[Sidenote: Similar development in Connecticut, Rhode Island, and other New England states.]
The course of development since the awakening has been very similar in the other New England states. The successors of Barnard in the central administration both in Rhode Island and Connecticut have been skilled and earnest educators, and, while their reports lacked his literary touch, they were of rather more practical character. Until 1856, Connecticut made no attempt to return from the parish to the town organization. Even then, as well as later, legislation on the subject was ‘permissive,’ and not until the twentieth century was the ‘school society,’ or district system, given up in half of the towns. In Rhode Island, even after Barnard’s reforms, almost one-third of the districts did not own their school buildings, owing to the survival of the method in use when the schools were private, but this condition has gradually been remedied. Likewise, the number of towns levying sufficient local taxes to secure a share in the state apportionment rapidly grew, and the state appropriation itself doubled and quadrupled within a generation. In Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, owing to insufficient wealth, infertility of soil, and sparseness of population, effective public education has been reached only by slow and cautious steps. But even these states have gradually centralized their educational administration through the abolition of the district system and the creation at various times of a state superintendent, a state commissioner, or a state board and secretary. This reorganization has been followed by increased state school funds and appropriations, more systematic statistics and reports from the schools, and great advances in universalizing and improving all stages of public education.
[Sidenote: Increased enthusiasm for public education in Middle states.]
=Influence of the Awakening upon the Middle States.=--Although this awakened sentiment for education and progress in the common school has been most patent and spectacular in New England, it has not been peculiar to that part of the country. Nearly all of the other states seem to have felt the influence of the awakening. In close conjunction with the ‘revival’ in New England, the movement appeared in New York, especially the western part, and was more or less evident in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware. But because of its cosmopolitanism and the need of fusing so many different political, religious, and industrial traditions, the older parts of New York, where the school system had until the awakening been rather in advance of other states, did not progress as rapidly in the development of public education as Massachusetts and Connecticut. It had, however, by the time of the Civil War, succeeded in working over its heterogeneous people into a unified civilization and in causing their children to be educated together for a common citizenship.