaskan natives but also lift the population a step forward in civilization, change them from hunting the management and breeding of the deer, and thus not only produce a new supply to herding, accumulating property, etc. Upon my return to Washington I made a the adoption of this plan of introducing reindeer into Alaska. report to the Commissioner of Education, which was transmitted to Congress, urging During the year a large, substantial school building was erected at Yakutat and a small school building at the Kake village on Kupreanof Island. In 1891 I made my second annual tour to the Arctic, inspecting schools on the into Alaska, an account of which is given in this report under the head of "IntroThe leading event of the year 1892 was the actual introduction of domestic reindeer duction of domestic reindeer into Alaska." Alaska sido; also purchasing and transporting reindeer from Siberia. nefarious operations. nue cutter Bear. oring to protect the natives of the village where he lived from the landing of whisky On January 10, 1892, Mr. C. H. Edwards, Government teacher at Kake, while endeavcontrary to law by some smugglers, was shot by them and a few days afterwards died. After the farce of a trial, the murderers were turned loose to continue their young men in the raising and breeding of reindeer was established at Port Clarence, On the 29th of June, 1892, an industrial school for the instruction of Alaskan 4th of July the first reindeer for the herd were landed at this station from the revenear Bering Straits. This school was named the Teller Reindeer Station, and on the On May 1, the Hon. James Sheakley, who had been local superintendent of schools in southeastern Alaska for the past three years, resigned, and Mr. William A. Kelly Wales, was shot with a bomb gun in the hands of two or three hoodlum young men, On the 19th of August, 1893, Mr. Harrison R. Thornton, teacher at Cape Prince of who had been debarred the privileges of the school because of misbehavior. The young men were immediately shot by their relatives and neighbors, as the only method the villagers had of showing their abhorrence of the deed. burned to the ground. On account of the smallness of the appropriation for schools, On February 18 the schoolhouse at Killisnoo was discovered to be on fire, and the building could not be rebuilt, and the school for the time being was closed. reindeer station, to take the places of teachers previously secured in Siberia, a fuller In the spring of 1894 I secured seven families of Norway Lapps and sent them to the account of which is found under the head of "Reindeer." During the summer and was appointed in his place. fall of 1895 school buildings were erected at Unalaska and Saxman. SHELDON JACKSON, General Agent Education for Alaska. I have the honor to be, very respectfully, yours, CHAPTER XXXIV. THE SOCIAL UNIT IN THE PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEMS OF THE UNITED STATES.' Early inclusion of school affairs in New England as a part of the local civil affairs of the "town."Birth of the district community system as population dispersed itself in the wilderness.-The form of administration this community system assumed when the boundaries of the “town” again became those of the school district (" township system”).—The form of school administration in the Southern States upon the introduction of public schools after the close of the civil war (county district system).—The members of the school community.--Its area. Its functions. I. THE ORIGIN OF THE SCHOOL DISTRICT. At one time or another an institution has appeared, and in the great majority of cases still exists, in almost all of the States of the Union which is probably the most communistic as well as democratic feature of our political institutions and is certainly the smallest minor civil division of our system. This institution may be called generically the school community in the United States. Its communistic feature is that wealth and occupation are taxed for the support of schools irrespective of the benefit directly derived by the individual owner or laborer and its democratic feature is that the component members of this school community form or originally formed a legislature for school affairs which votes to tax itself and elects persons to manage its affairs during the intervals clapsing between its meetings. It is evident that such a community could come into existence, at least spontaneously, only in an environment marked by the absence of well defined and acknowledged shades of social standing; for a symmetrical and homogeneous organization of public education, a very democractic process, if left to develop freely is sadly impeded in a State whose population has in the course of time been segregated into nobility, gentry, trades-people, yeomen, and wanderers in search of work, as in England in the times of Henry VIII and Elizabeth, or of nobility, professional persons, tradesmen, and peasantry, as in France or Germany before the French Revolution. There is considerable probability in the assumption that the education of the people first became an affair of political self-government in the Puritan or religious commonwealth of the New World. Every "township"3 of 50 householders was required to appoint a teacher who was to be paid by the parents or masters of those who received instruction, or by the inhabitants in general by way of supply as “the major part of those who order the prudentials of the town shall appoint." Here for practical purposes is first connected the word township with school affairs. In 1636 the general court of Massachusetts gave public sanction to the township, an institution which had become spontaneously the political unit of the colony." In New England, as a rule, entire communities settled down and erected at once a township, which was not merely an aggregation of human beings nor a mere municipal organization, but a well-defined and represented political entity. It became a body corporate as well as politic, could possess and dispose of property, could sue and be sued. But it was a close corporation. Not residence but votes gave By Mr. Wellford Addis, specialist in the Bureau. It is noticeable how the exceptions to this remark in past times originally appeared as one passed southward from New England. In Pennsylvania, for instance, the constitution of 1790 contained the following provision: "The legislature shall provide for the establishment of schools in such manner that the poor may be taught gratis." This provision was repeated in the constitution of 1838. Mr. Wickersham refers to the provision as an "objectionable policy of educating the poor as a class." Hist. Ed. in Pennsylvania, p. 276. It will be observed that this old law calls the New England town a township. It was so in England, the word town and township being used interchangeably. Palfrey, Compendious History of New England, Vol. I, p. 172. Lodge, English Colonies in America, p. 411, Palfrey, Vol. I, p. 172. 'Palfrey, Vol. I, p. 274-276. membership, and either by law or the force of public opinion every member, or freeman, as he was called, must be a member of the recognized church, and thus voters in church meetings and voters in town meetings were the same persons, until the religious test gave way to other qualification. It has been maintained that the town meeting was merely the vestry meeting of the parish of the Anglican church adapted to Puritan needs in the American wilderness. But it must be remembered that there was more than one kind of parish in England at the time of the Puritan emigration to America. "For the purpose of civil government the term 'parish' meant a district separate from the ecclesiastical parish, from the highway parish,' and from the civil division called a township," it being especially created in 1601 as a poorlaw parish. The lay business of the New England town was not a part of the ecclesiastical proceedings, but the ecclesiastical business was a part of the proceedings of the town meeting, which was a body politic sending representatives to a general court or legislature, which also considered ecclesiastical concerns. Into this town meeting, as has just been remarked, was also carried the-at that date-church duty of education, which thus became a civil instead of an ecclesiastical function as far as English America is concerned. Education in Europe in the age of the Reformation, says Francis Adams, "was not a civil but an ecclesiastical matter, and its aim was religious, not political."3 The wisdom of endowing the local unit of civil administration with this formerly special function of the ecclesiastical unit is unimpeachable. As early as 1616 the English privy council and in 1633 Parliament had enacted that a school should be established in every parish (ecclesiastical) of Scotland, where practical, at the expense of the parishioners, and in 1646 authoritative supervision of the schools was placed in the hands of the presbyteries. The expenses of the schools were to be borne by the landowners, though one-half of the rates might be obtained by them from their tenants. But after a century or more of irreligious wrangling between the presbyteries, who directed, and the lairds, who paid for the education of the Scotch, the former appealed to the central government at London for pecuniary relief, while the English church, after incubating the matter for a century or more, gave birth to the wild and tumultuous efforts of Bell and Lancaster, parliamentary inquiries as to the misappropriation of "foundations" for elementary education, and finally after 1870 to a rapid series of acts which established a system noted for its peculiar manner of operation and general intricacy. In 1795 a bishop of the Anglican church, from his political place in the House of Lords, naively remarked, in answer to the demand that the law-making power should be educated, that he did not know what the mass of the people in any country had to do with the laws but to obey them; which, according to him, is their raison d'être. In America the spirit of the political government of schools has at length spread over the whole country. But as the environment changed in which the idea was first applied it has frequently been modified to suit changed conditions. In general this modification has been made in one of two forms, one of which is called the "school district system," or more properly the school community system; the other the "township system," or more properly the township school district system. The school district or community system seems to have originated somewhat in this way. As the population of each little nucleus of settlement spread itself out from the center of the original "plantation," it early became convenient in Massachusetts and Connecticut, at least, to allow neighboring families at a distance to form themselves into a school district, and this system so necessary in a growing agricultural community, such as Massachusetts was before the war of 1812, was adopted after years of use as the State system by the act of 1789, and was not repealed until manufacturing had restored those concentrations of population which in the early colonial days had invited township control of school affairs. This originated the school district community, which is the form of public school management operated in the greater number of the States. It is evident, however, that whatever form the exigencies of each particular territorial or economic situation compelled or induced the people to adopt, the success of local self-government in school affairs depends upon the willingness of the constituent individuals of the community to tax themselves for the benefit of their children, 1 Palfrey, Vol. I. pp. 121, 172, 272. 2 Stubbs, Constitutional History of England, Vol. I, pp. 247–248, 5th ed.; also C. J. Elton, barrister at law, in Eney. Brit., 9th ed., article quoting act of 1866, regulating the interpretation of the word "parish" in the statutes. 3 Elementary School Contest [in England], p. 20. This assertion of Mr. Adams is borne out by facts so familiar to students of the education of the people (popular education as it is called) in Europe, that further quotation or reference seems unnecessary, especially as the idea underlies the practical treatment of the theme in Europe during times past. 4Cf. Historical Survey of Education in Scetland, by A. Tolman Smith, Rept. Comr. Ed., 1889-90, pp. 214-235. The public poor schools" of Pennsylvania tried this cheap expedient with no direct results. 6 Martin, Evolution of Massachusetts Public School System, p. 92 and upon their willingness, at whatever cost, to deprive themselves of any immediate pecuniary benefits arising from the sale to others of their children's time or the personal monopolization of it at home; in general, the absence of a narrow or selfish spirit not only in the family but also in community affairs; or, to say the same thing, in other words a spirit of reasonable emulation and compromise. This desire, of course, is dependent on the value attached to education by the parent and in a measure upon the inclinations of the child. As it has been found that some communities are not always willing or able to tax themselves as highly as other and perhaps neighboring communities, a persevering attempt is being made to rectify what is considered to be not a necessity but a defect of the administration of our school systems. The question is largely dependent upon the economic condition of the locality and of the State; in other words, upon the unequal distribution of wealth and upon a general desire to distribute the highest benefits to all, irrespective of the inability of some to pay for them.1 Other than the political and corporate side of the school community there is another which has reference to the territory over which its jurisdiction extends. In Massachusetts the early judicial and administrative relations of the towns were with the central authority called the General Court. For the purpose principally of judicial convenience, the New England colonies were at various times after 1643 divided into counties, the administrative and representative functions of the towns not being interfered with. Like the General Court of Massachusetts, the House of Burgesses (borough representatives) of Virginia was composed of members representing "hundreds and plantations," but in 1634, when the population of Virginia had increased to 5,000 and had spread itself over the land with the view of finding eligible tobacco fields, then shires or counties were created and the burgesses were thereafter returned as representatives of the counties. The community of Virginia was a series of plantations which were indistinguishable from one another inasmuch as tobacco culture gave them the same character by tending irresistibly to promote the constant expansion of the area of each plantation, which thus became in area a small principality containing a squire, his family, and their numerous servants-in short, the Latifundia of the later Roman Empire. In Virginia, therefore, the county is made the unit of administration which was under the jurisdiction of the "commissioners of the county court" with a grand jury to move attention to defects in county administration. In the public lands of the West it is true that the blocks of land that were laid off into counties as they get a sprinkling of population are divided with mathematical regularity into squares of 36 square miles called townships, but it is partienlarly necessary to note that the New England settlers of these squares of lands are careful to distinguish them from real "towns" by calling them Congressional townships because the survey of the original wildnerness was authorized by the act of Congress of 1786. II. LEGAL AND POLITICAL CHARACTER OF THE SCHOOL DISTRICT. Although the law books insist that the school district is a quasi corporation, in almost every State the legislature has specifically made it or its executive body a body corporate and in three States (Ohio, Illinois, and Kentucky) a body politic and corporate. The circumstance that has caused the law writers to use the term "quasi corporation" seems to be the original formation of the district in New England, where the district school probably was looked upon as an educational succursal or outlying post of the original "town" school, tolerated as it were by reason of the distance that attendance at the village or "town" school proper would require to be traveled. Thus when a neighborhood built its own school and formed itself into a body for managing its own school affairs without legislative sanction, as was originally in New England the case, it was called a quasi corporation to accommodate the fact to legal necessities. As beyond doubt the school district is a body corporate, it remains to inquire if it be not as it exists to-day also a body politic. It is admitted at the outset that it is a body established for a special purpose and that it is unrepresented as such in the State legislature. But on the other hand, it embraces all the inhabitants within a series of well-defined areas which together form the area of the State, and though in some cases it excludes nontaxpayers and in others it includes women, nevertheless practically its voters are the voters of the State. The particular fact, however, that goes to show that the school community is a body politic is the power it possesses No sooner had the towns taken the schoolhouses than the same people who, in the district meetings had resolutely opposed any improvements, came forward and demanded new houses in the district." (Martin, Evolution of Massachusetts Public School System, p. 209.) *Cooke, Virginia, p. 202, footnote. *Bruce, Economic History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century. Doyle, English Colonies in America, Vol. I, p. 217. In Oregon it has been decided that a school district is a public corporation. (2 Oreg., 306.) |