[Sidenote: Degeneracy of the district system.]
[Sidenote: Endowment of academies with public lands.]
[Sidenote: High schools not yet influential.]
Thus the year 1827 “marks the culmination of a process which had been going on for more than a century,--the high-water mark of modern democracy, and the low-water mark of the Massachusetts school system.” The district system did in its earlier stages bind the families of a neighborhood into a corporation whose intent was the most vital of human needs,--education, and the people came to feel the necessity of supporting it by their own generous contributions. But in the course of time the districts became involved in private and petty political interests, and had but little consideration for the public good. The choice of the committeeman, the site, and the teacher caused much unseemly wrangling, and as each received only what it paid in, the poor district obtained only a weak school and that for but a short term. The increasing expense of the district system had also made it impossible for any except the larger towns to support the old-time ‘grammar’ school, and this part of the old school requirements had fallen into disuse before the close of the eighteenth century. To meet the needs of secondary education, the policy of endowing ‘academies’ (Fig. 32) with wild lands in Maine had gradually grown up, and this custom was legalized in 1797. Seven academies,--four in Massachusetts proper and three in the province of Maine, had originally been endowed with a township apiece, and some fourteen more had been chartered by towns at an early date, and empowered by the state to hold educational funds. By the time of the educational awakening there were some fifty of these private secondary institutions subsidized by the state, although managed by a close corporation. The first public high school (Fig. 41) had been established in Boston (1821), but this type of secondary school had not begun to have any influence as yet. Into such a decadence had the liberally supported system of public education fallen, before the rapid development in common schools began and the influence of Horace Mann and other reformers was felt.
[Illustration: Fig. 30.--A ‘kitchen school.’]