ents as could attend; he examined the children as to their proficiency and then recommended them to their teacher. A year later Mr. Gioding held a public examination of his pupils. He asked questions regarding the most important Christian doctrines, requiring proof from Holy Scripture, to which questions of Mr. Gioding, to the surprise and gratification of all, they answered promptly and boldly, and so quickly confirmed their answers by a text of Holy Scripture that all the company present could not refrain from glorifying God with tears of joy and gladness for their children's quick memory and attainments and the schoomaster's diligence and circumspection.' It appears that the burden of supporting Swedish schools now increased to such an extent that none were kept between 1722 and the coming of Acrelius in 1749. The children were sent to English schoolmasters, who taught them simply to read, but Acrelius urged upon his congregation the importance of preserving the Swedish language in its purity as it had then (about 1750) "very much fallen out of use," and under his leadership Nils Forsberg, a student from the University of Lund who had recently arrived, was employed as a sort of traveling educational missionary. Moving from house to house, he took up his temporary abode with first one family and then another and in this way instructed their children. In summarizing the whole educational system among the Swedes in Delaware during the colonial period, Powell says: The protracted struggle for separate and distinct Swedish schools was abandoned before the Revolution, and their subsequent history was merged into that of the Lutheran and Episcopal Churches. The reason for this is not far to seek. After the coming of the English in 1682 many of the Swedes began gradually to drop their native speech. Education in the Swedish language declined, and it became customary for Swedish children first to learn English and then the tongue of their fathers. Acrelius said that all children in his day could read English, write, and cipher. More attention was doubtless given to reading than to writing, particularly in the early period, for many made their mark instead of signing their names to documents. House instruction by the pastor was the last flickering light of education among the Swedes.2 With the Dutch the evidence for schools is still more scanty than for the Swedes. The first provision made by the Dutch for education in what is now Delaware seems to have been the offer by the city of Amsterdam in 1656 to settlers on Delaware River to "send thither a proper person for schoolmaster, who shall also read the Holy Scriptures and set the Psalms." The city of Amsterdam was "until further opportunity" to provide his salary. It was also required that at New Amstel (now New Castle) "a house for a school, which can likewise be occupied by a person who will hereafter be sexton, psalm setter, and schoolmaster" should be erected, but we have no record that such schoolhouse was really built or that one existed in the colony of Delaware before 1682. There are, however, records Powell, L. P.: History of Educ. in Delaware, p. 18. 2 Powell, p. 20. of Dutch schoolmasters in the colony, and some of their names have come down to us, including Evert Pietersen, Arent Eversen Molinaer, Abelius Zetscoven, and Andreas Hudde.' III. EDUCATION AMONG THE ENGLISH SETTLERS BEFORE THE REVOLUTION. A modern writer, Right Rev. Frederick J. Kinsman, Bishop of Delaware, has emphasized the differences between the Dutch and the English by saying that, while the Dutch cared comparatively little for education as contrasted with the New Englanders, they cared more for the amenities, comforts, and graces of social life.2 But Dr. Wickersham says: As a social or political force the Swedish and Dutch settlers on the Delaware were scarcely felt after the arrival of Penn. They were soon surrounded by a more positive, more pushing, better educated class of men, and few of them came forward to take advantage of the new and broader field of effort that opened before them. They remained good, loyal citizens, working quietly on their farms or in their shops, and at times serving with apparent reluctance and in small proportion to their numbers, as local officers, on juries, or in the legislative assemblies of the province. In their descendants they gave the State some of its most worthy citizens and illustrious names.3 This judgment is not contrary to the conclusions formed by Powell and other authors who have been quoted already. In the seventeenth century the Dutch learned Swedish and tended to forget their own tongue; in the eighteenth century the Swedes "who became separated from their countrymen or who mingled little with them after the coming of the English, soon lost the use of their native tongue and were absorbed by the swifter currents of social and religious life into which they were thrown." They began to teach their children English even before they learned their mother tongue, and all the evidence goes to show that long before the Revolution the English were the predominant element in the population. What then did the English do for popular education in the preRevolutionary period? Previous to the coming of Penn, indeed from 1640 on, isolated English families, some from New England, others from Maryland and Virginia, had attempted to settle along the Delaware, but while they were generally repulsed by the stronger Swedes and Dutch, they were not expelled; they gradually grew in power and even under the administration of Delaware as a part of New York some provisions had been made looking toward education, as will be seen by an examination of the laws promulgated by the 1 Powell, L. P.: History of Educ. in Delaware, pp. 24-25. Bishop Kinsman's address in Publications Del. Hist. Soc., No. 54, p. 10. Wickersham: History of Educ. in Pennsylvania, p. 79. In certain isolated settlements like "Wicaco, Kingsessing, and Upper Merion, all near Philadelphia, they continued to speak the Swedish language for 150 years after this first settlement." It was this that made possible the continuation of the Swedish mission down to 1831. Duke of York. But with the coming of Penn in 1682 the English came at once into greater prominence than they had ever occupied before in the province, and Penn's Frame of Government, thanks to his enlightened association with the Dutch in Holland, contained a provision that "the Governor and Provincial Council shall erect and order all public schools and encourage and reward the authors of useful sciences and laudable inventions;" it laid the foundations for industrial education also by providing that all children of the age of 12 should be taught "some useful trade or skill, to the end none may be idle, but the poor may work to live, and the rich, if they become poor, may not want." The laws passed by the Assembly of Pennsylvania in 1682 and 1683 indicate the intention to provide immediately for the establishment of public schools and for the introduction of industrial education in accord with the ideas of Penn. Universal education was clearly contemplated, and had this been accomplished for Pennsylvania we may safely assume that Delaware would have received equal benefit. But the good work, educationally speaking, thus inaugurated under the direction of William Penn, did not long continue. A do-nothing policy was soon in the ascendant. Says Wickersham: 2 The provincial authorities of Pennsylvania, as has already been stated, did next to nothing to promote the cause of general education during the long period from the beginning of the eighteenth century to the end of their rule in 1776. Charters were granted to a few educational institutions, some laws were passed securing to religious societies the right to hold property for school purposes, and in special cases enabling them to raise money by lottery to build schoolhouses; but this was all. Penn's broad policy respecting public education was virtually abandoned. Intellectual darkness would have reigned supreme throughout the province had not the various churches and the people themselves been more alive to the importance of the subject than the government. What actually happened to Pennsylvania also happened to Delaware. The government itself did nothing. What was done was the work in the main of private denominational activity. In this work the Quakers and the Episcopalians led. Before 1686 Christopher Taylor, a classical scholar and a Quaker minister, founded a school on Tinicum Island, where Gov. John Printz had established his headquarters and which is now in Pennsylvania. Taylor refers to the island as "Tinicum, alias College Island." It does not appear that the Quakers established any school in Delaware before the one at Wilmington in 1748. This school has had a continuous existence to the present time." The efforts of the Quakers had been anticipated by the representatives of the Church of England, to whom, through the venerable Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, is given 1 See Thorpe, F. N.: Federal and State Constitutions, vol. 5, p. 3062. 2 History of Educ. in Pennsylvania, p. 78. 3 Powell, L. P.: History of Educ. in Delaware, pp. 30-32. the honor of making education universal throughout the State of Delaware, for the efforts of the Quakers were mostly confined to the northern section of the colony. In 1705 Rev. George Ross was sent by the society as a missionary to New Castle, where he remained for many years. The importance of education was ever before his mind. In 1711 the vestry petitioned the society for a schoolmaster. But none seems to have been sent, for in 1729 Ross himself petitioned the authorities in England that "a small salary of £6 per annum may be allowed to a catechist or schoolmaster in this place to encourage his instructing youth in the church catechism." The business of education was at that time in private hands and was conducted by a different class of teachers. In a history of his church Mr. Ross has this to say as to the conditions of education in 1727: There are some private schools within my reputed district which are put very often into the hands of those who are brought into the country and sold for servants. Some schoolmasters are hired by the year, by a knot of families who, in their turns, entertain him monthly, and the poor man lives in their houses like one that begged an alms, more than like a person in credit and authority. When a ship arrives in the river it is a common expression with those who stand in need of an instructor for their children, "Let us go and buy a schoolmaster." The truth is the office and character of such a person is generally very mean and contemptible here, and it can not be otherwise 'til the public takes the education of children into their mature consideration.2 Missionaries were sent from time to time to other sections of the colony, but it does not appear that they at any time engaged in the formal work of education, although devoting much time to instructing the people in the use of the liturgy, in catechising the children, and in similar work that lies on the borderland between simple religious instruction and formal teaching. Says Powell at the end of his review of the work of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel: Brief as is this sketch of the society and its work in Delaware, it includes all that the records have revealed, and suffices to establish the society as the most important agent in the State at large in the last century for the propagation of education as well as the gospel. Moreover, it is equally clear that New Castle and Dover, whither missionaries were first sent, became the Iona and the Lindesfarne of this little Teutonic commonwealth, for they sent forth missionaries to its remotest bounds.3 There were individual private schools taught at various times during the colonial and revolutionary period, some of whose teachers attained to a local celebrity which has handed down their name and fame to the succeeding generations. One of these was John Thelwell, a schoolmaster famous in Wilmington during revolutionary days; another was Mrs. Elizabeth Way, a celebrated teacher of needlework in 1790, under whose instruction the art of shirt making was strictly attended to, and fitting and cutting was taught here with neatness 1 For an extensive study of Dr. Thomas Bray, the founder of the S. P. G. and his work in Maryland, see Dr. Thomas Bray: His life and selected works relating to Maryland, edited by Bernard C. Steiner (Baltimore, 1901). 2 Powell, pp. 36-37, quoting Perry's Hist. Colls. Relating to the Amer. Col. Ch., V., p. 47 et seq. 3 Powell, L. P.: History of Educ. in Delaware, p. 38. and care." In 1748 the Quakers established their Friends' School in Wilmington, which has had a continuous existence since that time. The old academy of Wilmington was built about 1765, and instruction in it was begun before the Revolution. The object of the academy was declared to be to promote "religion, morality, and literature,” and in 1786 a formal curriculum of studies was drawn up and adopted which mark it as a classical academy of the orthodox type. Particular stress was laid on Latin, Greek, and mathematics, but English was not neglected, showing that the institution was ahead of its time. As the life of Wilmington became more normal after the close of hostilities, the school facilities became more abundant, some of them being conducted by men who later became famous in other lines, the best known being the celebrated political writer, William Cobbett, publisher of Porcupine's Gazette, and Lewis Cass, candidate for the Presidency in 1848. The educational history of Wilmington during the early days is that of other cities, mutatis mutandis. It has been seen how the city of Amsterdam sent a teacher to New Castle as early as 1657; the comments of Missionary Ross on the educational situation in 1727 have been quoted, and it was from New Castle as a center that the Presbyterians of New Castle Presbytery in days long before the Revolution sent forth a stream of missionaries to the old South who laid in the States to which they were sent the foundations of denominational schools from which came later by evolution the public schools of to-day. As early as 1738 the Presbytery of Lewes laid the foundation for Delaware College. In the absence of an organized public-school system, other towns organized for themselves, and independently of the State, schools that had more or less of municipal direction and care if not support, but, as they were in reality private schools, no further consideration of their work is necessary in this study. Suffice it to say that from the time of the Revolution, and in some cases before that date, private schools began to be founded in most of the towns and villages of the State and furnished fair opportunities for education to those who wished and who could pay for its privileges. The curious reader who is interested in this subject will find a fuller presentation in Powell's History of Education in Delaware, where there has been brought together from various sources the scattered material extant relating to this interesting subject.1 The conclusion of the whole matter seems to be that, as far as education was concerned, this was available to a greater or less extent during the whole of the colonial period to all who had the ambition to desire it, the energy to seek it, and the money with S also Scharf's History of Delaware, II, 683-698 (1888); Elizabeth Montgomery's Reminiscences of Wilmington (written in 1851); Ferris's History of the Original Settlements on the Delaware (1846); Wick. ersham's History of Education in Pennsylvania (1886). 93106-17-2 |