First Law to Educate Poor Children Signed

March 1, 1802

The same earnest solicitude for public education which made itself manifest in the settlement of the New England Colonies in an unusual degree does not run through the early history of Pennsylvania, yet, outside of the Puritan settlements, there was no other colony which paid so much attention as Pennsylvania to the mental training of youth.

During the seventeenth century the general character of the province, as regards the intelligence of its people, stood deservedly high. The school-house, with its inevitable concomitant, the printing-press, never at any time ceased to exert its wholesome influence in training up a population which as regards sobriety, thrift, and all the substantial qualities that flow from instructions, has never been surpassed by any other great community.

William Penn, who was one of the most accomplished scholars of his time, never wearied in pointing out to the colony the advantages of public education. The Constitution which he proposed for the infant Commonwealth contains the direction that virtue and wisdom must be propagated by educating the youth, and that after ages would have the benefit of the care and prudence of the founders in this respect.

It was one of the provisions of the great law of April 25, 1683, that “schools should be established for the education of the young” and those in authority did not long delay in carrying it into practical effect.

On December 26, 1683, the subject of education was brought up in the Provincial Council, when it was agreed that there existed a great necessity for a schoolmaster. Accordingly an agreement was entered into with Enoch Flower, who promised that in conducting such an establishment as was needed he would charge only four shillings for teaching English each quarter, six shillings for reading, writing and costing accounts. A scholar who boarded with him would receive his tuition as well as his lodging, meals and washing for £10 a year.

This was the first regular English school in Pennsylvania. There had been schools during the ascendancy of the Swedes and the Dutch. The former are known to have maintained schools at Chester and Tinicum as early as 1642, and the Dutch records show that in 1657 Evert Pieterson came over from Holland, and in the capacity of “schoolmaster, comforter of the sick and setter of Psalms,” sought twenty-five pupils.

In 1689 George Keith was engaged at a salary of £50 a year, the use of a house, and the profits of the school for one year, to open a grammar school in Philadelphia. This institution was a flourishing one for 159many years. Here the children of the poor were instructed free of charge, the schoolhouse being located on Fourth Street, below Chestnut, and conducted under a charter which had been procured by Edward Shippen, David Lloyd, John Jones, Samuel Carpenter, Anthony Morris, James Fox, William Southby and others.

Darby became the seat of a school in 1692. One was established in Germantown in 1701, with the learned Pastorius at its head.

No church or sect was more active in education than the Moravians, and schools were established at Germantown, Nazareth, Bethlehem and Lititz. Christopher Dock, “the pious schoolmaster of the Skippack,” taught a Moravian school in Germantown, and is the author of the first book on school teaching published in America.

During the sixty years following the establishment of Keith’s school there was no attempt made to start schools that would be free to all and not marked by the distinction between the rich and poor children. This democratic principle was not clearly formulated and advanced until it was taken up by Benjamin Franklin in 1749, when he distributed gratis a pamphlet which soon became productive of important results in the establishment of the future University of Pennsylvania. Prior to that time most of the schools in the province were conducted either under strictly private auspices or under the patronage of religious denominations.

March 1, 1802, Governor Thomas McKean signed the first law for the education of the children of the poor gratis, although both the Constitution of 1776 and that of 1790 provided for the establishment of “a school or schools in every county.” Owing to the lameness of this law, it remained a dead statute so far as some of the counties of the State were concerned.

The City and County of Philadelphia had been erected into “the first school district of Pennsylvania” in 1818, and in 1822 the City and County of Lancaster were erected into “the second school district.” These, termed the Lancasterian methods, were the beginnings of that glorious system of free education which has been a blessing to our great Commonwealth.

Up to 1830, the great free-school system, as we now have it, was still in embryo. The people began to awaken; public meetings were held all over the State, resolutions were adopted, comparisons with other States were made. The result was that on March 15, 1834, “An Act to Establish a General System of Education by Common Schools” was passed. Only a single member of the House and three Senators voted nay.

Late in 1834 the enemies of free schools attacked the measure all over the State, and the Senate voted to repeal the act of 1834, but Thaddeus Stevens saved the measure in the House. By 1848 this school law had grown much in favor, but it was not until 1874 that the last district in 160the State accepted the law. State Superintendent Wickersham then said in his annual report: “For the first time in our history the door of a public school house stands open to receive every child of proper age within the limits of the State.”

The progress of education after 1850 was very rapid. The crowning acts to make elementary education universal were the free textbook law of 1893 and the compulsory attendance law of 1895.